agreeable and polite, and Dr. Johnson said, he was a very pleasing man.  My fellow-traveller and I talked of going to Sweden[605]; and, while we were settling our plan, I expressed a pleasure in the prospect of seeing the king.  JOHNSON.  ‘I doubt, Sir, if he would speak to us.’  Colonel M’Leod said, ‘I am sure Mr. Boswell would speak to him.’  But, seeing me a little disconcerted by his remark, he politely added, ’and with great propriety.’  Here let me offer a short defence of that propensity in my disposition, to which this gentleman alluded.  It has procured me much happiness.  I hope it does not deserve so hard a name as either forwardness or impudence.  If I know myself, it is nothing more than an eagerness to share the society of men distinguished either by their rank or their talents, and a diligence to attain what I desire[606].  If a man is praised for seeking knowledge, though mountains and seas are in his way, may he not be pardoned, whose ardour, in the pursuit of the same object, leads him to encounter difficulties as great, though of a different kind?

After the ladies were gone from table, we talked of the Highlanders not having sheets; and this led us to consider the advantage of wearing linen.  JOHNSON.  ’All animal substances are less cleanly than vegetable.  Wool, of which flannel is made, is an animal substance; flannel therefore is not so cleanly as linen.  I remember I used to think tar dirty; but when I knew it to be only a preparation of the juice of the pine, I thought so no longer.  It is not disagreeable to have the gum that oozes from a plum-tree upon your fingers, because it is vegetable; but if you have any candle-grease, any tallow upon your fingers, you are uneasy till you rub it off.  I have often thought, that if I kept a seraglio, the ladies should all wear linen gowns,—­or cotton; I mean stuffs made of vegetable substances.  I would have no silk; you cannot tell when it is clean:  It will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so.  Linen detects its own dirtiness.’

To hear the grave Dr. Samuel Johnson, ’that majestick teacher of moral and religious wisdom,’ while sitting solemn in an armchair in the Isle of Sky, talk, ex cathedra, of his keeping a seraglio[607], and acknowledge that the supposition had often been in his thoughts, struck me so forcibly with ludicrous contrast, that I could not but laugh immoderately.  He was too proud to submit, even for a moment, to be the object of ridicule, and instantly retaliated with such keen sarcastick wit, and such a variety of degrading images, of every one of which I was the object, that, though I can bear such attacks as well as most men, I yet found myself so much the sport of all the company, that I would gladly expunge from my mind every trace of this severe retort.

Talking of our friend Langton’s house in Lincolnshire, he said, ’the old house of the family was burnt.  A temporary building was erected in its room; and to this day they have been always adding as the family increased.  It is like a shirt made for a man when he was a child, and enlarged always as he grows older.’