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By Root 5192 0

‘I wish I saw you and Mrs. Macaulay together.’ He grew very angry; and, after a pause, while a cloud gathered on his brow, he burst out, ‘No, Sir; you would not see us quarrel, to make you sport. Don’t you know that it is very uncivil to pit two people against one another?’ Then, checking himself, and wishing to be more gentle, he added, ‘I do not say you should be hanged or drowned for this; but it is very uncivil.’ Dr. Taylor thought him in the wrong, and spoke to him privately of it; but I afterwards acknowledged to Johnson that I was to blame, for I candidly owned, that I meant to express a desire to see a contest between Mrs. Macaulay and him; but then I knew how the contest would end; so that I was to see him triumph. JOHNSON. ‘sir, you cannot be sure how a contest will end; and no man has a right to engage two people in a dispute by which their passions may be inflamed, and they may part with bitter resentment against each other. I would sooner keep company with a man from whom I must guard my pockets, than with a man who contrives to bring me into a dispute with somebody that he may hear it. This is the great fault of —, (naming one of our friends,)718 endeavouring to introduce a subject upon which he knows two people in the company differ.’ BOSWELL. ‘But he told me, Sir, he does it for instruction.’ JOHNSON. ‘Whatever the motive be, Sir, the man who does so, does very wrong. He has no more right to instruct himself at such a risk, than he has to make two people fight a duel, that he may learn how to defend himself.’

He found great fault with a gentleman of our acquaintance719 for keeping a bad table. ‘sir, (said he,) when a man is invited to dinner, he is disappointed if he does not get something good. I advised Mrs. Thrale, who has no card-parties at her house, to give sweet-meats, and such good things, in an evening, as are not commonly given, and she would find company enough come to her; for every body loves to have things which please the palate put in their way, without trouble or preparation.’ Such was his attention to the minutiæ of life and manners.

He thus characterised the Duke of Devonshire, grandfather of the present representative of that very respectable family: ‘He was not a man of superiour abilities, but he was a man strictly faithful to his word. If, for instance, he had promised you an acorn, and none had grown that year in his woods, he would not have contented himself with that excuse; he would have sent to Denmark for it. So unconditional was he in keeping his word; so high as to the point of honour.’ This was a liberal testimony from the Tory Johnson to the virtue of a great Whig nobleman.

Mr. Burke’s Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, on the affairs of America, being mentioned, Johnson censured the composition much, and he ridiculed the definition of a free government, viz. ‘For any practical purpose, it is what the people think so.’a – ‘I will let the King of France govern me on those conditions, (said he,) for it is to be governed just as I please.’ And when Dr. Taylor talked of a girl being sent to a parish workhouse, and asked how much she could be obliged to work, ‘Why, (said Johnson,) as much as is reasonable: and what is that? as much as she thinks reasonable.’

Dr. Johnson obligingly proposed to carry me to see Islam, a romantick scene, now belonging to a family of the name of Port, but formerly the seat of the Congreves. I suppose it is well described in some of the Tours. Johnson described it distinctly and vividly, at which I could not but express to him my wonder; because, though my eyes, as he observed, were better than his, I could not by any means equal him in representing visible objects. I said, the difference between us in this respect was as that between a man who has a bad instrument, but plays well on it, and a man who has a good instrument, on which he can play very imperfectly.

I recollect a very fine amphitheatre, surrounded with hills covered with woods, and walks neatly formed along the side of a rocky steep, on the quarter next the house, with recesses under