life for you. There's a guinea." Here was one of the many, many instances of his active benevolence. At the same time the slow and sonorous solemnity with which, while he bent himself down, he addressed a little thick short-legged boy, contrasted with the boy's awkwardness and awe, could not but excite some ludicrous emotions.-Boswell.

Talking of London, he observed, "Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London consists."-Boswell.

Having asked Mr. Langton if his father and mother had sat for their pictures, which he thought it right for each generation of a family to do, and being told they had opposed it, he said, "Sir, among the anfractuosities of the human mind, I know not if it may not be one that there is a superstitious reluctance to sit for a picture."-Boswell.

Lord Lucan tells a very good story, which, if not precisely exact, is certainly characteristical: that, when the sale of Thrale's brewery was going forward, Johnson appeared bustling about, with an inkhorn and pen in his button-hole, like an exciseman; and on being asked what he really considered to be the value of the property which was to be disposed of, answered, "We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice."—Boswell.

He seemed to take a pleasure in speaking in his own style; for when he had carelessly missed it, he would repeat the thought translated into it. Talking of the comedy of "The Rehearsal," he said, "It has not wit enough to keep it

sweet." This was easy; he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more round sentence: "It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction."-Boswell.

DISEASES.

HE is shockingly near-sighted. He did not even know Mrs. Thrale, till she held out her hand to him; which she did very engagingly. After the first few minutes he drew his chair close to the pianoforte, and then bent down his nose quite over the keys to examine them and the four hands at work upon them, till poor Hetty and Susan hardly knew how to play on, for fear of touching his phiz; or, which was harder still, how to keep their countenances.Madame D'Arblay.

The old tutor of Macdonald always ate fish with his fingers, alleging that a knife and fork gave it a bad taste. I took the liberty to observe to Dr. Johnson that he did so. "Yes," said he; "but it is because I am short-sighted, and afraid of bones, for which reason I am not fond of eating many kinds of fish, because I must use my fingers."-Boswell.

Dr. Johnson's sight was so very defective that he could scarcely distinguish the face of his most intimate acquaintance at half a yard, and, in general, it was observable that his critical remarks on dress, etc., were the result of very close inspection of the object.-Miss Reynolds.

I met him at Drury Lane playhouse in the evening. Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Mrs. Abington's request, had promised. to bring a body of wits to her benefit; and having secured forty places in the front boxes, had done me the honor to put me in the group. Johnson sat on the seat directly behind me; and as he could neither see nor hear at such a dis

tance from the stage, he was wrapped up in grave abstraction, and seemed quite a cloud amidst all the sunshine of glitter and gayety. I wondered at his patience in sitting out a play of five acts and a farce of two.-Boswell.

Being urged by a lady to go to see Mrs. Siddons, he said, "Well, madam, if you desire it, I will go. See her I shall not, nor hear her; but I'll go, and that will do."-Madame D'Arblay.

In the year 1766 Mr. Johnson's health grew so bad that he could not stir out of his room, in the court he inhabited, for many weeks together-I think, months. Mr. Thrale's attentions and my own now became so acceptable to him that he often lamented to us the horrible condition of his mind, which, he said, was nearly distracted.-Mrs. Piozzi.

Young Johnson had the misfortune to be much afflicted with the scrofula, or king's evil, which disfigured a countenance naturally well-formed, and hurt his visual nerves so much that he did not see at all with one of his eyes, though its appearance was little different from that of the other. There is among his prayers one inscribed, "When my EYE was restored to its use," which ascertains a defect that many of his friends knew he had, though I never perceived it.— Boswell.

Dr. Johnson loved late hours extremely, or, more properly, hated early ones. Nothing was more terrifying to him than the idea of retiring to bed, which he never would call going to rest, or suffer another to call so. "I lie down," said he, "that my acquaintance may sleep; but I lie down to endure oppressive misery, and soon rise again to pass the night in anxiety and pain."—Mrs. Piozzi.

In his seventy-third year, Johnson wrote to his friend, Mr.

Hector, "My health has been, from my twentieth year, such as has seldom afforded me a single day of ease; but it is at least not worse, and I sometimes make myself believe that it is better. My disorders are, however, still sufficiently oppressive." It seems probable that he inherited a tendency to insanity from his father. All through his life he was subject to that nervous affection which Boswell considered a kind of St. Vitus's dance; and at different periods he was afflicted by asthma, gout, dropsy, and paralysis.-Editor.

MELANCHOLY.

THE "morbid melancholy," which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which at a very early period marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year as to afflict him in a dreadful manner. While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with a horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterward was perfectly relieved; and all his labors and all his enjoyments were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence. How wonderful, how unsearchable are the ways of God! Johnson, who was blest with all the powers of genius and understanding, in a degree far above the ordinary state of human nature, was at the same time visited with a disorder so afflictive, that they who know it by dire experience will not envy his exalted endowments. That it was, in some degree, occasioned by a defect in his nervous system, that inexplicable part of our frame, appears highly probable. He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and inefficient that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town clock.-Boswell.

In 1764 he was afflicted with a very severe return of the hypochondriac disorder, which was ever lurking about him. He was so ill, as, notwithstanding his remarkable love of company, to be entirely averse to society-the most fatal symptom of that malady. Dr. Adams told me that, as an old friend, he was admitted to visit him, and that he found him in a deplorable state-sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room. He then used this emphatical expression of the misery which he felt: "I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits."-Boswell.

He asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope. Being pressed upon this subject, and asked if he really was of opinion that, though in general happiness was very rare in human life, a man was not sometimes happy in the moment that was present, he answered, "Never, but when he is drunk."-Boswell.

I talked to him of misery being the "doom of man,” in this life, as displayed in his "Vanity of Human Wishes." Yet I observed that things were done upon the supposition of happiness: grand houses were built, fine gardens were made, splendid places of public amusement were 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 afterward, 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