His appetite for more innocent kinds of food was equally excessive.  He would eat seven or eight peaches before breakfast, and declared that he had only once in his life had as much wall-fruit as he wished.  His consumption of tea was prodigious, beyond all precedent.  Hawkins quotes Bishop Burnet as having drunk sixteen large cups every morning, a feat which would entitle him to be reckoned as a rival.  “A hardened and shameless tea-drinker,” Johnson called himself, who “with tea amuses the evenings, with tea solaces the midnights, and with tea welcomes the mornings.”  One of his teapots, preserved by a relic-hunter, contained two quarts, and he professed to have consumed five and twenty cups at a sitting.  Poor Mrs. Thrale complains that he often kept her up making tea for him till four in the morning.  His reluctance to go to bed was due to the fact that his nights were periods of intense misery; but the vast potations of tea can scarcely have tended to improve them.

The huge frame was clad in the raggedest of garments, until his acquaintance with the Thrales led to a partial reform.  His wigs were generally burnt in front, from his shortsighted knack of reading with his head close to the candle; and at the Thrales, the butler stood ready to effect a change of wigs as he passed into the dining-room.  Once or twice we have accounts of his bursting into unusual splendour.  He appeared at the first representation of Irene in a scarlet waistcoat laced with gold; and on one of his first interviews with Goldsmith he took the trouble to array himself decently, because Goldsmith was reported to have justified slovenly habits by the precedent of the leader of his craft.  Goldsmith, judging by certain famous suits, seems to have profited by the hint more than his preceptor.  As a rule, Johnson’s appearance, before he became a pensioner, was worthy of the proverbial manner of Grub Street.  Beauclerk used to describe how he had once taken a French lady of distinction to see Johnson in his chambers.  On descending the staircase they heard a noise like thunder.  Johnson was pursuing them, struck by a sudden sense of the demands upon his gallantry.  He brushed in between Beauclerk and the lady, and seizing her hand conducted her to her coach.  A crowd of people collected to stare at the sage, dressed in rusty brown, with a pair of old shoes for slippers, a shrivelled wig on the top of his head, and with shirtsleeves and the knees of his breeches hanging loose.  In those days, clergymen and physicians were only just abandoning the use of their official costume in the streets, and Johnson’s slovenly habits were even more marked than they would be at present.  “I have no passion for clean linen,” he once remarked, and it is to be feared that he must sometimes have offended more senses than one.