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Often appears with: ambition and the love of glory · theatre and performance · poverty and wealth · pompey · mrs. pritchard bowstring scene · juvenal · irene tragedy · garrick as manager and interfered revisions · fortune’s reversals · fortune and the turn of the wheel
Usually: argument (1) · narrative (1) · grief and loss (1) · sudden reversal of fortune (1) · curiosity (1) · lament (1) · skepticism (1)
This passage notes, via a Juvenal reference, that Pompey’s fate became an example of how human wishes and efforts are overturned by Fortune and even lead to the loss of a defeated leader’s head.
[30] The fate of Pompey served also as an instance to Juvenal in his satire on the vanity of human wishes. Provida Pompeio diderat Campania febres Optandas, sed multæ urbes et publica vota Vicerunt; igitur Fortuna ipsius et urbis Servatum victo caput abstulit. Sat. X. 283, &c. [31] Spartacus was the celebrated leader of the slaves in the Servile War.
Boswell recounts Johnson’s composition of the satire “Vanity of Human Wishes,” his modest earnings, and the efforts to stage Johnson’s tragedy “Irene,” including audience reactions to an onstage strangling scene.
correspondent allusions floating in his mind, which he could, when he pleased, embody and render permanent without much labour. Some of them, however, he observed were too gross for imitation. The profits of a single poem, however excellent, appear to have been very small in the last reign, compared with what a publication of the same size has since been known to yield. I have mentioned, upon Johnson's own authority…