He seemed to take a pleasure in speaking in his own style; for when he had carelessly missed it, he would repeat the thought translated into it[986].  Talking of the Comedy of The Rehearsal[987], he said, ’It has not wit enough to keep it sweet.’  This was easy; he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more round sentence; ’It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.’

He censured a writer of entertaining Travels[988] for assuming a feigned character, saying, (in his sense of the word[989],) ’He carries out one lye; we know not how many he brings back.’[990] At another time, talking of the same person, he observed, ’Sir, your assent to a man whom you have never known to falsify, is a debt:  but after you have known a man to falsify, your assent to him then is a favour.’

Though he had no taste for painting, he admired much the manner in which Sir Joshua Reynolds treated of his art, in his Discourses to the Royal Academy[991].  He observed one day of a passage in them, ’I think I might as well have said this myself:  ’and once when Mr. Langton was sitting by him, he read one of them very eagerly, and expressed himself thus:—­’Very well, Master Reynolds; very well, indeed.  But it will not be understood.’

When I observed to him that Painting was so far inferiour to Poetry, that the story or even emblem which it communicates must be previously known, and mentioned as a natural and laughable instance of this, that a little Miss on seeing a picture of Justice with the scales, had exclaimed to me, ‘See, there’s a woman selling sweetmeats;’ he said, ‘Painting, Sir, can illustrate, but cannot inform.’

No man was more ready to make an apology when he had censured unjustly, than Johnson[992].  When a proof-sheet of one of his works was brought to him, he found fault with the mode in which a part of it was arranged, refused to read it, and in a passion[993] desired that the compositor[994] might be sent to him.  The compositor was Mr. Manning, a decent sensible man, who had composed about one half of his Dictionary, when in Mr. Strahan’s printing-house; and a great part of his Lives of the Poets, when in that of Mr. Nichols; and who (in his seventy-seventh year), when in Mr. Baldwin’s printing-house, composed a part of the first edition of this work concerning him.  By producing the manuscript, he at once satisfied Dr. Johnson that he was not to blame.  Upon which Johnson candidly and earnestly said to him, ’Mr. Compositor, I ask your pardon.  Mr. Compositor, I ask your pardon, again and again.’

His generous humanity to the miserable was almost beyond example.  The following instance is well attested:—­Coming home late one night, he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that she could not walk; he took her upon his back, and carried her to his house, where he discovered that she was one of those wretched females who had fallen into the lowest state of vice, poverty, and disease.  Instead of harshly upbraiding her, he had her taken care of with all tenderness for a long time, at considerable expence, till she was restored to health, and endeavoured to put her into a virtuous way of living[995].