1. For Johnson and patriot/country rhetoric, see Donald J. Greene, The Politics of Samuel Johnson (2nd edn, Athens, Ga., 1990); Howard Weinbrot, The Formal Strain: studies in Augustan imitation and satire (Chicago, 1969), p. 185; John Butt, Johnson’s practice in poetical imitation, in Frederick W. Hilles ed., New Light on Dr. Johnson: Essays on the Occasion of his 250th birthday (New Haven, 1959), pp. 19–34, at p. 22; and Mary Lascelles, Johnson and Juvenal, in idem, pp. 35–55, at p. 39. For patriot rhetoric more generally, see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: the politics of nostalgia in the age of walpole (2nd edn, Ithaca, 1992), and especially Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: politics, poetry, and national myth, 1725–42 (Oxford, 1994).
2. John P. Hardy, Johnson’s London: the country vs. the city, in R.F. Brissenden (ed.) Studies in the Eighteenth Century. Papers presented at the David Nichol Smith memorial seminar (Canberra, 1968), pp. 251–68, at p. 257.
3. Samuel Johnson, London, in Poems, ed. E.L. McAdam with George Milne (New Haven, 1964), 1. 2. All subsequent references are to this edition, and will be referenced by line in the text.
4. The notion of a ‘true Briton’ was important to the patriot vocabulary used to oppose Walpole, and Johnson reverted to it in his political pamphlet Marmor Norfolciense. [Samuel Johnson] Marmor Norfolciense (1739), in Political Writings, ed. Donald J. Greene (New Haven, 1977), p. 28.
5. This theme is ably discussed also in Rajani Sudan, Foreign bodies: contracting identity in Johnson’s London and the Life of Savage, in Criticism, 34, 1992, pp. 173–92.