On Friday, August 5, we set out early in the morning in the Harwich stage coach.  A fat elderly gentlewoman, and a young Dutchman, seemed the most inclined among us to conversation.  At the inn where we dined, the gentlewoman said that she had done her best to educate her children; and particularly, that she had never suffered them to be a moment idle.  Johnson.  ’I wish, madam, you would educate me too; for I have been an idle fellow all my life.’  ’I am sure, Sir, (said she) you have not been idle.’  Johnson.  ’Nay, Madam, it is very true; and that gentleman there (pointing to me,) has been idle.  He was idle at Edinburgh.  His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle.  He then came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever.  I asked him privately how he could expose me so.  Johnson.  ’Poh, poh! (said he) they knew nothing about you, and will think of it no more.’  In the afternoon the gentlewoman talked violently against the Roman Catholicks, and of the horrours of the Inquisition.  To the utter astonishment of all the passengers but myself, who knew that he could talk upon any side of a question, he defended the Inquisition, and maintained, that ’false doctrine should be checked on its first appearance; that the civil power should unite with the church in punishing those who dared to attack the established religion, and that such only were punished by the Inquisition.’  He had in his pocket Pomponius Mela de situ Orbis, in which he read occasionally, and seemed very intent upon ancient geography.  Though by no means niggardly, his attention to what was generally right was so minute, that having observed at one of the stages that I ostentatiously gave a shilling to the coachman, when the custom was for each passenger to give only six-pence, he took me aside and scolded me, saying that what I had done would make the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the passengers, who gave him no more than his due.  This was a just reprimand; for in whatever way a man may indulge his generosity or his vanity in spending his money, for the sake of others he ought not to raise the price of any article for which there is a constant demand.

At supper this night* he talked of good eating with uncommon satisfaction.  ’Some people (said he,) have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat.  For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else.’  He now appeared to me Jean Bull philosophe, and he was, for the moment, not only serious but vehement.  Yet I have heard him, upon other occasions, talk with great contempt of people who were anxious to gratify their palates; and the 206th number of his Rambler is a masterly essay against gulosity.  His practice, indeed, I must acknowledge, may be considered as casting the balance of his different opinions upon this subject;