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In the "Anecdotes" she relates that one day in Wales she meant to
please Johnson with a dish of young peas. "Are they not charming?"
said I, while he was eating them. "Perhaps," said he, "they would be
so--to a pig;" meaning (according to the marginal note), because they
were too little boiled. Pennant, the historian, used to tell this as
having happened at Mrs. Cotton's, who, according to him, called out,
"Then do help yourself, Mr. Johnson." But the well-known high
breeding of the lady justifies a belief that this is one of the many
repartees which, if conceived, were never uttered at the time.[1]
[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.
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