MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 13.
The room where we lay was a celebrated one. Dr. Johnson's bed was the
very bed in which the grandson of the unfortunate King James the
Second[543] lay, on one of the nights after the failure of his rash
attempt in 1745-6, while he was eluding the pursuit of the emissaries of
government, which had offered thirty thousand pounds as a reward for
apprehending him. To see Dr. Samuel Johnson lying in that bed, in the
isle of Sky, in the house of Miss Flora Macdonald, struck me with such a
group of ideas as it is not easy for words to describe, as they passed
through the mind. He smiled, and said, 'I have had no ambitious thoughts
in it[544].' The room was decorated with a great variety of maps and
prints. Among others, was Hogarth's print of Wilkes grinning, with a cap
of liberty on a pole by him. That too was a curious circumstance in the
scene this morning; such a contrast was Wilkes to the above groupe. It
reminded me of Sir William Chambers's _Account of Oriental
Gardening_[545], in which we are told all odd, strange, ugly, and even
terrible objects, are introduced for the sake of variety; a wild
extravagance of taste which is so well ridiculed in the celebrated
Epistle to him[546]. The following lines of that poem immediately
occurred to me;
'Here too, O king of vengeance! in thy fane,
Tremendous Wilkes shall rattle his gold chain[547].
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