NOTICE.

THE Editor, after preparing this volume for the press, feels more than ever satisfied as to the arrangement ultimately adopted with respect to the scattered JOHNSONIANA of Boswell's friends and rivals. In the notes to the preceding volumes, he has presented all those short passages of other writers, which seemed to bear decidedly on the statements in Boswell's text: in this, and in the succeeding volume, the reader has presented to him a mass of miscellaneous Anecdotes and Sayings, gathered from nearly a hundred different publications; which could not have been produced as notes to Boswell, without overloading and perplexing his pages, but which are essential to the completion of the intellectual portrait of Johnson.

Taken by themselves alone, these Ana might, it is presumed, claim a place with the best books of that popular description, in our own or in any other

language. They form, it will hardly be disputed, one of the richest collections of Materials for Thinking that can be pointed out in literature; and constitute, eminently, a Manual such as Johnson himself was so fond of 66 one of those portable books, that you may carry to the fire-side, and hold readily in your hand - the most useful after all."

The beautiful head of Mrs. Piozzi, which faces the title-page of this volume, is from Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait; which, on the dispersion of the Streatham Gallery, passed into the hands of that accomplished lover of art and literature, Samuel Boddington, Esq., and which was never before engraved.

October 28. 1835.