“As for his not sleeping,” said Dr. Johnson, “sir, Tom Davies is a very great man—Tom has been on the stage, and knows how to do those things.”
Boswell: “I have often blamed myself, sir, for not feeling for others as sensibly as many say they do.” Johnson: “Sir, don't be duped by them any more. You will find those very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling.” Mr. Boswell thought that he would do well to turn his friend from the subject under discussion, so he made the apparently harmless remark that Foote had a great deal of humour and that he had a singular talent of exhibiting character. But Johnson had on him the mood not only of “the rugged Russian bear,” but also of “the armed rhinoceros and the Hyrcan tiger.”
“Sir, it is not a talent: it is a vice; it is what others abstain from,” he growled.
“Did not he think of exhibiting you, sir?” inquired the tactful Mr. Boswell, though he knew all about Foote and Johnson long before.
“Sir, fear restrained him,” said Johnson. “He knew I would have broken his bones. I would have saved him the trouble of cutting off a leg: I would not have left him a leg to cut off.”
This brutal reference to the fact that Foote's recent accident had compelled him to have a leg amputated should surely have suggested to his inquisitor that he had probably been paying a visit to an industrious young pickle maker without Tom Davies' recommendation, or that he had partaken of too generous a helping of his favourite veal, baked with plums, and so that he would do well to leave him alone for a while. But no, Mr. Boswell was not to be denied.
“Pray, sir, is not Foote an infidel?” he inquired. But as he himself had been dining with Foote the previous day, and as he possessed no more delicacy than a polecat, he could easily have put the question to Foote himself.
But Johnson would not even give the man credit for his infidelity.
“I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an infidel,” he said; “but if he is an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel, that is to say, he has never thought on the subject.”
In another second he was talking of Buchanan, a poet, whom he praised, and of Shakespeare, another poet, whom he condemned, winding up by saying that there were some very fine things in Dr. Young's Night Thoughts. But the most remarkable of his deliverances on this rather memorable evening had reference to Baretti's fate. After declaring that if one of his friends had just been hanged he would eat his dinner every bit as heartily as if his friend were still alive.—“Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow,” he added; “friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plum pudding the less.” Happily the accuracy of this tender-hearted scholar's prediction had no chance of being put to the test. Baretti was tried and acquitted.