JOHNSON. 'Yet the Journey to the Hebrides has not had a great sale.'
BOSWELL. 'That is strange.' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; for in that book I have
told the world a great deal that they did not know before.'

BOSWELL. 'I drank chocolate, Sir, this morning with Mr. Eld; and, to my
no small surprize, found him to be a Staffordshire Whig, a being which
I did not believe had existed.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, there are rascals in all
countries.' BOSWELL. 'Eld said, a Tory was a creature generated between
a non-juring parson and one's grandmother.' JOHNSON. 'And I have always
said, the first Whig was the Devil.' BOSWELL. 'He certainly was, Sir.
The Devil was impatient of subordination; he was the first who resisted
power:--

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."'

At General Paoli's were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Langton, Marchese
Gherardi of Lombardy, and Mr. John Spottiswoode the younger, of
Spottiswoode, the solicitor.

We talked of drinking wine. JOHNSON. 'I require wine only when I
am alone. I have then often wished for it, and often taken it.'
SPOTTISWOODE. 'What, by way of a companion, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'To get rid
of myself, to send myself away. Wine gives great pleasure; and every
pleasure is of itself a good. It is a good, unless counterbalanced by
evil. A man may have a strong reason not to drink wine; and that may be
greater than the pleasure. Wine makes a man better pleased with himself.
I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others. Sometimes it
does. But the danger is, that while a man grows better pleased with
himself, he may be growing less pleasing to others. Wine gives a man
nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man,
and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company had repressed.
It only puts in motion what has been locked up in frost. But this may
be good, or it may be bad.' SPOTTISWOODE. 'So, Sir, wine is a key which
opens a box; but this box may be either full or empty.' JOHNSON. 'Nay,
Sir, conversation is the key: wine is a pick-lock, which forces open the
box and injures it. A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that
confidence and readiness without wine, which wine gives.' BOSWELL. 'The
great difficulty of resisting wine is from benevolence. For instance,
a good worthy man asks you to taste his wine, which he has had twenty
years in his cellar.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, all this notion about benevolence
arises from a man's imagining himself to be of more impo