Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/16

 ��Apophthegms, Sentiments

��When some one asked him for what he should marry, he replied, first, for virtue ; secondly, for wit ; thirdly, for beauty ; and fourthly, for money 1.

He thought worse of the vices of retirement than of those of society 2.

He attended Mr. Thrale in his last moments, and stayed in the room praying, as is imagined, till he had drawn his last breath. His servants, said he, would have waited upon him in this awful period, and why not his friend 3 ?

He was extremely fond of reading the lives of great and learned persons 4. Two or three years before he died, he applied to a friend of his to give him a list of those in the French language that were well written and genuine. He said, that Bolingbroke had declared he could not read Middleton's life of Cicero 5.

He was a great enemy to the present fashionable way of supposing worthless and infamous persons mad.

He was not apt to judge ill of persons without good reasons ;

��Printer or Stationer to .the East India Company) in the early part of his life was seized with the cacotthes scribendi, and having finished a Pam phlet wished much to have Mr. John son's opinion of it, before he offered it to the Publick. So without any previous knowledge or introduction, he called on Johnson, and humbly requested him to peruse the Manu script of his first production ; which was with great good nature im mediately acquiesced in : when he had finished it he said to Mr. Towns- hend, " Pray, Sir, are you of any profession?" "A Printer, at your service." "Then, Sir, I would recom mend you to print any work rather than your own ; it will turn out more to your advantage if you get paid for it, and if it be worth printing, in finitely more to your credit." This interview Townshend spoke of in his latter days with grateful remem

��brance ; a different reception, he said, would have flattered his vanity and allured him to poverty and con tempt.'

1 Life, ii. 128 ; iv. 131.

2 Ib. v. 62.

3 Ib. iv. 84 ; ante, i. 96.


 * Ib. \. 425 ; v. 79.

5 Johnson would not read Boling- broke's works at all events his Philosophical works. Ib. i. 330.

his wife. . . . Dr. Middleton told me a compliment she made him two years ago which I thought pretty. She said she was persuaded that he was a very great writer, for she un derstood his works better than any other English book, and that she had observed that the best writers were always the most intelligible.' [She was a Frenchwoman.] Wai- pole's Letters, ii. 202.
 * My Lord Bolingbroke has lost

an

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