CHAP. viiL] THE CLUB AND ITS FIRST MEMBERS.

reluctant departure for Utrecht, where the old judge laird 175
was sending him to study the law ;—and so many of Johnson's J3U5
sympathies had thus early been awakened by the untiling
social enjoyment, the eagerness for talk, the unbounded
reverence for himself, exhibited by Boswell, strengthened
doubtless by his youth and idleness (of themselves enough,
to him, to make any man acceptable), by his condition in life,
by a sort of romance in the lairdsliip of Auchinleck which
he was one day to inherit, and not a little, it may be, by even
his jabbering conceits and inexpressible absurdities, that on
the 5th of August, the sage took a place beside him in the
Harwich coach, accompanied him to the port he was to sail
from, and as they parted on the beach enjoined him to keep
a journal, and himself promised to write to him. " Who is
" this Scotch cur at Johnson's heels ? " asked some one,
amazed at the sudden intimacy. " He is not a cur," answered
Goldsmith ; " you are too severe. He is only a bur. Tom
" Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he has the
" faculty of sticking."*

Boswell has retorted this respectful contempt; and in him
it is excessively ludicrous. " It has been generally circulated
" and believed," he says, " that the Doctor was a mere fool
" in conversation; but in truth this has been greatly exag-
" gerated." Goldsmith had supped with them at the Mitre
on the 1st of July, and flung a paradox at both their heads.
He maintained that knowledge was not desirable on its own
account, for it often was a source of unhappiness. f He
supped with them again at the Mitre five days later, as
Boswell's guest, when Tom Davies and others were present;
and again was paradoxical.! He disputed very warmly with
Johnson, it seems, against the sacred maxim of the British

* Prior, i. 436. t Boswdl, ii. 194.

£ Among Boswell's guests was a presbyterian. doctor aad small poet, Ogilvie,e and vice, why, sir, when