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

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.

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