At dinner Wilkes, placed next to Johnson, took up his part in the performance.  He pacified the sturdy moralist by delicate attentions to his needs.  He helped him carefully to some fine veal.  “Pray give me leave, sir; it is better here—­a little of the brown—­some fat, sir—­a little of the stuffing—­some gravy—­let me have the pleasure of giving you some butter.  Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange; or the lemon, perhaps, may have more zest.”  “Sir, sir,” cried Johnson, “I am obliged to you, sir,” bowing and turning to him, with a look for some time of “surly virtue,” and soon of complacency.

Gradually the conversation became cordial.  Johnson told of the fascination exercised by Foote, who, like Wilkes, had succeeded in pleasing him against his will.  Foote once took to selling beer, and it was so bad that the servants of Fitzherbert, one of his customers, resolved to protest.  They chose a little black boy to carry their remonstrance; but the boy waited at table one day when Foote was present, and returning to his companions, said, “This is the finest man I have ever seen.  I will not deliver your message; I will drink his beer.”  From Foote the transition was easy to Garrick, whom Johnson, as usual, defended against the attacks of others.  He maintained that Garrick’s reputation for avarice, though unfounded, had been rather useful than otherwise.  “You despise a man for avarice, but you do not hate him.”  The clamour would have been more effectual, had it been directed against his living with splendour too great for a player.  Johnson went on to speak of the difficulty of getting biographical information.  When he had wished to write a life of Dryden, he applied to two living men who remembered him.  One could only tell him that Dryden had a chair by the fire at Will’s Coffee-house in winter, which was moved to the balcony in summer.  The other (Cibber) could only report that he remembered Dryden as a “decent old man, arbiter of critical disputes at Will’s.”

Johnson and Wilkes had one point in common—­a vigorous prejudice against the Scotch, and upon this topic they cracked their jokes in friendly emulation.  When they met upon a later occasion (1781), they still pursued this inexhaustible subject.  Wilkes told how a privateer had completely plundered seven Scotch islands, and re-embarked with three and sixpence.  Johnson now remarked in answer to somebody who said “Poor old England is lost!” “Sir, it is not so much to be lamented that old England is lost, as that the Scotch have found it.”  “You must know, sir,” he said to Wilkes, “that I lately took my friend Boswell and showed him genuine civilized life in an English provincial town.  I turned him loose at Lichfield, that he might see for once real civility, for you know he lives among savages in Scotland and among rakes in London.”  “Except,” said Wilkes, “when he is with grave, sober, decent people like you and me.”  “And we ashamed of him,” added Johnson, smiling.