He gave us an entertaining account of Bet Flint, 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, 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 ------, 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.’  Wilkes.  ‘But this does not move the passions.’  Johnson.  ’He must be a weak man, who is to be so moved.’  Wilkes. (naming a celebrated orator,) ’Amidst all the brilliancy of ------’s imagination, and the exuberance of his wit, there is a strange want of taste. It was observed of Apelles’s Venus, 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 said to me, loud enough for Dr. Johnson to hear, ’Dr. Johnson should make me a present of his Lives of the Poets, as I am a poor patriot, who cannot afford to buy them.’  Johnson seemed to take no notice of this hint; but in a little while, he called to Mr. Dilly, ’Pray, Sir, be so good as to send a set of my Lives to Mr. Wilkes, with my compliments.’  This was accordingly done; and Mr. Wilkes paid Dr. Johnson a visit, was courteously received, and sat with him a long time.

The company gradually dropped away.  Mr. Dilly himself was called down stairs upon business; I left the room for some time; when I returned, I was struck with observing Dr. Samuel Johnson and John Wilkes, Esq., literally tete-a-tete; for they were reclined upon their chairs, with their heads leaning almost close to each other, and talking earnestly, in a kind of confidential whisper, of the personal quarrel between George the Second and the King of Prussia.  Such a scene of perfectly easy sociality between two such opponents in the war of political controversy, as that which I now beheld, would have been an excellent subject for a picture.  It presented to my mind the happy days which are foretold in Scripture, when the lion shall lie down with the kid.

After this day there was another pretty long interval, during which Dr. Johnson and I did not meet.  When I mentioned it to him with regret, he was pleased to say, ‘Then, Sir, let us live double.’