Doctor, afterwards Dean Maxwell x , sitting in company with Johnson, they were talking of the violence of parties, and what unwarrantable and insolent lengths mobs will sometimes run into. ' Why, yes, Sir,' says Johnson, ' they'll do any thing, no matter how odd, or desperate, to gain their point ; they'll catch hold of the red-hot end of a poker, sooner than not get possession of it.'
Dr. Johnson, in his tour through North Wales, passed two days at the seat of Colonel Middleton of Gwynagag 2 . While he remained there, the gardener caught a hare amidst some potatoe plants, and brought it to his master, then engaged in conversation with the Doctor. An order was given to carry it to the cook. As soon as Johnson heard this sentence, he begged to have the animal placed in his arms ; which was no sooner done, than approaching the window then half open, he restored the hare to her liberty, shouting after her to accelerate her speed. 'What have you done?' cried the Colonel; 'why, Doctor, you have robbed my table of a delicacy, perhaps deprived us of a dinner.' 'So much the better, Sir,' replied the humane champion of a condemned hare ; ' for if your table is to be supplied at the expense of the laws of hospitality, I envy not the appetite of him who eats it. This, Sir, is not a hare ferce naturce, but one which had placed itself under your protection ; and savage indeed must be that man who does not make his hearth an asylum for the confiding stranger V
��BY RICHARD GREEN OF LICHFIELD 4 .
[Richard Green was an apothecary of Lichfield. Of his Museum Johnson said to him : ' Sir, I should as soon have
1 For Dr. Maxwell's Collectanea truly the dinner of a country gentle- see Life, ii. 1 1 6. man. Myddelton is the only man who,
2 We came (writes Johnson) to in Wales, has talked to me of litera- Mr. Myddelton's of Gwaynynog, to ture.' Life, v. 443, 452. They passed the first place, as my Mistress ob- not two days but eight with him. served, where we have been welcome. 3 This story is not in Mrs. Piozzi's . . . The table was well supplied, ex- Anecdotes.
cept that the fruit was bad. It was 4 Croker's Boswell, ix. 248.
thought
�� �
