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 ��Anecdotes.

��' These are the distresses of sentiment (he would reply)

which a man who is really to be pitied has no leisure to feel. The sight of people who want food and raiment is so common in great cities, that a surly fellow like me has no compassion to spare for wounds given only to vanity or softness V No man, therefore, who smarted from the ingratitude of his friends, found any sympathy from our philosopher : ' Let him do good on higher motives next time,' would be the answer ; * he will then

be sure of his reward.' It is easy to observe, that the justice

of such sentences made them offensive ; but we must be careful how we condemn a man for saying what we know to be true, only because it is so. I hope that the reason our hearts rebelled a little against his severity, was chiefly because it came from a living mouth. Books were invented to take off the odium of immediate superiority, and soften the rigour of duties prescribed by the teachers and censors of human kind setting at least those who are acknowledged wiser than ourselves at a distance 2. When we recollect however, that for this very reason they are

��i. 212. Over the dying bed of Mrs. Thrale's mother 'he hung with the affection of a parent and the rever ence of a son.' Post, p. 235. On the death of young Harry Thrale he wrote to his mother : ' Poor dear sweet little boy! When I read the letter this day to Mrs. Aston she said, " Such a death is the next to translation." Yet however I may con vince myself of this the tears are in my eyes, and yet I could not love him as you loved him, nor reckon upon him for a future comfort as you and his father reckoned upon him.' Letters, i. 381. On the death of the boy's father he wrote to the widow : ' I am not without my part of the calamity. No death since that of my wife has ever oppressed me like this.' Letters, ii. 209. With Miss Burney he often had 'long and melancholy discourses about our dear deceased master, whom indeed he re grets incessantly.' Mme. D'Arblay's

��Diary, ii. 63.

Mrs. Piozzi says (post, p. 230) : ' The truth is nobody suffered more from pungent sorrow at a friend's death than Dr. Johnson, though he would suffer no one else to complain of their losses in the same way.'

1 It was the exaggeration of feeling that Johnson attacked. 'You will find these very feeling people,' he said, 'are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling! Ib. ii. 95.

2 Johnson, in the Rambler, No. 87, entitled, ' The reasons why advice is generally ineffectual,' says : ' By the consultation of books, whether of dead or living authors, many tempta tions to petulance and opposition, which occur in oral conferences, are avoided. . . Books are seldom read with complete impartiality but by those from whom the writer is placed at such a distance that his life or death is indifferent.'

seldom

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