{"id":55,"date":"2006-07-25T12:26:36","date_gmt":"2006-07-25T16:26:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/2006\/07\/25\/lets-not\/"},"modified":"2006-07-25T12:30:18","modified_gmt":"2006-07-25T16:30:18","slug":"lets-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/2006\/07\/25\/lets-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Let&#8217;s not."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This inscription isn&#8217;t technically accurate, since <a href=\"http:\/\/lms01.harvard.edu\/F?func=find-c&amp;CCL_TERM=sys=01807968\">this book<\/a> was not a gift to Samuel Johnson from the author, the Roman poet Tibullus, who died about 1800 years before it was published. It&#8217;s actually from the translator, James Grainger, who in addition to being Johnson&#8217;s friend was a physician and accomplished man of letters. Perhaps unfairly, Grainger may be best remembered for the unfortunate reception of his poem <a href=\"http:\/\/lms01.harvard.edu\/F?func=find-c&amp;CCL_TERM=sys=09277326\"><em>The Sugar-Cane<\/em><\/a>. Boswell reports that &#8220;This poem, when read in manuscript at Sir Joshua Reynolds&#8217;s, had made all the assembled wits burst  into a laugh, when, after much blank-verse pomp, the poet began a new paragraph thus: &#8216;Now, Muse, let&#8217;s sing of rats.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"477\" height=\"417\" alt=\"Dr. Grainger\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/files\/2006\/07\/DrGrainger.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This inscription isn&#8217;t technically accurate, since this book was not a gift to Samuel Johnson from the author, the Roman poet Tibullus, who died about 1800 years before it was published. It&#8217;s actually from the translator, James Grainger, who in addition to being Johnson&#8217;s friend was a physician and accomplished man of letters. Perhaps unfairly, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[769],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john-overholt"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/245"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hydeblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}