We talked of Letter-writing.  JOHNSON.  ’It is now become so much the fashion to publish letters, that in order to avoid it, I put as little into mine as I can.[331]’ BOSWELL.  ’Do what you will, Sir, you cannot avoid it.  Should you even write as ill as you can, your letters would be published as curiosities: 

     “Behold a miracle! instead of wit,
      See two dull lines with Stanhope’s pencil writ[332]."’

He gave us an entertaining account of Bet Flint[333], a woman of the town, who, with some eccentrick talents and much effrontery, forced herself upon his acquaintance.  ’Bet (said he) wrote her own Life in verse[334], which she brought to me, wishing that I would furnish her with a Preface to it. (Laughing.) I used to say of her that she was generally slut and drunkard; occasionally, whore and thief.  She had, however, genteel lodgings, a spinnet on which she played, and a boy that walked before her chair.  Poor Bet was taken up on a charge of stealing a counterpane, and tried at the Old Bailey.  Chief Justice ------[335], who loved a wench, summed up favourably, and she was acquitted.  After which Bet said, with a gay and satisfied air, ’Now that the counterpane is my own, I shall make a petticoat of it.’

Talking of oratory, Mr. Wilkes described it as accompanied with all the charms of poetical expression.  JOHNSON.  ’No, Sir; oratory is the power of beating down your adversary’s arguments, and putting better in their place.’  WlLKES.  ‘But this does not move the passions.’  JOHNSON.  ’He must be a weak man, who is to be so moved.’  WlLKES. (naming a celebrated orator) ’Amidst all the brilliancy of ——­’s[336] imagination, and the exuberance of his wit, there is a strange want of taste.  It was observed of Apelles’s Venus[337], that her flesh seemed as if she had been nourished by roses:  his oratory would sometimes make one suspect that he eats potatoes and drinks whisky.’

Mr. Wilkes observed, how tenacious we are of forms in this country, and gave as an instance, the vote of the House of Commons for remitting money to pay the army in America in Portugal pieces[338], when, in reality, the remittance is made not in Portugal money, but in our own specie.  JOHNSON.  ’Is there not a law, Sir, against exporting the current coin of the realm?’ WlLKES.  ’Yes, Sir:  but might not the House of Commons, in case of real evident necessity, order our own current coin to be sent into our own colonies?’ Here Johnson, with that quickness of recollection which distinguished him so eminently, gave the Middlesex Patriot an admirable retort upon his own ground.  ’Sure, Sir, you don’t think a resolution of the House of Commons equal to the law of the land[339].’  WlLKES. (at once perceiving the application) ’GOD forbid, Sir.’  To hear what had been treated with such violence in The False Alarm, now turned into pleasant repartee, was extremely agreeable.  Johnson went on;—­’Locke observes well, that a prohibition to export the current coin is impolitick; for when the balance of trade happens to be against a state, the current coin must be exported[340].’