Who would believe Goldy when he told of a Ghost? a Man whom One could not believe when he told of a Brother.

Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, marginal annotation to Boswell's Life of Johnson

Here is a museum. Visitors may see in it Nero's couch, a statue of Cerberus and a skeleton of an Ethiopian, the bones stuck with porcupine quills. Here is a cabinet of curiosities. In it are a ribbon pretending to have belonged to Frances Thrale (dead in infancy) but in fact stolen from a nurse's work-basket and fraudulently labelled, a poem about sunsets written by Mrs Williams all by herself with no help at all from Dr Johnson, a tuft of hair looking like something 'plucked from the rump of a squirrel' and purporting to come from the head of Mr Pope, together with an empty space reserved for a promised monkey's paw. Here is a dissection table on which have been anatomised dogs which, before being hanged, had their stomachs cut open and filled with milk, for the better understanding of the absorption of fat through the abdominal lymphatics into the thoracic duct.

LRB 1 November 2001 | PDF Download