despotic power, glanced sternly around, and called out in a strong tone, ‘Where’s the merriment?’ Then collecting himself, and looking awful, to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced, ’I say the woman was fundamentally sensible;’ as if he had said, Hear this now, and laugh if you dare.  We all sat composed as at a funeral.”

This resembles the influence exercised by the “great commoner” over the House of Commons.  An instance being mentioned of his throwing an adversary into irretrievable confusion by an arrogant expression of contempt, the late Mr. Charles Butler asked the relator, an eye-witness, whether the House did not laugh at the ridiculous figure of the poor member.  “No, Sir,” was the reply, “we were too much awed to laugh.”

It was a marked feature in Johnson’s character that he was fond of female society; so fond, indeed, that on coming to London he was obliged to be on his guard against the temptations to which it exposed him.  He left off attending the Green Room, telling Grarrick, “I’ll come no more behind your scenes, Davy; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.”

The proneness of his imagination to wander in this forbidden field is unwittingly betrayed by his remarking at Sky, in support of the doctrine that animal substances are less cleanly than vegetable:  “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 silks:  you cannot tell when it is clean:  it will be very nasty before it is perceived to be so; linen detects its own dirtiness.”  His virtue thawed instead of becoming more rigid in the North.  “This evening,” records Boswell of their visit to an Hebridean chief, “one of our married ladies, a lively pretty little woman, good-humouredly sat down upon Dr. Johnson’s knee, and being encouraged by some of the company, put her hands round his neck and kissed him.  ‘Do it again,’ said he, ’and let us see who will tire first.’  He kept her on his knee some time whilst he and she drank tea.”

The Rev. Dr. Maxwell relates in his “Collectanea,” that “Two young women from Staffordshire visited him when I was present, to consult him on the subject of Methodism, to which they were inclined.  ‘Come,’ said he, ’you pretty fools, dine with Maxwell and me at the Mitre, and we will talk over that subject:’  which they did, and after dinner he took one of them upon his knee, and fondled her for half an hour together.” [1]

[Footnote 1:  “Amongst his singularities, his love of conversing with the prostitutes he met in the streets, was not the least.  He has been known to carry some of these unfortunate creatures into a tavern, for the sake of striving to awaken in them a proper sense of their condition.  I remember, he said, once asking one of them for what purpose she supposed her Maker had bestowed on her so much beauty.  Her answer was, ’To please the gentlemen, to be sure; for what other purpose could it be given me?” (Johnsoniana.) He once carried one, fainting from exhaustion, home on his back.]