Boswell hath since, in the simplicity of his heart, narrated. It was my hapless lot, however, to be excluded from the objects of this propension; perhaps at my age, of about fourteen, I might have been too old or too ugly; but the idea of Johnson's carrying bonbons, to give to children of any age, is much like supposing that a Greenland bear has a pocket stuffed with tartlets for travellers.

On the day of my introduction, he was asked to dinner at my father's house, in Soho Square, and the Erudite Savage came a full hour before his time. I happened to be with my father, who was beginning his toilet, when it was announced to him that the Doctor had arrived. My sire, being one of the tributary princes who did homage to this monarch, was somewhat flurried; and, having dressed himself hastily, took me with him into the drawing-room. On our entrance, we found Johnson sitting in a fauteuil of rosecolored satin, the arms and legs of which (of the chair, remember, not of the Doctor) were of burnished gold; and the contrast of the man with the seat was very striking; an unwashed coal-heaver in a vis-à-vis could not be much more misplaced than Johnson thus deposited. He was dressed in a rusty suit of brown cloth dittos, with black worsted stockings; his old yellow wig was of formidable dimensions; and the learned head which sustained it rolled about in a seemingly paralytic motion; but, in the performance of its orbit, it inclined chiefly to one shoulder, whether to the right or left, I cannot now remember; a fault never to be forgiven by certain of the Twaddleri, who think these matters of the utmost importance. He deigned not to rise on our entrance; and we stood before him while he and my father talked. There was soon a pause in the colloquy; and my father, making his advantage of it, took me by the hand, and said, "Doctor Johnson, this is a little Colman." The Doctor bestowed a slight, ungracious glance upon me, and, continuing the rotary motion of his head, renewed the previous conversation. Again there was a pause; again

the anxious father, who had failed in his first effort, seized the opportunity for pushing his progeny, with "This is my son, Dr. Johnson." The great man's contempt for me was now roused to wrath; and, knitting his brows, he exclaimed in a voice of thunder, "I see him, sir!" he then fell back in his rose-colored satin fauteuil, as if giving himself up to meditation; implying that he would not be further plagued, either with an old fool or a young one.

After this rude rebuff from the Doctor, I had the additional felicity to be placed next to him at dinner. He was silent over his meal; but I observed that he was, as Shylock says of Lancelot Gobbo, “a huge feeder;" and during the display of his voracity (which was worthy of Bolt Court) the perspiration fell in copious drops from his visage upon the table-cloth; the clumsiness of the bulky animal, his strange costume, his uncouth gestures, yet the dominion which he usurped withal, rendered his presence a phenomenon among gentlemen; it was the incursion of a new species of barbarian, a learned Attila, King of the Huns, come to subjugate polished society.-George Colman, the Younger (abridged).

CIVILITY FOR FOUR.-Mrs. Thrale: "I remember, sir, when we were travelling in Wales, how you called me to account for my civility to the people; 'Madam,' you said, 'let me have no more of this idle commendation of nothing. Why is it, that whatever you see, and whoever you see, you are to be so indiscriminately lavish of praise?' 'Why, I'll tell you, sir,' said I; 'when I am with you, and Mr. Thrale, and Queeny, I am obliged to be civil for four."" -Madame D'Arblay.

GOLDSMITH ON JOHNSON'S BEARISHNESS.-The late Alexander Earl of Eglintoune, who loved wit more than wine, and men of genius more than sycophants, had a great adniration of Johnson; but, from the remarkable elegance of

his own manners, was perhaps too delicately sensitive of the roughness which sometimes appeared in Johnson's behavior. One evening about this time, when his lordship did me the honor to sup at my lodgings with Dr. Robertson and several other men of literary distinction, he regretted that Johnson had not been educated with more refinement, and lived more in polished society. "No, no, my lord," said Signor Baretti, "do with him what you would, he would always have been a bear." "True," answered the Earl, with a smile, "but he would have been a dancing bear." To obviate all the reflections which have gone round the world to Johnson's prejudice by applying to him the epithet of a bear, let me impress upon my readers a just and happy saying of my friend Goldsmith, who knew him well: "Johnson, to be sure, has a roughness in his manner; but no man alive has a more tender heart. He has nothing of the bear but his skin."-Boswell.

HIS MERITS OUTWEIGHED HIS DEFECTS. -I pretend not to vindicate his temper, nor to justify his manners; but his many essential virtues and excellences made all who were much connected with him rather grieve at his defects than resent them.-Madame D'Arblay.

AMIABILITY.I knew him well, respected him highly, loved him sincerely. It was never my chance to see him in those moments of moroseness and ill-humor which are imputed to him, perhaps with truth; for who would slander him? But I am not warranted by any experience of those humors to speak of him otherwise than of a friend, who always met me with kindness, and from whom I never separated without regret. When I sought his company, he had no capricious excuses for withholding it, but lent himself to every invitation with cordiality, and brought good-humor with him that gave life to the circle he was in.-Richard Cumberland.

A VIEW OF HIS RUDENESS.-That Dr. Johnson possessed the essential principles of politeness and good taste none who knew his virtues and his genius will, I imagine, be disposed to dispute. But why they remained with him, like gold in the ore, unfashioned and unseen, except in his literary capacity, no person that I know of has made any inquiry, though in general it has been spoken of as an unaccountable inconsistency in his character. Much, too, may be said in excuse for an apparent asperity of manners which was, at times at least, the natural effect of those inherent mental infirmities to which he was subject. His corporeal defects also contributed largely to the singularity of his manners; and a little reflection on the disqualifying influence of blindness and deafness would suggest many apologies for Dr. Johnson's want of politeness. The particular instance I have just mentioned, of his inability to discriminate the features of any one's face, deserves, perhaps more than any other, to be taken into consideration, wanting, as he did, the aid of those intellectual signs, or insinuations, which the countenance displays in social converse, and which in their slightest degree influence and regulate the manners of the polite, or even the common, observer. And to his defective hearing, perhaps, his unaccommodating manners may be equally ascribed, which not only precluded him from the perception of the expressive tones of the voice of others, but from hearing the boisterous sound of his own. And nothing, I believe, more conduced to fix upon his character the general stigma of ill-breeding than his loud, imperious tone of voice, which apparently heightened the slightest dissent to a tone of harsh reproof, and, with his corresponding aspect, had an intimidating influence on those who were not much acquainted with him, and excited a degree of resentment which his words in ordinary circumstances would not have provoked. I have often heard him on such occasions express great surprise that what he had said could have given any offence.-Miss Reynolds.

GENERAL VIEW OF JOHNSON'S CHARACTER.

MAN is, in general, made up of contradictory qualities; and these will ever show themselves in strange succession where a consistency in appearance at least, if not reality, has not been attained by long habits of philosophical discipline. In proportion to the native vigor of the mind, the contradictory qualities will be the more prominent, and more difficult to be adjusted, and therefore we are not to wonder that Johnson exhibited an eminent example of this remark which I have made upon human nature. At different times he seemed a different man, in some respects; not, however, in any great or essential article, upon which he had fully employed his mind, and settled certain principles of duty, but only in his manners, and in the display of argument and fancy in his talk. He was prone to superstition, but not to credulity. Though his imagination might incline him to a belief of the marvellous and the mysterious, his vigorous reason examined the evidence with jealousy. He was a sincere and zealous Christian, of High-Church of England and monarchical principles, which he would not tamely suffer to be questioned, and had, perhaps, at an early period narrowed his mind somewhat too much, both as to religion and politics. His being impressed with the danger of extreme latitude in either, though he was of a very independent spirit, occasioned his appearing somewhat unfavorable to the prevalence of that noble freedom of sentiment which is the best possession of man. Nor can it be denied that he had many prejudices, which, however, frequently suggested many of his pointed sayings, that rather show a playfulness of fancy than any settled malignity. He was steady and inflexible in maintaining the obligations of religion and morality, both from a regard for the order of society and from a veneration for the Great Source of all order; correct, nay, stern, in his taste; hard to please, and easily offended; impetuous and irritable in his temper, but of a most humane and benevolent