from the taint of snobbishness.  He described it frequently to his friends, and Boswell with pious care ascertained the details from Johnson himself, and from various secondary sources.  He contrived afterwards to get his minute submitted to the King himself, who graciously authorized its publication.  When he was preparing his biography, he published this account with the letter to Chesterfield in a small pamphlet sold at a prohibitory price, in order to secure the copyright.

“I find,” said Johnson afterwards, “that it does a man good to be talked to by his sovereign.  In the first place a man cannot be in a passion.”  What other advantages he perceived must be unknown, for here the oracle was interrupted.  But whatever the advantages, it could hardly be reckoned amongst them, that there would be room for the hearty cut and thrust retorts which enlivened his ordinary talk.  To us accordingly the conversation is chiefly interesting as illustrating what Johnson meant by his politeness.  He found that the King wanted him to talk, and he talked accordingly.  He spoke in a “firm manly manner, with a sonorous voice,” and not in the subdued tone customary at formal receptions.  He dilated upon various literary topics, on the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge, on some contemporary controversies, on the quack Dr. Hill, and upon the reviews of the day.  All that is worth repeating is a complimentary passage which shows Johnson’s possession of that courtesy which rests upon sense and self-respect.  The King asked whether he was writing anything, and Johnson excused himself by saying that he had told the world what he knew for the present, and had “done his part as a writer.”  “I should have thought so too,” said the King, “if you had not written so well.”  “No man,” said Johnson, “could have paid a higher compliment; and it was fit for a King to pay—­it was decisive.”  When asked if he had replied, he said, “No, sir.  When the King had said it, it was to be.  It was not for me to bandy civilities with my sovereign.”  Johnson was not the less delighted.  “Sir,” he said to the librarian, “they may talk of the King as they will, but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen.”  And he afterwards compared his manners to those of Louis XIV., and his favourite, Charles II.  Goldsmith, says Boswell, was silent during the narrative, because (so his kind friend supposed) he was jealous of the honour paid to the dictator.  But his natural simplicity prevailed.  He ran to Johnson, and exclaimed in ’a kind of flutter,’ “Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I should have done, for I should have bowed and stammered through the whole of it.”