“I’ faith, madam, I am not sure but that ’tis so, and I haul down my colours to you, and feel no dishonour in the act,” cried James. “Lord, where should we all be to-day if it were not for the good women who hold fast to the old traditions of the distaff and needle? They are the women who do more for the happiness of men than all who pass their time dipping quills in inkhorns or daubing paint upon good canvas that might with luck be hung from a stunsail boom and add another knot to the log of a frigate of seventy-two! Is there anyone who dines at the table of Sir Joshua Reynolds round the corner that does not wish with all his heart that his sister would sell her palette and buy a wine-glass or two with the proceeds? Why, when we went to dinner at Sir Joshua’s yesterday there were not enough glasses to go round the table.”
“There never are—that is well known,” said Mrs. Burney.
“Nay, nay; let us take to ourselves the reproof of Dr. Johnson to Mr. Boswell when he complained, loud enough almost for Sir Joshua himself to hear him, about the scarcity of service. ‘Sir,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘some who have the privilege of sitting at this table, and you are one of them, sir, will be wiser if they keep their ears open and their mouths shut than they would if they had the means of drinking all that you are longing to drink.’”
“Mr. Boswell, in spite of the reproof, contrived to lurch from the table with more wine than wisdom ’tween decks,” remarked James.
“He must have found a wine-glass,” said Miss Susy Burney, who had been quite silent but quite attentive to every word that had been spoken since breakfast-time.
“And so the honour of Mrs. Reynolds’s housekeeping is saved,” said Dr. Burney.
“Nay, sir, is not Mr. Boswell a Scotsman?” cried the irrepressible James.
“That is his lifelong sorrow, since he fancies it to be an insuperable barrier between his idol, Dr. Johnson, and himself,” replied his father. “But how does his Scotsmanship bear upon the wine-glass question?”
“Ah, sir, without being versed in the subtleties of theology I make bold to think that Father Adam did not suffer hunger until knives and forks were invented,” said James. “Your drouthy Scot will drink straight from the bottle if no beaker be at hand. Oh, why was not Mr. Garrick at Sir Joshua’s to rouse our spirits by his imitation of Mr. Boswell seeking for a wine-glass—and after?”
“Mr. Boswell is too trivial a subject for Davy: I have seen him take off Dr. Johnson mixing a bowl of punch until I was like to die of laughter. I protest that when he came to the squeezing of the imaginary lemon, while he cried out in the Doctor’s broadest Lichfield, ‘Who’s for poonch?’ I could smell the acid juice,” said Dr. Burney, and he laughed at the recollection of Garrick’s fooling.