“Dear sir,” said Mrs. Thrale, “you will force me to appeal to your charity at this time on behalf of Mr. Boswell. If you do not permit him to enter the house and bring us a faithful report of young Mr. Linley, a whole day may pass before the Pump Room knows anything of him.”
“Psha! madam, do you know the Pump Room so indifferently as to fancy that it will wait for any report of the young gentleman before forming its own conclusions on the subject of his return?”
“Ah, Dr. Johnson, but Mr. Boswell is invariably so accurate in his reports on everything,” persisted the lady.
Little Mr. Boswell smirked between the cross-fires of the yellow lamplight and the lurid links; he smirked and bowed low beneath the force of the lady’s compliment. He had not a nice ear either for compliment or detraction: he failed to appreciate the whisper of a zephyr of sarcasm.
But his huge patron was not Zephyrus, but Boreas.
“Madam,” he cried, “I allow that Mr. Boswell is unimaginative enough to be accurate; but he is a busybody, and I will not allow him to cross this threshold. List to those sounds, Mrs. Thrale”—Polly in the room upstairs had just begun to sing, with her two sisters, a glee of Purcell—“list to those sounds. What! madam, would you have that nest of linnets disturbed?”
“Is Saul also among the prophets? Oh, ’tis sure edifying to find Dr. Johnson the patron of music,” said the lady with double-edged sweetness.
“Madam, let me tell you that one cannot rightly be said to be a patron of music,” said Dr. Johnson. “Music is an abstraction. One may be a patron of a musician or a painter—nay, I have even heard of a poet having a patron, and dying of him too, because, like a gangrene that proves fatal, he was not cut away in time.”
“And just now you are the patron of the musicians, sir?” said the lady.
“Just now, madam, I am hungry and thirsty. I have a longing to be the patron of your excellent cook, and the still more excellent custodian of your tea-cupboard. Come, Mrs. Thrale, sweet though the sounds of that hymn may be—if indeed it be a hymn and not a jig; but I hope it is a hymn—take my word for it, madam, a hungry man would like better to hear the rattle of crockery.”