In the margin is written "Charles James Fox." Mr. Croker came to the conclusion that the gentleman was Mr. Vesey. Boswell says that Fox never talked with any freedom in the presence of Johnson, who accounted for his reserve by suggesting that a man who is used to the applause of the House of Commons, has no wish for that of a private company. But the real cause was his sensitiveness to rudeness, his own temper being singularly sweet. By an odd coincidence he occupied the presidential chair at the Club on the evening when Johnson emphatically declared patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Again: "On an occasion of less consequence, when he turned his back on Lord Bolingbroke in the rooms of Brighthelmstone, he made this excuse: 'I am not obliged, Sir,' said he to Mr. Thrale, who stood fretting, 'to find reasons for respecting the rank of him who will not condescend to declare it by his dress or some other visible mark: what are stars and other signs of superiority made for?' The next evening, however, he made us comical amends, by sitting by the same nobleman, and haranguing very loudly about the nature, and use, and abuse, of divorces. Many people gathered round them to hear what was said, and when my husband called him away, and told him to whom he had been talking, received an answer which I will not write down."
The marginal note is: "He said: 'Why, Sir, I did not know the man. If he will put on no other mark of distinction, let us make him wear his horns.'" Lord Bolingbroke had divorced his wife, afterwards Lady Diana Beauclerc, for infidelity.
A marginal note naming the lady of quality (Lady Catherine Wynne) mentioned in the following anecdote, verifies Mr. Croker's conjectural statement concerning her:
"For a lady of quality, since dead, who received us at her husband's seat in Wales, with less attention than he had long been accustomed to, he had a rougher denunciation: 'That woman,' cries Johnson, 'is like sour small beer, the beverage of her table, and produce of the wretched country she lives in: like that, she could never have been a good thing, and even that bad thing is spoiled.' It was in the same vein of asperity, and I believe with something like the same provocation, that he observed of a Scotch lady, 'that she resembled a dead nettle; were she alive,' said he, 'she would sting.'"
From similar notes we learn that the "somebody" who declared Johnson "a tremendous converser" was George Grarrick; and that it was Dr. Delap, of Sussex, to whom, when lamenting the tender state of his inside, he cried out: "Dear Doctor, do not be like the spider, man, and spin conversation thus incessantly out of thy own bowels."
On the margin of the page in which Hawkins Browne is commended as the most delightful of conversers, she has written: "Who wrote the 'Imitation of all the Poets' in his own ludicrous verses, praising the pipe of tobacco. Of Hawkins Browne, the pretty Mrs. Cholmondeley said she was soon tired; because the first hour he was so dull, there was no bearing him; the second he was so witty, there was no bearing him; the third he was so drunk, there was no bearing him." [1]
[1] Query, whether this is the gentleman immortalised by Peter Plymley: "In the third year of his present Majesty (George III.) and in the thirtieth of his own age, Mr. Isaac Hawkins Brown, then upon his travels, danced one evening at the court of Naples. His dress was a volcano silk, with lava buttons. Whether (as the Neapolitan wits said) he had studied dancing under Saint Vitus, or whether David, dancing in a linen vest, was his model, is not known; but Mr. Brown danced with such inconceivable alacrity and vigour, that he threw the Queen of Naples into convulsions of laughter, which terminated in a miscarriage, and changed the dynasty of the Neapolitan throne."
In the "Anecdotes" she relates that one day in Wales she meant to please Johnson with a dish of young peas. "Are they not charming?" said I, while he was eating them. "Perhaps," said he, "they would be so—to a pig;" meaning (according to the marginal note), because they were too little boiled. Pennant, the historian, used to tell this as having happened at Mrs. Cotton's, who, according to him, called out, "Then do help yourself, Mr. Johnson." But the well-known high breeding of the lady justifies a belief that this is one of the many repartees which, if conceived, were never uttered at the time.[1]
[1] I have heard on good authority that Pennant afterwards owned it as his own invention.