"I wish, madam," said Johnson, "you would educate me too; for I have been an idle fellow all my life."
"I am sure, sir," said she, "you have not been idle;" which was a mere empty compliment, for she had not the least idea whom she was addressing.
"Nay, madam," rejoined the Doctor, "it is very true; and that gentleman there," pointing to Boswell, "has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever."
At this, Boswell was very wroth, and asked Johnson, in an aside, how he could expose him so.
"Pooh, pooh," retorted the immortal Samuel, "they know nothing about you, and will think of it no more." Nor, in all probability, did they.
In this manner they travelled, the gentlewoman talking violently against the Roman Catholics and the horrors of the Inquisition; Johnson, to the astonishment of all the passengers, save Boswell, who knew his ways, defending the Inquisition and its methods with "false doctrines." This would appear to have annoyed the rest of the company, for Boswell relates that Johnson presently appeared to be very intent upon ancient geography. Not so intent, however, but that he noticed Boswell giving a shilling to the coachman at the end of one of the stages, when it was the custom to give only sixpence. The great man took Boswell aside and scolded him for it, saying that what he had done would make the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the passengers, who had given him no more than his due.
They stopped at Colchester a night, at an inn unfortunately not specified, Johnson talking of the town with veneration for having stood a siege for Charles the First.
The last great occasion on the road, before railways took its traffic away, was the funeral, in 1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline of Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven years before: her body was embarked for Brunswick on August 16, 1821, after a hurried three days' journey from Kensington. So many years have passed by since the stormy times when the nation was divided between partisans of the King on one side and the Queen on the other—both parties equally violent—that the long and bitter quarrels between the "First Gentleman in Europe" and the most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times have become historic, and no longer divide families, or cause fathers to cut their sons off with a shilling, as they did when the trial of the Queen was a recent event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least odiously vulgar and utterly wanting in dignity and the commonest dictates of prudence. They were not worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken up by parties and made political missiles of, so that even the occasion of the Queen's funeral was made the excuse for a riot by her followers, who were indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the country, as they thought, without proper respect. The Queen died on the 7th of August, and it was decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent haste" was the expression used by the Times of that day in describing the funeral arrangements for the 14th, but that journal was a most violent enemy of the then Government and had always supported the Queen and vilified the King as far as it could safely be done.
It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty miles between Kensington and Harwich in two days, and the Times furiously bellowed in its reports that the procession was hurried through London at a trot. However that may be, certainly the pace was decently slow when on the open road. Ilford was reached, for instance, at 6·15 that afternoon, but Romford, only five and a half miles further on, not until 7·45; an extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a funeral. At Romford the cortège was met by sympathisers with blazing torches, who stood on guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort and the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn.