Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/411

 Feb. 8, 1785.

In social company, when he unbended from critical austerity, he afforded the finest dessert to a rational repast. I once dined with him, Wilkes, Boswell, and Lee the American x ; what a group ! ' It was ungrateful,' said Lee, ' for the Scotch who, when emigrants, always found an asylum in America, to be the most violent opponents to American independence, and to oppose their benefactors in the cabinet and in the field.' 'The obli gation,' replied Boswell, 'was not so considerable, when it is understood that the Americans sent the Scotch emigrants to Cape Fear, and such-like barren regions.' ' I think,' said John son, ' they acted like philosophers.' 'Why?' Boswell inquired. ' Because,' added Johnson, ' if you turn a starved cow into clover, it will soon kill itself by the sudden transition; and if the Scotch, famished in their own country, had been placed in the more fruitful parts of America, they would have burst by a bellyful, like the cattle in clover 2 .' Nobody enjoyed a laugh at the expense of the Scotch more than Boswell, at least when it came from Johnson ; and the latter appeared to do it in play; but his play was as rough as that of a bear, and you felt fearful of coming within the embraces of so fierce an animal ' (p. 84).

��MISCELLANEOUS ANECDOTES.

[From Croker's Boswell, vol. x. pp. 131-142.]

A gentleman once told Dr. Johnson, that a friend of his, looking into the Dictionary which the Doctor had lately pub lished, could not find the word ocean. ' Not find ocean ! '

1 Life, iii. 68 ; Letters, i. 397. is comparative. The Scotch would

2 ' Mr. Arthur Lee mentioned some not know it to be barren.'" Life, Scotch who had taken possession of iii. 76. Boswell's 'long head' (ib. a barren part of America, and won- iv. 166), which retained a great deal dered why they should choose it. of the conversation, here failed him, JOHNSON. " Why, Sir, all barrenness for all that Lettsom reports is new.

D d ^ exclaimed

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