“At Sir John Dick’s, Sunday, 8th May, 1785, I made the gentlemen sit and drink out some capital old hock after the ladies left us. When I came into the drawing-room, and was seated by the lady of Sir Matthew White Ridley,[295] she said to me, ‘We ladies don’t like you when you have drunk a bottle of hock, because you then tell us only plain truth.’ ‘Bravo!’ cried I; ‘Lady Ridley, this shall go into my Boswelliana. It is one of the best bon mots I have heard for a long time. It goes deep into human nature.’”
“M. D’Ankerville (9th May, 1785) at General Paoli’s paid me the compliment that I was the man of genius who had the best heart he had ever known.”
“The king cannot give to Langton because he is not in the political sphere. He cannot take a handful of the gold upon the faro table, and give it to any man, however worthy, who is only looking on or stalking round the room. Let him play, let him part, and take his chance. The king is but the marker at the great billiard-table of the state. He can mark a man three, four, or five, or whatever number according to his play, and if he goes off the table into opposition, can rub out the chalk; like the marker, he can give what money he has for himself as he pleases, and employ his own tailor or shoemaker, and buy his own snuff and ballads, take a walk or a ride at his idle hours where he pleases.”
“The first time Suard saw Burke, who was at Reynolds’s, Johnson touched him on the shoulder and said, ‘Le grande Burke.’”
“My journal is ready; it is in the larder, only to be sent to the kitchen, or perhaps trussed and larded a little.”
“Mrs. Cosway[296] said she had often expressed a wish to see me. General (Paoli) did not tell me this. He has been affraid of making me too vain and turning the head of his friend. No, he knows the value of things—it was not worth telling.”
“At Mr. Aubrey’s, 19th April, Wilkes and I hard at it. I warm on monarchy. ‘Po, your’n old Tory.’ Boswell. ‘And you’re a new Tory. Let that stand for that.’”
“I mentioned my having been in Tothill Fields Bridewell; how the keeper had let me in, &c. Wilkes, ‘I don’t wonder at your getting in, but that you got out.’ Bos. ‘O no, I have no propensity to be a jail-bird; I never had the honour you have had[297] [he looking a little disconcerted, as the pill rather too strong]—I mean being Lord Mayor of London; I mean the golden chain. I never had the honour to have a chain of any sort.’”
“‘I’ll have some of the other soup too. Were there a hundred soups, I should eat of them all.’ Mrs. Aubrey (very pleasantly): ‘I am sorry ours comes so far short of your number.’”