Selections from the works of Samuel Johnson

Front matter

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Preface

One day. at Mrs. Thrale's, Johnson remarked, in an 1 indulgent humor ' : ' I think there is no impropriety in a man's publishing as much as he chooses of any author, if he does not put the rest out of the way. 7 His words lend one perhaps the best excuse for a book of this kind. It is in the hope of putting the rest in the way that these selections have been gathered and edited; and enough will have been done, if they should prove the means of correcting some error .of .vision, or of helping to find life in that which has seemed dead.

The introduction may appear at times too emphatic and opinionated, or too condensed and barren of illustration. But opinion often creates opinion in others, if only by reaction; and such passages as those on Johnson's style or his theory of criticism, or on the poetry of his time, may suggest to teachers various useful and agreeable studies in quest of illustration and evidence.

Rasselas is unrepresented because it has been well edited in this series by Professor Emerson. The selections are entire, except the Life of Addison, from which the long quotation of Dennis's tedious remarks on Cato has been in large part omitted. No biographical sketch of Johnson beyond a chronological outline has seemed necessary. If a shorter account than Boswell's is desired, it may be found in Sir Leslie Stephen's Life of Johnson (English Men of Letters), or, shorter still, in his article in the Dictionary of National Biography. Macaulay may be read with interest, but not for Johnson's sake.

h PREFACE

The memory of Dr. G. Birkbeek Hill is, by his noble work as an editor and essayist, already inseparable from that of Boswell and Johnson, and cannot but be affectionately honored by every devoted reader of their works. No man will ever have done so much and so well as he to make their companionship accessible and familiar to those who need it and enjoy it. An editor of Johnson must henceforth be deeply in debt to him; and while it is easy to acknowledge definite borrowings, it is hard to measure or describe the inspiration and insight which one owes to his labors.

I wish to thank Mr. A. Edward Newton for the portraits which accompany this edition; and Professor Lane Cooper for a careful criticism of the Introduction.

Princeton, July 31, 1909.

Contents

INTRODUCTION 1-

Chronological Outline of Johnson's Life . . lix

London 3

Prologue for the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre 22

Letter to Lord Chesterfield 26

Preface to the Dictionary 29

No. 4. The modern Form of Romances preferable

to the ancient 61

No. 5. A Meditation on Spring 67

No. 14. The Difference between an Author's Writings and his Conversation . . . . . 71 No. 16. The Dangers and Miseries of Literary

Eminence 77

No. 50. A virtuous Old Age always reverenced . 82

No. 60. The Dignity and Usefulness of Biography 87

No. 72. The Necessity of Good Humor ... 92

No. 93. The Prejudices and Caprices of Criticism 96

No. 102. The Voyage of Life 101

No. 108. Life sufficient to all Purposes if well

employed 106

No. 117. The Advantages of living in a Garret . 110 No. 120. The History of Almamoulin, the Son of

Nouradin 116

No. 134. Idleness an anxious and miserable State 122

No. 137. The Necessity of Literary Courage . . 126

No. 145. Petty Writers not to be despised . . 131 v

VI

CONTENTS

No. 154. The Inefficacy of Genius without Learning

No. 169. Labor necessary to Excellence .

No. 170. The History of Misella .

No. 171. The History of Misella, concluded .

No. 173. Unreasonable Fears of Pedantry .

No. 188. Favor often gained with little Assistance from the Understanding

No. 191. The Busy Life of a Young Lady .

No. 203. The Pleasures to be sought in' Futurity

No. 204. The History of Ten Days of Seged, Em peror of Ethiopia . .

No. 205. The History of. Seged, concluded

The Adventurer

No. 102. Infelicities of Retirement to Men of Business

135 140

144 149

159 163

172 177

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

No.

The Uncertainty of Friendship

On the Death of a Friend .

Portraits defended

Books fall into Neglect .

Minim, the Critic

Minim, the Critic, concluded

What have ye done? .

. 182

. 189

. 192

. 195

. 198

. 200

. 205

. 208

No. 101. Omar's Plan of Life .! ... 210

On the Death of Levett 364

To William Strahan . . . . . . .366

To Miss Boothby 367

. . 367

. 368

. 369

. 369

. 370

. 370

. 370

To Dr. Burney

To Mrs. Johnson

To Miss Porter

To his Mother

To his Mother

To Miss Porter

To his Mother

(his mother)

CONTENTS vii

To a Lady . 371

To the Earl of Bute 372

To Bennet Langton . . . . . . .373

To Mr. Boswell 374

To James Macpherson 375

To Mrs. Boswell . . . 378

To the King . . .378

To Mrs. Boswell 379

To Mr. Boswell . 380

To Mr. Boswell 382

To James Elphinston 383

To Mr. Boswell 3S4

To Miss Porter 385

To Sir Joshua Reynolds 386

To Sir Joshua Reynolds 386

To the Reverend Dr. Taylor 387

To Miss Jane Langton 388

To the Lord High. Chancellor 390

To Dr. Burney 391

Prayers and Meditations 392

Kotes 399

INTRODUCTION ]

It has been a custom for nearly one hundred years to denounce the Eighteenth Century: and one of the loudest accusers is Carlyle. He was, to be sure, more deeply interested in that period than in any other, and he devoted to it the most brilliant and elaborate of his historical studies. But he did not approve of it. Whatever he disliked was to him characteristic of the Eighteenth Century; whatever he liked was an exception to it. He calls it ' the sceptical century ' ; ' opulent in accumulated falsities ' ; ' swindling.' i spendthrift ' ; 1 unheroic, godless '; 'a time of quacks and quackery ? ; 1 unbelieving ' ; l mechanical ? ; ' prosaic ? ; ' selfish 7 ; 1 trivial J ; i a decrepit, death-sick Era of Cant.' This clamor has flown from mouth to mouth, and reverberates even to the present in well-worn epithets and vain repetitions of criticism. Johnson's time is still spoken of as the Age of Doubt; the Age of Reason; the Age of Pseudo-classicism, or of Artificiality: with other nicknames of a like sort. Nicknames are perhaps never quite fair; they exaggerate, caricature, or disparage, but they never tell the whole truth, and often not the most important part of it.

During such leisure, then, as we find for the study

1 References are often given to the Life (Dr. Hill's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson; to Misc. (Johnsonian Miscellanies, edited by Hill) ; to Lett. (The Letters of Samuel Johnson, edited by Hill) ; and to the Lives (Johnson's Lives of the Poets, edited by Hill).

i is

X INTRODUCTION

of Johnson's time, it will be better to forget the nicknames and denunciations, and to contemplate with open mind some of the great achievements of that age ; nor will it be necessary to look for them far beyond Johnson's circle.

It was the time when Reynolds and Gainsborough were painting portraits full of inexhaustible beauty and charm; when Goldsmith was creating his exquisite masterpieces in genre; when Burke was expressing his noble thought in classic eloquence;- when Gibbon led forth the gorgeous but fading pageant of ancient Rome. Little or none of their essential greatness do these achievements owe to mere Reason, or Doubt, or Pseudo-classicism.

More notable than these are the deeds, opinions, and character of Johnson, together with his portrait from BoswelFs hand. Modern haste and prejudice have done much to warp our notions of Boswell and Johnson. A passing glance at Boswell's masterpiece, an amused impression of Macaulay's brilliant caricature, are about the sum of the common ignorance of Johnson. To most men he is a ponderous, uncouth, slovenly figure, gruff, ill-mannered, absent, unapproachable, unconsciously funny, blurting out his prejudices in unwieldy periods, and chiefly celebrated for sitting up late, drinking infinite tea, and writing an obsolete dictionary. And if aught else beside, he is a hide-bound Tory and Jacobite, hating all Whigs, Scots, French, and Americans, puffed up with insular pride, indifferent to the beauties of nature, to the arts, to all the finer things of life; venting himself in pedantic bombast and prosy moralistic abstractions, which have long since been relegated to the rubbish-heap of literature.

There is but one way to understand a great portrait, whether it be the work of pencil or pen. Sit down patiently and open-mindedly before it; return to it from time to time; consider it familiarly, as if it were

INTRODUCTION xi

in the flesh — as if, for example, you were yourself living in Johnson's time; imagine yourself in his place, or him in yours. Then the merely grotesque and whimsical traits begin to fade, the superficial and illusory veil is slowly withdrawn, as a living man comes forth to meet us, full of life, strength, charm, and even of kindness and affection. He may indeed become what he has already been for many — the advisor, consoler, and intimate friend. There lives, for example, in a large American city, a busy man of affairs, who has essentially educated himself through years of deepening familiarity with BoswelFs Life of Johnson. Since early manhood he has found for his scant leisure no other literary companion so responsive. At the age of thirty-one Stevenson wrote to a friend that he was reading Bos well 'daily by way of a Bible; I mean to read Bosivell now until the day I die.' x Sir Leslie Stephen said : 1 1 had the good fortune when a boy, to read what is to me, I must confess, the most purely delightful of all books — I mean BoswelFs Life of Johnson. I read it from cover to cover, backward and forward, over and over, through and through, till I nearly knew it by heart.' 2 i On his deathbed,' says his biographer, l he suffered little pain. He could see a friend almost every day. He was surrounded by the tenderest love and devotion, and he still could read.' Here follows a considerable list of authors. i Then, when other books failed, he fell back upon the old, old story. Need I name it? He told his nurse that his enjoyment of books had begun, and would end with BoswelFs Life of Johnson/ 3

II

It is commonly said, after Macaulay, that Johnson lives only in Boswell, while his own books are dead,

2 Maitland,'/" ' r jes u € Stephen, p. 39.

xii INTRODUCTION

as they deserve to be; that had it not been for Boswell, Johnson would be now comparatively unheard of. Johnson's works are overshadowed by his conversations in the Life, but had the Life never been written, yet such is the vigor and sanity of his writings that they must have found many readers who now know Johnson only as revealed by his devoted friend. At any rate they furnish the best commentary on Boswell's portrayal, and in many essential ways supplement it. Without them one's acquaintance is imperfect. Even Boswell, who knew Johnson's conversation better than any one else could, was a devoted student of his works; and an unprejudiced reader must find in them as great a Johnson as Boswell has shown us, expressed with as much clearness, originality, and power, and often with greater eloquence.

In some sense every great man is greater than his works, and genius humbles itself to every form of expression it employs. But Johnson's genius humbled itself more than that of most writers, both in his books and his conversation. At the conclusion of The Bambler he wrote : i Though in every long work there are some joyous intervals of self -applause, when the attention is recreated by unexpected facility, and the imagination soothed by incidental excellencies; yet that toil with which performance struggles after the idea is so irksome and disgusting, and so frequent is the necessity of resting below the perfection we imagined within our reach, that seldom any man obtains more from his endeavors than a painful conviction of his defects, and a continual resuscitation of desires which he feels himself unable to gratify.' Johnson chose no one great literary form in which to excel; he wrote but little verse, nor was that his best work. He did not write for the love of it. i No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.' 1 ' You may have pleasure fr*> ' ' - *f ter it is over, if

INTRODUCTION xiii

you Have written weii ; Dut you doii r f go 'willingly to it again/ * His actual writing was not the uncontrollable exuberance of pent-up feeling or conviction. It was done partly to earn his living, partly from sense of necessity that he should cast into some permanent form the exceptional gifts that he had received from nature. His superiority to his works no doubt owed something to his natural laziness. He praised others for long and careful elaboration of their works; his own were written with incredible speed, and often went to the press without his perusal. 2 But disappointing as they were to him, they are an opening, however confined, through which the full stature of the man is discernible.

Johnson was the man of letters, a literary Jack-ofall-trades — reviewer, poet, dramatist, essayist, lexicographer, narrator, critic, biographer, letter- writer, composer of prayers for himself, and of dedications, prologues, and epitaphs for others ; and if he did not succeed equally in all ways, yet each species of his composition is a facet of the whole, addhig something to the lustre of his genius.

2 ' His most excellent works were struck off at a heat, with rapid exertion ' (Life 1. 71). Malone makes this note: 'He told Dr. Burney that he never wrote any of his works that were printed twice over. Dr. Burner's wonder at seeing several pages of his Lives of tJie Poets in manuscript, with scarce a blot or erasure, drew this observation from him.' To this Dr. Hill has added the following note : '"He wrote forty-eight of the printed octavo pages of the Life of Savage at a sitting" (Life 1. 166), and a hundred lines of the Vanity of Human Wishes in a day" (ibid. 2. 15). The Ramblers "were written in haste as the moment pressed, without even being read over by him before they were printed" (1. 203). In the second edition, however, he made corrections. " He composed Rasselas in the evenings of one week" (1. 341). « The False Alarm was written between eight o'clock on Wednesday eight and twelve o'clock on Thursday night " (Piozzi's Anecdotes, p. 41). "The Patriot," he says, "was called for on a Friday, was written on a Saturday"' (?. ?«?)_ xiv INTRODUCTION

III

London and The Vanity of Human Wishes are the best known of Johnson's few attempts in verse. For some sixty or seventy years it had been the fashion to l imitate ' Latin writers of the Empire, that is, to adapt the ideas and illustrations of some selected poem to contemporary life. The practice was much stimulated by Pope's brilliant Imitations of Horace. Such a performance was of course purely academic, and in Johnson's case, as in many another, it served only as a kind of test of his right to recognition in the literary world. 1 No man ever became great by imitation/ says Johnson, 1 and his own imitations, so far as they imitate, exhibit only his cleverness. Nobody would recognize this sooner than he. Of poetic imitation in general his estimate was low. Thirty years later he must have had his own imitations in mind when he spoke thus in his Life of Pope : ' What is easy is seldom excellent ; such imitations cannot give pleasure to common readers; the man of learning is sometimes surprised and delighted by an unexpected parallel; but the comparison requires knowledge of the original which will likewise often detect strained applications. Between Roman images and English manners there will be an irreconcilable dissimilitude, and the work will be generally uncouth and parti-colored; neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern.'

Furthermore Johnson's imitations bear most of the external marks of ' Eighteenth Century poetry.' For half a century and more poetry had suffered from the habit of proceeding from the abstract to the concrete, from the general to the particular. A poet chooses as his subject some general or abstract topic, a- id his poem must be made up of well-arranged concrete illustrations or l images ' suggested by the general sub-

1 Below, 139. 16 : Rasselas, chap. 10.

INTRODUCTION xv

ject. Hence poems on Women, Riches, Dunces, Seasons, and the Pleasures of Hope, each subject abundantly illustrated by a collection of idylls, stories, or descriptions. On the other hand, Macbeth, Paradise Lost, and The King and the Booh proceed in the opposite direction, choosing one concrete instance from human life, but leaving the hearer to generalize from the particular instance described. In Goldsmith's poems there is a conflict of the two methods. The Traveler recommended itself to contemporaries as a philosophic poem on Government; The Deserted Village as a treatise on Luxury and Emigration. But Goldsmith's genius forsook him in the abstract parts of the poem, and spent itself with so much power on his illustrations, that they constitute the real poem, and through his landscapes in the Traveler, or his miniature of Auburn, or his portrait of the old parson, we discern elemental truths of life far deeper and greater than the professed theories of the poems. After the manner of the times, Johnson's London is on the general subject, London, and is composed of detailed illustrations of London as seen or imagined by the clever literary novice of 1738. The Vanity of Human Wishes proceeds to illustrate its general subject with concrete examples suggested by those in the tenth satire of Juvenal.

To the poet of the Eighteenth Century arrangement and transition were very important. His examples must be neatly arranged in natural order, and joined by easy transitions. Hence such unity as his poem possessed. 1 The real form and unity that arise only from one dominant and supreme emotion within they seldom show. Johnson's two imitations had only to follow Juvenal in each case to realize the artificial unity; but of the two. only T' ? Vanity of Human Wishes can be said to contain sufficiently deep and steady conviction and feeling to attain to real unity.

1 Cf. Johnson's criticism of Savage, p. 250.

xvi

Further traits of the times these poems show in their use of stock poetic words and phrases; of incessant personification that does not personify. Each noun must have its epithet — i rosy ' lips, i radiant ' eyes, and ' modest ' innocence — after the late classical manner. Each vowel must have its right place in the succession of sounds in the line; each thought and phrase and cadence must be confined within the balance of the rimed couplet.

This form of poetic composition cast a deep spell upon five or six generations of our ancestors, but its charm is now departed. No longer can it captivate the ear, or stir the imagination, as once it did. The modern reader makes nothing of it but a monotonous sing-song. We do injustice to the rimed couplet, and the chief reason is that the art of reading aloud, and the art of listening, have declined almost to extinction, so that the ear is no longer discerning. We read with the eye; in Johnson's time they read with the ear. To the eye Johnson's cadences mean nothing, and he who can make us hear them as Johnson could have done is not to be found. Only by the most practised and measured utterance of his numbers, with lively auricular imagination, can we begin to realize the sonorous power and rhythmic charm that lay in the rimed couplet as conceived by Dryden or Johnson. It was not, to be sure, an instrument for the tumultuous and intermittent feelings of modern poetry; but the constant, deep, and mature emotions that belong to the even temperament, or rest upon long experience, it conveys with great power.

When the inferior elements of imitation and mannerism have been subtracted from Johnson's satires, there yet remains something nobly genuine. London is vitalized with a strong man's spirited resistance. He repels the obstacles which the age throws in the way of real manhood. He struggles to cast off the weight which is crushing many choice spirits of his time; and he coniNTHODUCTlOii xvii

tends neither in confidence nor in despair, but with indomitable energy. In London he did not discern the nature of his antagonists. The increasing foreign element, and the domination of Sir Robert TValpole, were not the real evils of the times, as he soon learned. But his energy and courage, however misdirected in this case, were permanent elements of nobleness in his character, which asserted themselves with greater effect on every right occasion throughout the rest of his life.

The Vanity of Human Wishes is wiser, more natural, more deeply impassioned than London. The harsh irritation of Johnson's earlier hardships has subsided, and his sympathy is broader and more profound. Its most original and greatest passages 1 are filled with tender pity for the weakness of even the strongest man, and for the futility of unaided human effort to subdue the dominant forces of the world. These lines came spontaneously from a full heart. As one grows familiar with their solemn cadence, and touched with their feeling, he ceases to wonder that the poem was a favorite of the romanticists Scott and Byron, or that Johnson himself, as he was once reciting the lines on a young aspirant to a scholar's fame, faltered, and burst into tears.

IV

While Johnson was engaged on his Dictionary, his mind found release and recreation from such exacting labor in the semi-weekly essays of The Rambler. Goldsmith spoke in the name of his own generation at least, when he said that Johnson's fame was based upon these essays. Though hurriedly written, for the immediate purpose of getting bread and butter, yet they are not slovenly or unfinished. But his well-known haste in composition is more apparent than real. He was

1 Those on patronage (73-82), on the pride of learning (135- 164), on military pride (191-222), on the helplessness of man (346-356).

xviii INTRODUCTION

above forty when he began The Rambler. Up to this time his writings had been almost entirely of ephemeral nature. There had been slothful lapses of his energy, for which, even in the days of his poverty, he bitterly reproached himself. But these years had not been so fruitlessly spent as he imagined; they were really a period of slow elaboration through experience, thought, and assimilation, and from these sprang his permanent work, mature in energy and form. However brief the time of execution, his. writing was thus saved from shallowness, nonsense, or the impotence of a perfunctory effort.

As in his satires he imitated Juvenal, so in The Rambler he imitated Addison. His account of the origin of the periodical essay in his Life of Addison, and his appreciation of The Spectator there expressed, show his great, admiration of Addison's work. But his imitation of Addison is after all external. He chose the literary form which Addison perfected — a choice determined more by material necessity, than by mere admiration or the affinity of genius. Beyond this Addison indicated the general range of topics for treatment, and now and then furnished him with a definite subject. 1

1 Speaking of the origin of his .essays Johnson says in The Rambler 184 : ' A careless glance upon a favorite author, or transient survey of the varieties of life, is sufficient to supply the first hint or. seminal idea.' The most obvious hint that he got from earlier periodical writers came from Addison's series of criticisms on Paradise Lost in The Spectator. Milton was still a popular poet in the days of the Rambler (R.), and Johnson wrote five essays on the versification of Milton, and two on Samson Agonistes. Other subjects which may have been wholly or in part suggested by The Tatler (T.) and The Spectator (8.) are: Pastoral Poetry (R. 36, 37; cf. T. 143; Guardian, passim); Death of Friends (R. 54, Idler (I). 90; cf. T. 114, 181; 8. 349) ; Virtuosos (R. 82, 83; cf. T. 216, 221) ; Prostitution (R. 107, 170, 171 ; cf. 8. 190) ; Degeneracy of the Stage (R. 133; cf. T. 108; 8. 446, 592) ; Beauty destroyed by Small-pox (R. 133; cf. 8. 306) ; Epistolary Prose (R. 152; cf. Epistolary Verse, S. 618) ; Bashfulness (R. 157, 159; cf. 8. 148) Test of Purity by Abraham's Magnet {R. 199; cf. 8. 579) J ~ -•- a " 8tage-0oarh (Adventurer (A.) 84; cf. T. 192

INTRODUCTION xix

Johnson also employs many of the well-tried expedients of his predecessors, such as Oriental tales, allegory, dreams, letters, and frequent quotation from Seneca and ' Tully/ authors for whom he seems not otherwise to have had any especial liking; his citations from modern authors are much more extensive and varied than in the earlier periodicals. This rough sketch of Johnson's indebtedness to his forerunners will serve to show the general extent of his borrowings. It appears that The E ambler owes more to The Spectator, and The Idler to The Tatler, both in matter and manner; and that Steele's help was quite as important to Johnson as Addison's.

But Johnson's best papers are on subjects spontaneously chosen. Xow and then he cites a remark from Addison, but Addison's influence upon him in this respect is no greater than that of Dryden, Bacon, Seneca, or many others whom he cites in the same casual manner.

The essays printed in this volume will illustrate the narrow range of Johnson's' topics. For this and for his prevailing seriousness he was constantly censured, and he acknowledged the truth of both criticisms with

#. 242) ; Itch of Writing (A. 115; cf. S. 582) ; Singularity U. 131; &. 576) ; Amazons {I. 5; cf 8. 433, 434) ; Newspapers (I. 7 ; cf. T. 18, 19, 42, 178 ; 8. 452) ; Experiences of Servants (J. 26. 29; cf. 8. 96, 137) ; Advertisements (I. 40; cf. T. 224, 228, 245) ; Terrific Diction (/. 36, 70: cf. T. 230, 244) ; Dick Minim (I. 60, 61 ; cf. Sir Timothy Tittle, T. 165) ; Indian's Opinion of the English (I. 81 ; cf. 8. 50) ; Oratory (J. 9 ; cf. T. 66, 70, 72 ; S. 407, 633) ; see also Notes in this edition on the Essays. Other subjects are common to two essayists, the choice of which is more likely to have been determined by Johnson's natural preoccupation with them, than from the mere suggestion of his predecessors. The following may be noted : Education, especially the Education of Women ; Good Nature and Good Humor ; Value of Time and Dangers of Idleness ; Affectation ; Marriage ; Domestic Conditions ; Poverty ; Fame ; Friendship ; Vanity of Human Wishes ; Retirement from Active Life ; Irksomeness of Country Life ; Political Newsmongery ; English Language.

xx INTRODUCTION

his usual indifference; at the same time he realized that, to be anything at all, he must be himself and not affect the style or practice of another. In The Rambler his essays are longer than Addison's, and often slower in getting under way; not infrequently his first paragraph is superfluous. On the other hand he maintains stricter unity than his predecessors, who sometimes throw together in one essay letters and remarks on several unrelated subjects. Such informality was affected by Johnson but three or four times, and then under protest. 1 The geniality and gaiety which have made Addison so popular are not characteristic of Johnson; even in the shorter and livelier papers of The Idler there is greater weight and moral significance than is common in Addison.

The best, as well as the greatest number, of Johnson's essays are generally confined to three subjects : characters and pictures of his time; literature; and the philosophy of life. Of these the first prevailingly deal with men and women of the middle class, wise and foolish. Merchants, housekeepers, servants, prisoners for debt, fops and flirts and matrons of a rich bourgeois society, country folk, squires, wits, critics, students, booksellers, shopkeepers, prostitutes — all these and more he selects from the middle and lower range of life in London, which he had studied long and well. His interest in this class, often remarked by Boswell, was not the condescending observation or curiosity of a man of the world, but came from his heart. In the wellappointed households of the Burneys or the Thrales, Johnson is a familiar figure; more familiar still is he as the centre of a circle including most of the greatest English men of genius in his day. He is more than once seen accepting the tribute of attention amid an adoring little group of Blue Stockings, or in quiet dignity at the exalted dinner-table of Lady Craven. 1 Rammer 107, 126, 155, 156.

INTRODUCTION xxi

In such surroundings it is easy to overlook his deep longing for near and domestic companionship of another and humbler sort. Not only did he tolerate in his household a lot of feeble, wrangling old women, and a blundering half -quack, but he could not easily have dispensed with them; he loved them for their very infirmities. To them he returned gladly from London high life, and with them found peculiar comfort and consolation. 1