But what irritated Johnson perhaps more than the endless questions was to be made a 'butt' as he termed it. 'On Monday, September 22, when at breakfast, I unguardedly said to Dr. Johnson, "I wish I saw you and Mrs. Macaulay together!" He grew very angry, and, after a pause, while a cloud gathered on his brow, he burst out: "No, Sir, you would not see us quarrel to make you sport."' Boswell eventually owns that he had wished to see a contest between Mrs. Macaulay and Johnson. It is not to be supposed that Boswell's provocations were always intentional, though there are many occasions upon which they clearly were so. Sometimes he was 'out of countenance,' and when Johnson 'carried the company with him,' his discomfiture perhaps was greater than he would have wished. Not infrequently he made mistakes. On one occasion when Johnson began: 'If I kept a seraglio,' Boswell was so much amused that he failed to keep his countenance and was overwhelmed with 'a variety of degrading images'! Yet he was well aware of the general tendency of his behaviour to provoke the ridicule of Johnson, and though there may have been moments when he did not intend it to do so, we may say that he consciously led to his own humiliation, or consciously at least ran the risk of it. How much humiliation Boswell was able to support may be seen from Miss Burney's account of a party at Streatham. Boswell, finding that there was no place at the side of Dr. Johnson, had taken up a seat immediately behind and between Dr. Johnson and Miss Burney. It was not very polite, and the discovery of his position by Dr. Johnson was disastrous: The Doctor turned angrily round upon him, and, clapping his hand rather loudly upon his knee, said, in a tone of displeasure, 'What do you do there, Sir? Go to the table, Sir!' Mr. Boswell instantly, and with an air of affright, obeyed; and there was something so unusual in such humble submission to so imperious a command that another smile gleamed its way across every mouth except that of the Doctor and of Mr. Boswell, who now, very unwillingly, took a distant seat. Anything more ignominious could hardly be imagined, and that Boswell was sensitive to a rebuke from the Doctor we cannot doubt. And yet, within a few minutes, he was to run the risk of a second. For some reason or other he wished to leave the room while the ceremony still demanded his presence at the table. The Doctor, calling after him authoritatively, said: 'What are you thinking of, Sir? Why do you get up before the cloth is removed? Come back to your place, Sir!' 'Again,' Miss Burney continues, 'and with equal obsequiousness, Mr. Boswell did as he was bid.'