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 i68 Anecdotes.

��them up ; but no experience is sufficient to cure the vice of negligence: whatever one sees constantly, or might see con stantly, becomes uninteresting ; and we suffer every trivial occu pation, every slight amusement, to hinder us from writing down, what indeed we cannot chuse but remember ; but what we should wish to recollect with pleasure, unpoisoned by remorse for not remembering more. While I write this, I neglect impressing my mind with the wonders of art, and beauties of nature, that now surround me ; and shall one day, perhaps, think on the hours I might have profitably passed in the Florentine Gallery, and reflecting on Raphael's St. John at that time, as upon Johnson's conversation in this moment, may justly exclaim of the months spent by me most delightfully in Italy

That I priz'd every hour that pass'd by,

Beyond all that had pleas'd me before; But now they are past, and I sigh,

And I grieve that I priz'd them no more.

SHENSTONE 1.

Dr. Johnson delighted in his own partiality for Oxford ; and one day, at my house, entertained five members of the other university with various instances of the superiority of Oxford, enumerating the gigantic names of many men whom it had produced, with apparent triumph 2. At last I said to him, Why there happens to be no less than five Cambridge men in the room now. ' I did not (said he) think of that till you told me ; but the wolf don't count the sheep.' When the company were retired, we happened to be talking of Dr. Barnard, the Provost of Eton, who died about that time 3 ; and after a long and just eulogium on his wit, his learning, and his goodness of heart : ' He was the only man too (says Mr. Johnson quite seriously)

1 From A Pastoral Ballad in four have been overwhelmed.

Parts. Shenstone's Poems, ed. 1854, 3 He died in Dec. 1781. Nichols's

p. 150. Johnson quotes this verse in Lit, Anec. viii. 543. For the evening

his Life of Shenstone. Mrs. Piozzi at Mrs. Vesey's when the company

spoils the metre of the first line by collected round him and Johnson

adding ' that.' four, if not five, deep,' see Life> iii.

2 With the names of Bacon, Milton, 425. and Newton even Johnson would

that

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