stare by doing better than others, why, make them stare till they stare their eyes out.  But consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd.  I may do it by going into a drawing-room without my shoes.  You remember the gentleman in The Spectator, who had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap.  Now, Sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best; but, relatively, the advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys run after him.’

Talking of a London life, he said, ’The happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it.  I will venture to say, there is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from where we now sit, than in all the rest of the kingdom.’  Boswell.  ’The only disadvantage is the great distance at which people live from one another.’  Johnson.  ’Yes, Sir; but that is occasioned by the largeness of it, which is the cause of all the other advantages.’  Boswell.  ’Sometimes I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desart.’  Johnson.  ‘Sir, you have desart enough in Scotland.’

Although I had promised myself a great deal of instructive conversation with him on the conduct of the married state, of which I had then a near prospect, he did not say much upon that topick.  Mr. Seward heard him once say, that ’a man has a very bad chance for happiness in that state, unless he marries a woman of very strong and fixed principles of religion.’  He maintained to me, contrary to the common notion, that a woman would not be the worse wife for being learned; in which, from all that I have observed of Artemisias, I humbly differed from him.

When I censured a gentleman of my acquaintance for marrying a second time, as it shewed a disregard of his first wife, he said, ’Not at all, Sir.  On the contrary, were he not to marry again, it might be concluded that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by taking a second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by shewing that she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second time.’  So ingenious a turn did he give to this delicate question.  And yet, on another occasion, he owned that he once had almost asked a promise of Mrs. Johnson that she would not marry again, but had checked himself.  Indeed, I cannot help thinking, that in his case the request would have been unreasonable; for if Mrs. Johnson forgot, or thought it no injury to the memory of her first love,—­the husband of her youth and the father of her children,—­to make a second marriage, why should she be precluded from a third, should she be so inclined?  In Johnson’s persevering fond appropriation of his Tetty, even after her decease, he seems totally to have overlooked the prior claim of the honest Birmingham trader.  I presume that her having been married before had, at times, given him some uneasiness; for I remember his observing upon the marriage of one of our common friends, ’He has done a very foolish thing, Sir; he has married a widow, when he might have had a maid.’