Indians an embodiment of the fancied state of nature. Johnson heartily
despised the affectation. He was told of an American woman who had to be
bound in order to keep her from savage life. "She must have been an
animal, a beast," said Boswell. "Sir," said Johnson, "she was a speaking
cat." Somebody quoted to him with admiration the soliloquy of an
officer who had lived in the wilds of America: "Here am I, free and
unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of nature, with the Indian
woman by my side, and this gun, with which I can procure food when I
want it! What more can be desired for human happiness?" "Do not allow
yourself, sir," replied Johnson, "to be imposed upon by such gross
absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he
might as well exclaim, 'Here am I with this cow and this grass; what
being can enjoy greater felicity?'" When Johnson implored Boswell to
"clear his mind of cant," he was attacking his disciple for affecting a
serious depression about public affairs; but the cant which he hated
would certainly have included as its first article an admiration for the
state of nature.

On the present occasion Johnson defended luxury, and said that he had
learnt much from Mandeville--a shrewd cynic, in whom Johnson's hatred
for humbug is exaggerated into a general disbelief in real as well as
sham nobleness of sentiment. As the conversation proceeded, Johnson
expressed his habitual horror of death, and caused Miss Seward's
ridicule by talking seriously of ghosts and the importance of the
question of their reality; and then followed an explosion, which seems
to have closed this characteristic evening. A young woman had become a
Quaker under the influence of Mrs. Knowles, who now proceeded to
deprecate Johnson's wrath at what he regarded as an apostasy. "Madam,"
he said, "she is an odious wench," and he proceeded to denounce her
audacity in presuming to choose a religion for herself. "She knew no