These words, lines 23–24 of Horace, Odes 1.2, are written, in another hand, on the verso of a fragment which was preserved in the family of Charles Congreve, Johnson’s schoolfellow at Lichfield Grammar School, and is now in the Bodleian Library (MS Eng. lett. c.275, f. 30; Handlist I, no. 2). A facsimile of the recto forms the frontispiece to volume I of Chapman, Letters. The verso also displays the signature “Sam: Johnson’’ with large ornate capitals, a Z-shaped flourish, and the date, apparently in Johnson’s hand, “1725.’’ (All of Johnson’s signatures, seven in number, in these exercises conclude with the Z-shaped flourish that can be seen in the facsimile.)

The quotation from Horace was presumably the set theme. Johnson evidently knew it well, for Frances Burney in later years reported hearing him repeat the lines “over and over again, as if by iteration, to exercise the organs of speech, and fix the ode in his memory” (Life, I.483–84, n. 4). The lines were well known in the early eighteenth century and had been quoted by Addison in Spectator 74 (25 May 1711) and Swift in Examiner 13 (2 November 1710), the first he wrote. It served Swift especially as a motto for the expression of antiwar sentiments, but both Swift and Addison used the passage in isolation from its context. Johnson did the same, leaving aside the poem’s flattery of Augustus and its wishes for military conquest abroad. Horace laments only that the weapons that the Romans had turned against one another in civil war would have been better directed against the Parthians. In what survives of Johnson’s essay, on the contrary, he uses the lines to denounce European intervention in other parts of the world.