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there. "Why, I can swarm it now," replied Dr. Johnson, which excited a hearty laugh—(he was then between fifty and sixty); on which he ran to the tree, clung round the trunk, and ascended to the branches, and, I believe, would have gone in among them, had he not been very earnestly entreated to descend, and down he came, with a triumphant air, seeming to make nothing of it.

At another time, at a gentleman's seat in Devonshire, as he and some company were sitting in a saloon, before which was a spacious lawn, it was remarked as a very proper place for running a race. A young lady present boasted that she could outrun any person; on which Dr. Johnson rose up and said, “Madam, you cannot outrun me;" and, going out on the lawn, they started. The lady at first had the advantage; but Dr. Johnson, happening to have slippers on much too small for his feet, kicked them off up into the air, and ran a great length without them, leaving the lady far behind him; and, having won the victory, he returned, leading her by the hand, with looks of high exultation and delight.-Miss Reynolds.

A large party had been invited to meet the doctor at Stow Hill. The dinner waited far beyond the usual hour, and the company were about to sit down, when Johnson appeared at the great gate. He stood for some time in deep contemplation, and at length began to climb it; and, having succeeded in clearing it, advanced with hasty strides. toward the house. On his arrival, Mrs. Gastrel asked him "if he had forgotten there was a small gate for foot-passengers by the side of the carriage-entrance ?" "No, my dear lady, by no means," replied the doctor; "but I had a mind to try whether I could climb a gate now as I used to do when I was a lad."-Parker.

?”

After breakfast we walked to the top of a very steep hill behind the house. When we arrived at the summit, Mr.

Langton said, "Poor dear Dr. Johnson, when he came to this spot, turned to look down the hill, and said he was determined to take a roll down. When we understood what he meant to do, we endeavored to dissuade him; but he was resolute, saying he had not had a roll for a long time; and taking out of his lesser pockets whatever might be in them-keys, pencil, purse, or penknife-and laying himself parallel with the edge of the hill, he actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom.” The story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak of the great lexicographer to have been a fiction or invention of Mr. Langton.-Best (from "Personal and Literary Memorials," 8vo, 1829).

HABITS AS SCHOLAR AND AUTHOR.

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THE particular course of his reading while at Oxford, and during the time of vacation which he passed at home, cannot be traced. Enough has been said of his irregular mode of study. He told me that, from his earliest years, he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end; that he read Shakspeare at a period so early that the speech of the ghost in Hamlet terrified him when he was alone; that Horace's Odes were the compositions in which he took most delight, and it was long before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read solidly, at Oxford, was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little epigram; that the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysics, but he had not read much, even in that way. I always thought that he did himself injustice in his account of what he had read, and that he must have been speaking with reference to the vast portion of study which is possible, and to which

few scholars in the whole history of literature have attained; for when I once asked him whether a person, whose name I have now forgotten, studied hard, he answered, “No, sir; I do not believe he studied hard. I never knew a man who studied hard. I conclude, indeed, from the effects, that some men have studied hard, as Bentley and Clarke." Trying him by that criterion upon which he formed his judgment of others, we may be absolutely certain, both from his writings and his conversation, that his reading was very extensive. Dr. Adam Smith, than whom few were better judges on this subject, once observed to me that "Johnson knew more books than any man alive." He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labor of perusing it from beginning to end. He had, from the irritability of his constitution, at all times an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote. A certain apprehension arising from novelty made him write his first exercise at college twice over; but he never took that trouble with any other composition; and we shall see that his most excellent works were struck off at a heat, with rapid exertion.—Boswell.

Somebody talked of happy moments for composition; and how a man can write at one time, and not at another. "Nay," said Dr. Johnson, "a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.”—Boswell.

Mr. Strahan, the printer, told me that Johnson wrote "Rasselas," that with the profits he might defray the expense of his mother's funeral, and pay some little debts which she had left. He told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he composed it in the evenings of one week, sent it to the press in portions as it was written, and had never since read it over.-Boswell.

He said, "Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular

plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. A young man should read five hours in a day, and so may acquire a great deal of knowledge."-Boswell.

In 1781, Johnson at last completed his "Lives of the Poets," of which he gives this account: "Some time in March I finished the 'Lives of the Poets,' which I wrote, in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily-unwilling to work, and working with vigor and haste."-Boswell.

Before dinner Dr. Johnson seized upon Mr. Charles Sheridan's "Account of the late Revolution in Sweden," and seemed to read it ravenously, as if he devoured it, which was, to all appearance, his method of studying. "He knows how to read better than any one," said Mrs. Knowles; "he gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it." He kept it wrapped up in the table-cloth, in his lap, during the time of dinner, from an avidity to have one entertainment in readiness when he should have finished another; resembling (if I may use so coarse a simile) a dog who holds a bone in his paws in reserve, while he eats something else which has been thrown to him.-Boswell.

In the morning of Tuesday, June 15, while we sat at Dr. Adams's, we talked of a printed letter from the Rev. Herbert Croft, to a young gentleman who had been his pupil, in which he advised him to read to the end of whatever books he should begin to read. Johnson: "This is surely a strange advice; you may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep to them for life. A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing: are we to read it all through? These voyages" (pointing to the three large volumes of "Voyages to the South Sea," which were just come

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out)," who will read them through? A man had better work his way before the mast than read them through; they will be eaten by rats and mice before they are read through.”— Boswell.

He said, "I wrote forty-eight of the printed octavo pages of the Life of Savage' at a sitting, but then I sat up all night." When a young man, he wrote three columns of the "Parliamentary Debates," in the "Gentleman's Magazine," in one hour. He composed seventy lines of his poem upon the "Vanity of Human Wishes" in one day, without putting one of them on paper until they were all finished.-Editor.

He always read amazingly quick, glancing his eye from the top to the bottom of the page in an instant. If he made any pause, it was a compliment to the work; and, after see-. sawing over it a few minutes, generally repeated the passage, especially if it was poetry.-Miss Reynolds.

Johnson's manner of composing has not been rightly understood. He was so extremely short-sighted that writing was inconvenient to him; for, whenever he wrote, he was obliged to hold the paper close to his face. He therefore never composed what we call a foul draught on paper of anything he published, but used to revolve the subject in his mind, and turn and form every period, till he had brought the whole to the highest correctness and the most perfect arrangement. Then his uncommonly retentive memory enabled him to deliver a whole essay, properly finished, whenever it was called for.-Thomas Percy.

We talked of composition, which was a favorite topic of Dr. Watson's, who first distinguished himself by lectures on rhetoric. Johnson: "I advised Chambers, and would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start

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