counted for his reserve by suggesting that a man who is used to the
applause of the House of Commons, has no wish for that of a private
company. But the real cause was his sensitiveness to rudeness, his
own temper being singularly sweet. By an odd coincidence he occupied
the presidential chair at the Club on the evening when Johnson
emphatically declared patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Again: "On an occasion of less consequence, when he turned his back
on Lord Bolingbroke in the rooms of Brighthelmstone, he made this
excuse: 'I am not obliged, Sir,' said he to Mr. Thrale, who stood
fretting, 'to find reasons for respecting the rank of him who will
not condescend to declare it by his dress or some other visible mark:
what are stars and other signs of superiority made for?' The next
evening, however, he made us comical amends, by sitting by the same
nobleman, and haranguing very loudly about the nature, and use, and
abuse, of divorces. Many people gathered round them to hear what was
said, and when my husband called him away, and told him to whom he
had been talking, received an answer which I will not write down."

The marginal note is: "He said: 'Why, Sir, I did not know the man. If
he will put on no other mark of distinction, let us make him wear his
horns.'" Lord Bolingbroke had divorced his wife, afterwards Lady
Diana Beauclerc, for infidelity.

A marginal note naming the lady of quality (Lady Catherine Wynne)
mentioned in the following anecdote, verifies Mr. Croker's
conjectural statement concerning her:

"For a lady of quality, since dead, who received us at her husband's
seat in Wales, with less attention than he had long been accustomed
to, he had a rougher denunciation: 'That woman,' cries Johnson, 'is
like sour small beer, the beverage of her table, and produce of the
wretched country she lives in: like that, she could never have been a
good thing, and even that bad thing is spoiled.' It was in the same
vein of asperity, and I believe with something like the same
provocation, that he observed of a Scotch lady, 'that she resembled a
dead nettle; were she alive,' said he, 'she would sting.'"

From similar notes we learn that the "somebody" who declared Johnson
"a tremendous converser" was George Grarrick; and that it was Dr.
Delap, of Sussex, to whom, when lamenting the tender state of his
_inside_, he cried out: "Dear Doctor, do not be like the spider, man,
and spin conversation thus incessantly