cahn

Would have to reread the "Life" to check about Catherine, but, you know: Dr. Johnson is also the author of that famous misongynistic quip re: a female preacher, that this is like watching a poodle walk upright, i.e. the miracle is in the creature doing it at all, not that it's doing it well. So I doubt he's into female monarchs per se. (Though happy if they translate his works, of course.) And if they kill their husbands to get on the throne? The Algarotti essay volume has reminded me that Orieux chides Voltaire of having had no problem with this, because near the end of the century there's a Russia book by another Italian writer obviously modelled on Algarotti's, only at the passage where Algarotti praises the late Peter the Great, there's a diatribe against Catherine, calling her a "philosophizing Clytaemnestra". So, without having looked it up yet, I guess chances are Dr. Johnson did not approve of Catherine per se.

(As for MT: impeccable moral reputation on the one hand, but Catholic on the other; also an enemy of England in the latest war, and Bisset's editorial comments as well as Holdernesses letters to Mitchell in the Mitchell papers show me the British thought this was totally ungrateful of her, since they credit themselves with having saved her in the Silesian Wars (Hungary: What?!!?; Austrian Trenck: As if!), and she just should have listened to Britain and not stabbed them in the back by teaming up with France. And then she refused Naples - which they didn't have - as a peace offering. Really. Not a good monarch, clearly.)

Dying George Keith: LOL. Scotland forever!

I can see why he and Fritz were friends for so long.

Same here.