Mr. Thackeray relates in his “Irish Sketches” that on his asking for currant jelly for his venison at a public dinner, the waiter replied, “It’s all gone, your honour, but there’s some capital lobster sauce left.”  This would have suited Johnson equally well, or better:  he was so fond of lobster sauce that he would call for the sauce-boat and pour the whole of its remaining contents over his plum pudding.  A clergyman who once travelled with him relates, “The coach halted as usual for dinner, which seemed to be a deeply interesting business to Johnson, who vehemently attacked a dish of stewed carp, using his fingers only in feeding himself.”  At the dinner when he passed his celebrated sentence on the leg of mutton—­“That it was as bad as bad could be:  ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-dressed”—­the ladies, his fellow-passengers, observed his loss or equanimity with wonder.

Two of Mrs. Thrale’s marginal notes on Boswell refer to her illustrious friend’s mode of eating.  On his reported remark, that “a dog will take a small bit of meat as readily as a large, when both are before him,” she adds, “which Johnson would never have done.”  When Boswell, describing the dinner with Wilkes at Davies’, says, “No man eat more heartily than Johnson, or loved better what was nice and delicate,” she strikes in with—­“What was gustful rather:  what was strong that he could taste it, what was tender that he could chew it.”

When Boswell describes him as occupied for a considerable time in reading the “Memoirs of Fontenelle,” leaning and swinging upon the low gate into the court (at Streatham) without his hat, her note is:  “I wonder how he liked the story of the asparagus,”—­an obvious hint at his selfish habits of indulgence at table.

With all this he affected great nicety of palate, and did not like being asked to a plain dinner.  “It was a good dinner enough,” he would remark, “but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.”  He was so displeased with the performances of a nobleman’s French cook, that he exclaimed with vehemence, “I’d throw such a rascal into the river;” and in reference to one of his Edinburgh hosts he said, “As for Maclaurin’s imitation of a made dish, it was a wretched attempt.”

His voice was loud, and his gesticulations, voluntary or involuntary, singularly uncouth.  He had superstitious fancies about crossing thresholds or squares in the carpet with the right or left leg foremost, and when he did not appear at dinner might be found vainly endeavouring to pass a particular spot in the anteroom.  He loved late hours, or more properly (say Mrs. Thrale) hated early ones.  Nothing was more terrifying to him than the idea of going to bed, which he never would call going to rest, or suffer another to call it so.  “I lie down that my acquaintance may sleep; but I lie down to endure oppressive misery, and soon rise again to pass the night in anxiety and pain.”  When people could be induced to sit