having, in any perfection, the tavern life. "There is no private house," said he, "in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so much desire that everybody should be easy, in the nature of things it cannot be there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests; the guests are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man, but a very impudent dog indeed, can as freely command what is in another man's house as if it were his own. Whereas at a tavern there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome: and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn." He then repeated, with great emotion, Shenstone's lines:

"Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round,

Where'er his stages may have been,

May sigh to think he still has found

The warmest welcome at an inn."-Boswell.

In contradiction to those who, having a wife and children, prefer domestic enjoyments to those which a tavern affords, I have heard him assert that a tavern chair was the throne of earthly felicity. "As soon," said he, " as I enter the door of a tavern I experience an oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude: when I am seated, I find the master courteous, and the servants obsequious to my call; anxious to know, and ready to supply, my wants; wine there exhilarates my spirits, and prompts me to free conversation and an interchange of discourse with those whom

I most love; I dogmatize and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinion and sentiments I find delight." — Sir John Hawkins.

RIDING IN A COACH. In the afternoon, as we were driven rapidly along in the post-chaise, he said to me, "Life has not many things better than this."-Boswell.

In our way Johnson strongly expressed his love of driving fast in a post-chaise. "If," said he, "I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman; but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation."-Boswell.

I asked him why he doted on a coach so, and received for answer that, "in the first place, the company was shut in with him there, and could not escape, as out of a room: in the next place, he heard all that was said in a carriage, when it was my turn to be deaf."-Mrs. Piozzi.

TALK.—Mr. Johnson, as he was a very talking man himself, had an idea that nothing promoted happiness so much as conversation. A friend's erudition was commended, one day, as equally strong and deep: "He will not talk, sir," was the reply; "so his learning does no good, and his wit, if he has it, gives us no pleasure.”—Mrs. Piozzi.

LONDON.-I suggested a doubt that, if I were to reside in London, the exquisite zest with which I relished it in occasional visits might go off, and I might grow tired of it. Johnson: "Why, sir, you find no man at all intellectual who is willing to leave London. No, sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."-Boswell.

TEA.- His defence of tea against Mr. Jonas Hanway's violent attack upon that elegant and popular beverage shows how very well a man of genius can write upon the slightest subjects, when he writes, as the Italians say, con amore; I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that fragrant leaf than Johnson. The quantities which he drank of it, at all hours, were so great that his nerves must have been uncommonly strong not to have been extremely relaxed by such an intemperate use of it.— Boswell.

He was a lover of tea to an excess hardly credible; whenever it appeared, he was almost raving; and by his impatience to be served, his incessant calls for those ingredients which make that liquor palatable, and the haste with which he swallowed it down, he seldom failed to make that a fatigue to every one else, which was intended as a general refreshment.-Sir John Hawkins.

There is no doubt that Miss Reynolds gained much of his good-will by her good-humored attention to his extraordinary predilection for tea; he himself saying that he wished his teakettle never to be cold; but Sir Joshua Reynolds having once, while spending the evening at Mr. Cumberland's, reminded him of the enormous quantity he was swallowing, observed that he had drank eleven cups, Johnson replied, "Sir, I did not count your glasses of wine; why, then, should you number up my cups of tea?" Johnson's extravagant fondness for this refreshment did not fail to excite notice wherever he went; and it is related, though not by Boswell, that, while on his Scottish tour, and spending some time at Dunvegan, the castle of the chief of the Macleods, the dowager Lady Macleod having repeatedly helped him, until she had poured out sixteen cups, then asked him if a small basin would not save him trouble, and be more agreeable? "I wonder, madam," said he, roughly, "why all the

ladies ask me such questions; it is to save yourselves trouble, madam, and not me." The lady was silent, and resumed her task.-Northcote.

CHEMISTRY.-Dr. Johnson was always exceedingly fond of chemistry, and we made up a sort of laboratory at Streatham one summer, and diverted ourselves with drawing essences and coloring liquors. But the danger in which Mr. Thrale found his friend one day, when I was driven to London, and he had got the children and servants assembled round him to see some experiments performed, put an end to all our entertainment; as Mr. Thrale was persuaded that his short sight would have occasioned his destruction in a moment by bringing him close to a fierce and violent flame. -Mrs. Piozzi.

ARITHMETIC.-When Mr. Johnson felt his fancy, or fancied that he felt it, disordered, his constant recurrence was to the study of arithmetic; and one day that he was totally confined to his chamber, and I inquired what he had been doing to divert himself, he showed me a calculation which I could scarce be made to understand, so vast was the plan of it, and so very intricate were the figures: no other, indeed, than that the national debt, computing it at one hundred and eighty millions sterling, would, if converted into silver, serve to make a meridian of that metal, I forget how broad, for the globe of the whole earth.-Mrs. Piozzi.

SMALL EXPERIMENTS.-My readers will not be displeased at being told every slight circumstance of the manner in which Dr. Johnson contrived to amuse his solitary hours. He sometimes employed himself in chemistry, sometimes in watering and pruning a vine, sometimes in small experiments, at which those who may smile should recollect that there are moments which admit of being soothed only by trifles. In one of his manuscript diaries there is the fol

lowing entry, which marks his curious minute attention: "July 26, 1768. I shaved my nail, by accident, in whetting the knife, about an eighth of an inch from the bottom, and about a fourth from the top. This I measure that I may know the growth of nails; the whole is about five-eighths of an inch." Another of the same kind appears: "August 7, 1779. Partem brachii dextri carpo proximam et cutem pectoris circa mamillam dextram rasi, ut notum fieret quanto temporis pili renovarentur." And, "August 15, 1783. I cut from the vine forty-one leaves, which weighed five ounces and a half and eight scruples. I lay them upon my bookcase to see what weight they will lose by drying."Boswell.

ATHLETIC EXERCISES.-Mr. Johnson was very conversant in the art of attack and defence by boxing, which science he had learned from his uncle Andrew, I believe; and I have heard him descant upon the age when people were received, and when rejected, in the schools once held for that brutal amusement, much to the admiration of those who had no expectation of his skill in such matters, from the sight of a figure which precluded all possibility of personal prowess; though, because he saw Mr. Thrale one day leap over a cabriolet-stool, to show that he was not tired after a chase of fifty miles or more, he suddenly jumped over it too; but in a way so strange and so unwieldy that our terror lest he should break his bones took from us even the power of laughing.-Mrs. Piozzi.

Dr. Johnson was very ambitious of excelling in common acquirements, as well as the uncommon, and particularly in feats of activity. One day, as he was walking in Gunisbury Park with some gentlemen and ladies who were admiring the extraordinary size of some of the trees, one of the gentlemen remarked that, when he was a boy, he made nothing of climbing (swarming, I think, was the phrase) the largest