[Footnote 1:  I have heard on good authority that Pennant afterwards owned it as his own invention.]

When a Lincolnshire lady, shewing Johnson a grotto, asked him:  “Would it not be a pretty cool habitation in summer?” he replied:  “I think it would, Madam, for a toad.”  Talking of Gray’s Odes, he said, “They are forced plants, raised in a hotbed; and they are poor plants:  they are but cucumbers after all.”  A gentleman present, who had been running down ode-writing in general, as a bad species of poetry, unluckily said, “Had they been literally cucumbers, they had been better things than odes.”  “Yes, Sir,” said Johnson, “for a hog.”

To return to the Anecdotes: 

“Of the various states and conditions of humanity, he despised none more, I think, than the man who marries for maintenance:  and of a friend who made his alliance on no higher principles, he said once, ‘Now has that fellow,’ it was a nobleman of whom we were speaking, ’at length obtained a certainty of three meals a day, and for that certainty, like his brother dog in the fable, he will get his neck galled for life with a collar.’” The nobleman was Lord Sandys.

“He recommended, on something like the same principle, that when one person meant to serve another, he should not go about it slily, or, as we say, underhand, out of a false idea of delicacy, to surprise one’s friend with an unexpected favour; ‘which, ten to one,’ says he, ’fails to oblige your acquaintance, who had some reasons against such a mode of obligation, which you might have known but for that superfluous cunning which you think an elegance.  Oh! never be seduced by such silly pretences,’ continued he; ’if a wench wants a good gown, do not give her a fine smelling-bottle, because that is more delicate:  as I once knew a lady lend the key of her library to a poor scribbling dependant, as if she took the woman for an ostrich that could digest iron.’” This lady was Mrs. Montagu.

“I mentioned two friends who were particularly fond of looking at themselves in a glass—­’They do not surprise me at all by so doing,’ said Johnson:  ’they see reflected in that glass, men who have risen from almost the lowest situations in life; one to enormous riches, the other to everything this world can give—­rank, fame, and fortune.  They see, likewise, men who have merited their advancement by the exertion and improvement of those talents which God had given them; and I see not why they should avoid the mirror.’” The one, she writes, was Mr. Cator, the other, Wedderburne.  Another great lawyer and very ugly man, Dunning, Lord Ashburton, was remarkable for the same peculiarity, and had his walls covered with looking-glasses.  His personal vanity was excessive; and his boast that a celebrated courtesan had died with one of his letters in her hand, provoked one of Wilkes’s happiest repartees.

Opposite a passage descriptive of Johnson’s conversation she has written:  “We used to say to one another familiarly at Streatham Park, ‘Come, let us go into the library, and make Johnson speak Ramblers.’”