"Lust, through some certain strainers well refined, Is gentle love,
and charms all womankind."

Johnson, despite of his unwieldy figure, scarred features and uncouth
gestures, was a favourite with the fair, and talked of affairs of the
heart as things of which he was entitled to speak from personal
experience as confidently as of any other moral or social topics. He
told Mrs. Thrale, without the smallest consciousness of presumption
or what Mr. Square would term the unfitness of things, of his and
Lord Lyttleton's having contended for Miss Boothby's preference with
an emulation that occasioned hearty disgust and ended in lasting
animosity. "You may see," he added, when the Lives of the Poets were
printed, "that dear Boothby is at my heart still. She would delight
in that fellow Lyttleton's company though, all that I could do, and I
cannot forgive even his memory the preference given by a mind like
hers." [1]

[Footnote 1: In point of personal advantages the man of rank and
fashion and the scholar were nearly on a par.

"But who is this astride the pony,
So long, so lean, so lank, so bony?
Dat be de great orator, Littletony."]

Mr. Croker surmises that "Molly Aston," not "dear Boothby," must have
been the object of this rivalry[1]; and the surmise is strengthened
by Johnson's calling Molly the loveliest creature he ever saw; adding
(to Mrs. Thrale), "My wife was a little jealous, and happening one
day when walking in the country to meet a fortune-hunting gipsy, Mrs.