One day, so the story goes, Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith visited Westminster Abbey together. As they passed through the south transept and came upon Poets' Corner they viewed the tombs and memorials there – Chaucer's, Spenser's, Shakespeare's, Milton's, and all the others – and Johnson quoted an apt line from Ovid: Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis, ‘It may be that our name too will mingle with those’ (Life, II, 238). Later in the day, they passed Temple-bar where the impaled heads of the rebel Scotch Lords were a grisly reminder of the Forty-Five, and Goldsmith slyly whispered the line back to Johnson with a different emphasis, Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis, ‘It may be that our name too will mingle with those’. Part of the pleasure in reading this little story lies in knowing that Johnson, not Goldsmith, was proved right, that whatever real or imagined Jacobite sympathies they may have had both writers kept their heads. After Goldsmith died in 1774 and was buried in the Abbey, Johnson wrote his epitaph – in Latin, because ‘he would never consent to disgrace the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English inscription’ (Life, III, 85). And on his deathbed, ten years later, he asked Sir John Hawkins ‘where he should be buried; and on being answered, “Doubtless, in Westminster-Abbey”, seemed to feel a satisfaction, very natural to a Poet’ (Life, IV, 419).

In this story we see Samuel Johnson, the monumental man of letters, wishing to be a monument.