At the time Lovecraft wrote this, he was a published poet, but had not yet written any of his Cthulhu-related works. He is self-deprecating his own writing style in this piece - if you were to read it rather than merely listen to it, you would see the style of spelling and grammar is quite antique. Don't worry, we'll start getting into the weird stuff with the very next upload :)

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The picture used is a 1775 portrait painting by Joshua Reynolds.

You can follow along at: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Reminiscence_of_Dr._Samuel_Johnson