out of thy own bowels."

On the margin of the page in which Hawkins Browne is commended as the
most delightful of conversers, she has written: "Who wrote the
'Imitation of all the Poets' in his own ludicrous verses, praising
the pipe of tobacco. Of Hawkins Browne, the pretty Mrs. Cholmondeley
said she was soon tired; because the first hour he was so dull, there
was no bearing him; the second he was so witty, there was no bearing
him; the third he was so drunk, there was no bearing him." [1]

[Footnote 1: Query, whether this is the gentleman immortalised by
Peter Plymley: "In the third year of his present Majesty (George
III.) and in the thirtieth of his own age, Mr. Isaac Hawkins Brown,
then upon his travels, danced one evening at the court of Naples. His
dress was a volcano silk, with lava buttons. Whether (as the
Neapolitan wits said) he had studied dancing under Saint Vitus, or
whether David, dancing in a linen vest, was his model, is not known;
but Mr. Brown danced with such inconceivable alacrity and vigour,
that he threw the Queen of Naples into convulsions of laughter, which
terminated in a miscarriage, and changed the dynasty of the
Neapolitan throne."]

In the "Anecdotes" she relates that one day in Wales she meant to
please Johnson with a dish of young peas. "Are they not charming?"
said I, while he was eating them. "Perhaps," said he, "they would be
so--to a pig;" meaning (according to the marginal note), because they
were too little boiled. Pennant, the historian, used to tell this as
having happened at Mrs. Cotton's, who, according to him, called out,
"Then do help yourself, Mr. Johnson." But the well-known high
breeding of the lady justifies a belief that this is one of the many
repartees which, if conceived, were never uttered at the time.[1]

[Footnote 1: I have heard on good authority that Pennant afterwards
owned it as his own invention.]

When a Lincolnshire lady, shewing Johnson a grotto, asked him: "Would
it not be a pretty cool habitation in summer?" he replied: "I think
it would, Madam, _for a toad_." Talking of Gray's Odes, he said,
"They are forced plants, raised in a hotbed; and they are poor
plants: they are but cucumbers after all." A gentleman present, who
had been running down ode-writing in general, as a bad species of
poetry, unluckily said, "Had they been literally cucumbers, they had
been better things than odes." "Yes, Sir," said Johnson, "_for a
hog_."

To return to the Anecd