Johnson was a great reciter of all sorts of things serious or comical.
I over-heard him repeating here, in a kind of muttering tone, a line
of the old ballad, 'Johnny Armstrong's Last Good-Night':

'And ran him through the fair body!'
[Footnote: The stanza from which he took this line is:
But then rose up all Edinburgh,
They rose up by thousands three;
A cowardly Scot came John behind,
And ran him through the fair body!]

We returned to my house, where there met him, at dinner, the Duchess
of Douglas, Sir Adolphus Oughton, Lord Chief Baron, Sir William
Forbes, Principal Robertson, Mr Cullen, advocate. Before dinner, he
told us of a curious conversation between the famous George Faulkner
and him. George said that England had drained Ireland of fifty
thousand pounds in specie, annually, for fifty years. 'How so, sir!'
said Dr Johnson, 'you must have a very great trade?' 'No trade.' 'Very
rich mines?' 'No mines.' 'From whence, then, does all this money
come?' 'Come! why out of the blood and bowels of the poor people of
Ireland!'

He seemed to me to have an unaccountable prejudice against Swift; for
I once took a liberty to ask him, if Swift had personally offended
him, and he told me, he had not. He said to-day, 'Swift is clear, but
he is shallow. In coarse humour, he is inferior to Arbuthnot; in
delicate humour, he is inferior to Addison: so he is inferior to his
contemporaries; without putting him against the whole world. I doubt
if the Tale of a Tub was his: it has so much more thinking, more
knowledge, more power, more colour, than any of the works which are