��Johnson's character. Yet every body naturally likes to gather little specimens of the rarities found in a great country ; and could I carry home from Italy square pieces of all the curious marbles which are the just glory of this surprising part of the world, I could scarcely contrive perhaps to arrange them so meanly as not to gain some attention from the respect due to
the places they once belonged to. Such a piece of motley
NLosaiz-ymrk will these Anecdotes inevitably make : but leTThe reader remember that he was promised nothing better, and so be as contented as he can.
An Irish trader at our house one day heard Dr. Johnson launch out into very great and greatly deserved praises of Mr. Edmund Burke x : delighted to find his countryman stood so high in the opinion of a man he had been told so much of, Sir (said he), give me leave to tell something of Mr. Burke now. We were all silent, and the honest Hibernian began to relate how Mr. Burke went to see the collieries in a distant province ; and he would go down into the bowels of the earth (in a bag), and he would examine every thing: he went in a bag Sir, and ventured his health and his life for knowledge ; but he took care of his clothes, that they should not be spoiled, for he went down in a bag 2 . 'Well Sir (says Mr. Johnson good-humouredly), if our friend Mund should die in any of these hazardous exploits, you and I would write his life and panegyric together ; and your chapter of it should be entitled thus : Burke in a Bag!
He had always a very great personal regard and particular affection for Mr. Edmund Burke, as well as an esteem difficult for me to repeat, though for him only easy to express. And when at the end of the year 1774 the general election called us all different ways, and broke up the delightful society in which we had spent some time at Beconsfield, Dr. Johnson shook the hospitable master of the house kindly by the hand, and said, ' Farewell my dear Sir, and remember that I wish you all the
1 Ante, p. 290. a covering for his clothes. Sack was
2 The bag apparently was not the used of ' a woman's loose robe.' vehicle in which he went down, but Johnson's Dictionary.
success
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