Dr. Johnson having retired for a short time, his lordship spoke of his conversation as I could have wished.  Dr. Johnson had said, ’I have done greater feats with my knife than this;’ though he had eaten a very hearty dinner.  My lord, who affects or believes he follows an abstemious system, seemed struck with Dr. Johnson’s manner of living.  I had a particular satisfaction in being under the roof of Monboddo, my lord being my father’s old friend, and having been always very good to me.  We were cordial together.  He asked Dr. Johnson and me to stay all night.  When I said we must be at Aberdeen, he replied, ’Well, I am like the Romans:  I shall say to you, “Happy to come;—­happy to depart!"’ He thanked Dr. Johnson for his visit.

JOHNSON.  ’I little thought, when I had the honour to meet your Lordship in London, that I should see you at Monboddo.’

After dinner, as the ladies[257] were going away, Dr. Johnson would stand up.  He insisted that politeness was of great consequence in society.  ’It is, (said he,) fictitious benevolence[258].  It supplies the place of it amongst those who see each other only in publick, or but little.  Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other.  I have always applied to good breeding, what Addison in his Cato[259] says of honour:—­

     “Honour’s a sacred tie; the law of Kings;
      The noble mind’s distinguishing perfection,
      That aids and strengthens Virtue where it meets her;
      And imitates her actions where she is not."’

When he took up his large oak stick, he said, ’My lord, that’s Homerick[260];’ thus pleasantly alluding to his lordship’s favourite writer.

Gory, my lord’s black servant, was sent as our guide, to conduct us to the high road.  The circumstance of each of them having a black servant was another point of similarity between Johnson and Monboddo.  I observed how curious it was to see an African in the North of Scotland, with little or no difference of manners from those of the natives.  Dr. Johnson laughed to see Gory and Joseph riding together most cordially.  ’Those two fellows, (said he,) one from Africa, the other from Bohemia, seem quite at home.’  He was much pleased with Lord Monboddo to-day.  He said, he would have pardoned him for a few paradoxes, when he found he had so much that was good:  but that, from his appearance in London, he thought him all paradox; which would not do.  He observed that his lordship had talked no paradoxes to-day.  ’And as to the savage and the London shopkeeper, (said he,) I don’t know but I might have taken the side of the savage equally, had any body else taken the side of the shopkeeper.[261]’ He had said to my lord, in opposition to the value of the savage’s courage, that it was owing to his limited power of thinking, and repeated Pope’s verses, in which ‘Macedonia’s madman’ is introduced, and the conclusion is,