OLIVEE GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1766. " Mr. Dyer, who is a scholar and a gentleman. Grarrick
JBfcTs. " is entirely off from Johnson, and cannot, he says, for-
" give him his insinuating that he withheld all his old
" editions."
What Grarrick could with greater difficulty forgive
(Warton's allusion is to that passage in the Preface to
his edition which regrets that he could not collate more
copies, since he had not found the collectors of those rarities
very communicative) was the absence of any mention of his
acting. He had not withheld his old plays; he had been
careful, through others, to let Johnson understand (too
notoriously careless of books,* as he was, to be safely
trusted with rare editions) that the books were at his service,
and that in his absence abroad the keys of his library had,
with that view solely, been entrusted to a servant: but this
implied an overture from Johnson, who thought it Garrick's
duty, on the contrary, to make overtures to him; who knew
that the other course involved acknowledgments he was not
prepared to make; and who laughed at nothing so much, on
Davy's subsequent loan of all his plays to George Steevens,t
as when he read this year, in the first publication of that
acute young Mephistophelean critic, that " Mr. Garrick's
" zeal would not permit him to withhold anything that
" might ever so remotely tend to show the perfections of
* Cooke says (in Ms Life of Foote) his ordinary habit was to open a book so wide
as almost to break the back of it, and then to fling it down. Oradock describes the
same peculiarity; and adds that on one occasion, Johnson having been admitted
to Gfarrick's room in Southampton-street to wait till its master should arrive, the
latter foxind, on his arrival, all Ms most splendidly bound presentation-volumes
from various authors and writers of plays &o. flung damaged on the floor aa
" stuff, trash, and nonsense." Boswell, who refers to the circumstances mentioned
in the text, adds that, "considering the slovenly and careless manner in which
" books were treated by Johnson, it could not have been expected that scarce and
" valuable editions should have been lent to him." iii. 229.
f Correspondence of Garrick, i. 216-17.