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BOSWELL PUTS HIS FOOT IN IT.

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. Don't you know that it is very uncivil to pit two people against one another?" Then, checking himself, and wishing to be more gentle, he added, "I do not say you should be hanged or drowned for this: but it is very uncivil." Boswell afterwards acknowledged himself to blame, but candidly owned that he did wish to see a contest between these two-because he was sure the Doctor would prove victorious. JOHNSON: "Sir, you cannot be sure how a contest will end; and no man has a right to engage two people in a dispute by which their passions may be inflamed, and they may part with bitter resentment against each other. I would sooner keep company with a man from whom I must guard my pockets, than with a man who contrives to bring me into a dispute with somebody that he may hear it. This is the great fault of (naming one of his friends), endeavouring to introduce a subject upon which he knows two people in the company differ."-BOSWELL: "But he told me, Sir, he does it for instruction.”—JOHNSON : "Whatever the motive be, Sir, the man who does so, does very wrong. has no more right to instruct himself at such risk, than he has to make two people fight a duel, that he may learn how to defend himself."

He

"I do not know for certain," said Mrs. Thrale, on one occasion, "what will please Dr. Johnson: but I know for certain that it will displease him to praise anything, even what he likes, extravagantly." Taylor, who had a habit of praising to excess all his own possessions, came into collision with this characteristic of the Doctor's, when enlarging, one evening, on the excellence of his bull-dog, which, he told the company, was "perfectly well shaped." Johnson immediately set about a close examination of the belauded brute, and then pronounced sentence upon it thus: "No, Sir, he is not well shaped; for there is not the quick transition from the thickness of the fore-part to the tenuity-the thin part-behind, which a bull-dog ought to have." Taylor then argued that a small bull-dog was as good as a large one. "No,

A SUBJECT THE DOCTOR HATES.

327

Sir," said Johnson, "for, in proportion to his size, he has strength; and your argument would prove that a bull-dog may be as small as a mouse."

Good talk means with Johnson good fighting: a debate, in the strictest sense of the word, he must always have; and to be beaten in conversation is to be irretrievably disgraced. Edmund Burke was perhaps the only man he ever acknowledged as a real opponent in this kind of warfare. Once, when the Doctor was ill, and

unable to exert himself as usual, except to his own hurt, somebody mentioned Burke's name. "That fellow," says the weary warrior, Were I to see Burke now it would

"calls forth all my powers. kill me."

"Misery" was spoken of as being the "doom of man.

BOSWELL: "Yet things are done upon the supposition of happiness; grand houses are built, fine gardens are made, splendid places of public amusement are contrived, and crowded with company."-JOHNSON: "Alas, Sir, these are all only struggles for happiness. When I first entered Ranelagh, it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind, such as I never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he viewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and think; but that the thoughts of each individual there would be distressing when alone."

On Wednesday evening, September 17, Johnson proposed that the crystal lustre in Dr. Taylor's large room should be lighted up some time or other. Taylor said, "It shall be lighted to-morrow evening." "That will do very well," answered Boswell, "for it is Dr. Johnson's birthday." Johnson (who hated to have his birthday mentioned) sternly replied, "I will not have the lustre lighted to-morrow."

Next day, some ladies, who had been present during the above conversation, came to dinner, and made matters still worse by wishing the Doctor "the compliments of the season." "Compli

328

AN AWKWARD COMPLIMEN1.

ments!" What is there complimentary in reminding a man that he is twelvemonths older, and, of necessity therefore, a year nearer death? The Doctor's feeling was solemnly earnest to him, yet we can hardly help laughing at it. "Life was never anything yet but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.”

LETTER TO BOSWELL.

329

CHAPTER XXXV.

AN ODD FAMILY-CONVERSATIONS-A DRAMATIC EVENING.

(1777-1778.

66 TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ.

"DEAR SIR,

"London, Nov. 26, 1777.

"You will wonder, or you have wondered, why no letter has come from me.

"I hope you found, at your return, my dear enemy and all her little people quite well, and had no reason to repent of your journey. I think on it with great gratitude.

"I was not well when you left me at the Doctor's, and I grew worse; yet I stayed on, and at Lichfield was very ill. Travelling, however, did not make me worse; and when I came to London, I complied with a summons to go to Brighthelmstone, where I saw Beauclerk, and stayed three days.

"Our CLUB has recommenced last Friday, but I was not there. Langton has another wench. Mrs. Thrale is in hopes of a young brewer. They got by their trade last year a very large sum, and their expenses are proportionate.

"Mrs. Williams's health is very bad. And I have had for some time a very difficult and laborious respiration; but I am better by purges, abstinence, and other methods. I am yet, however, much behindhand in my health and rest.

“Dr. Blair's sermons are now universally commended; but let him think that I had the honour of first finding and first praising his excellences. I did not stay to add my voice to that of the public.

"My dear Friend, let me thank you once more for your visit:

you did me great honour, and, I hope, met with nothing that displeased you. I stayed long at Ashbourne, not much pleased, yet awkward at departing. I then went to Lichfield, where I found my friend at Stowhill very dangerously diseased. Such is life. Let us try to pass it well, whatever it be, for there is surely something beyond it.

"Well, now, I hope all is well. Write as soon as you can to, dear Sir,

"This is the time of the year in which all express their good wishes to their friends, and I send mine to you and your family. May your lives be long, happy, and good. I have been much out of order, but, I hope, do not grow worse.

"All our friends are as they were; little has happened to them of either good or bad. Mrs. Thrale ran a great black hair-dressing pin into her eye; but by great evacuation she kept it from inflaming, and it is almost well. Miss Reynolds has been out of order, but is better. Mrs. Williams is in a very poor state of health.

"If I should write on, I should, perhaps, write only complaints, and therefore I will content myself with telling you that I love to think on you, and to hear from you; and that I am, dear Sir, "Yours faithfully,

"SAM. JOHNSON."

66 BOSWELL TO DR. JOHNSON.

"MY DEAR SIR,

"Edinburgh, March 12, 1778.

"The alarm of your late illness distressed me but a few hours, for on the evening of the day that it reached me I found it contradicted in the London Chronicle,' which I could depend upon as authentic concerning you, Mr. Strahan being the printer