These prints in their frames were sold in lots of 4, 8, and even 10
together, though certainly some of them--and perhaps many--were
engravings from Reynolds. The Catalogue of the sale is in the
Bodleian Library.
APPENDIX G.
(_Notes on Boswell's note on page 408_.)
[G-1] Mrs. Piozzi records (_Anecdotes_, p. 120) that Johnson told her,--
'When Boyse was almost perishing with hunger, and some money was
produced to purchase him a dinner, he got a bit of roast beef, but could
not eat it without ketch-up; and laid out the last half-guinea he
possessed in truffles and mushrooms, eating them in bed too, for want of
clothes, or even a shirt to sit up in.'
Hawkins (_Life_, p. 159) gives 1740 as the year of Boyse's destitution.
'He was,' he says, 'confined to a bed which had no sheets; here, to
procure food, he wrote; his posture sitting up in bed, his only covering
a blanket, in which a hole was made to admit of the employment of
his arm.'
Two years later Boyse wrote the following verses to Cave from a
spunging-house:--
'Hodie, teste coelo summo,
Sine pane, sine nummo,
Sorte positus infeste,
Scribo tibi dolens moeste.
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