There a man could “fold his legs and have his talk out”—­a pleasure hardly to be enjoyed now.  And there a set of friends meeting regularly, and meeting to talk, learnt to sharpen each other’s skill in all dialectic manoeuvres.  Conversation may be pleasantest, as Johnson admitted, when two friends meet quietly to exchange their minds without any thought of display.  But conversation considered as a game, as a bout of intellectual sword-play, has also charms which Johnson intensely appreciated.  His talk was not of the encyclopaedia variety, like that of some more modern celebrities; but it was full of apposite illustrations and unrivalled in keen argument, rapid flashes of wit and humour, scornful retort and dexterous sophistry.  Sometimes he would fell his adversary at a blow; his sword, as Boswell said, would be through your body in an instant without preliminary flourishes; and in the excitement of talking for victory, he would use any device that came to hand.  “There is no arguing with Johnson,” said Goldsmith, quoting a phrase from Cibber, “for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt-end of it.”

Johnson’s view of conversation is indicated by his remark about Burke.  “That fellow,” he said at a time of illness, “calls forth all my powers.  Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.”  “It is when you come close to a man in conversation,” he said on another occasion, “that you discover what his real abilities are.  To make a speech in an assembly is a knack.  Now I honour Thurlow, sir; Thurlow is a fine fellow, he fairly puts his mind to yours.”

Johnson’s retorts were fair play under the conditions of the game, as it is fair play to kick an opponent’s shins at football.  But of course a man who had, as it were, become the acknowledged champion of the ring, and who had an irascible and thoroughly dogmatic temper, was tempted to become unduly imperious.  In the company of which Savage was a distinguished member, one may guess that the conversational fervour sometimes degenerated into horse-play.  Want of arguments would be supplied by personality, and the champion would avenge himself by brutality on an opponent who happened for once to be getting the best of him.  Johnson, as he grew older and got into more polished society, became milder in his manners; but he had enough of the old spirit left in him to break forth at times with ungovernable fury, and astonish the well-regulated minds of respectable ladies and gentlemen.

Anecdotes illustrative of this ferocity abound, and his best friends—­except, perhaps, Reynolds and Burke—­had all to suffer in turn.  On one occasion, when he had made a rude speech even to Reynolds, Boswell states, though with some hesitation, his belief that Johnson actually blushed.  The records of his contests in this kind fill a large space in Boswell’s pages.  That they did not lead to worse consequences shows his absence of rancour.  He was always ready and anxious for a