One of Boswell’s first anecdotes of Johnson and Goldsmith will show the paltry, parasitical spirit in which he was in the habit of making his notes and comments. They three had been supping at the Mitre tavern, when Johnson got up to go home and take tea with his blind dependent, Miss Williams. “Dr. Goldsmith,” says Bozzy, “being a privileged man, got up to go with him, strutting away and calling to me, with an air of superiority, like that of an esoteric over an exoteric disciple of a sage of antiquity, ‘I go to Miss Williams.’” He says he envied this “mark of distinction,” but soon had the same honor himself! Boswell always betrays himself. For, without a grain of Oliver’s genius, he shows himself to be as thoughtless and absurd as he would have us think the poet to have been. If the latter did really exhibit any thing like exultation on the occasion alluded to—the canny Scot mistook it; he could not enter into the humorous vein of the author of the Citizen of the World, who never let any opportunity of pleasantry of any kind escape him, and who, doubtless, with a playful impulse, would, slily and aside, for Boswell’s behoof, put on a comic air of loftiness, at the idea of his own privilege. Such little _traits_ were very characteristic of Oliver Goldsmith, at all periods of his life; and neither his own dignity nor that of any one else was much thought of, whenever his funny “Cynthias of the minute” came across him. With all his respect for Dr. Johnson, he had still—though Boswell does not seem to admit it—a very strong sense of what was odd, petulant and _grandiose_ in the doctor’s manners, and could sport with it, too, to the bear’s face, with a rare and child-like temerity. For instance, once at Jack’s Coffee-house, where the pair were dining on rumps and kidneys, Johnson said—“These rumps are pretty things; but a man must eat a great number of them.” Goldsmith assented with pleasantry, and then, under the easy, unawed impulse of his nature, and carried away by the thought that he was not at his dreary desk, but at dinner with his friend, pushed on with—“But how many of them would go to the moon?” Johnson had, doubtless, said such small matters did not _go far_—a common expression, which would have provoked Oliver’s pun—though the story says nothing of this. “To the moon?” replies Johnson; “I think that exceeds your calculation.” “Not at all, sir,” cries Goldie—looking ludicrously prepense, at the terrible, grave face opposite—“I think I could tell.” “Well, sir,” rejoined Ursa Major; whereupon the other comes out with: “One, if it was long enough!”