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We sat till near two in the morning, having chatted a good while after my wife left us. She had insisted, that to shew all respect to the Sage, she would give up her own bed-chamber to him and take a worse. This I cannot but gratefully mention, as one of a thousand obligations which I owe her, since the great obligation of her being pleased to accept of me as her husband. SUNDAY, AUGUST 15. Mr. Scott came to breakfast, at which I introduced to Dr. Johnson, and him, my friend Sir William Forbes, now of Pitsligo; a man of whom ' too much good cannot be said; who, with distinguished abilities and application in his profession of a Banker, is at once a good companion, and a good Christian; which I think is saying enough. Yet it is but justice to record, that once, when he was in a dangerous illness, he was watched with the anx ious apprehension of a general calamity; day and night his house was beset with affectionate enquiries ; and, upon his recovery, Te deum was the universal chorus from the hearls of his countrymen. Mr. Johnson was pleased with my daughter Veronica, then a child of about four months old. She had the appearance of listening to him. His motions seemed to hen to be intended for her amusement; and when he stopped, she fluttered, and made a little infantine noise, and a kind of signal for him to begin again. She would be held closeto him ; which was a proof, from simple nature, that his figure was not horrid. Her fondness for him endeared her still more to me, and I declared she should have five hundred pounds of additional fortune. The saint's name of Veionica was introduced into our family through my great grandmother Veronica, Countess of Kincardine, a Dutch lady ofthe noble house of Sommelsdyck, of which there isa full account in Bayle's Dictionary. The ...
