Why, Sir, that is because gardening is much more necessary amongst you than with us, which makes so many of your people learn it. It is all gardening with you. Things which grow wild here, must be cultivated with great care in Scotland. Nay, my dear Lady, this will never do. I repeated this sally to Garrick, and wondered to find his sensibility as a writer not a little irritated by it.
Motives are generally unknown.
I know not from what spirit of contradiction he burst out into a violent declamation against the Corsicans, of whose heroism I talked in high terms. They have been at war with the Genoese for upwards of twenty years, and have never yet taken their fortified towns. They might have battered down their walls, and reduced them to powder in twenty years. They might have pulled the walls in pieces, and cracked the stones with their teeth in twenty years. I had greatly wished that two men, for whom I had the highest esteem, should meet.