Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/399

 intimacy with his son, and went to pay him a visit at JLangton. After breakfast we walked to the top of a very steep hill behind the house. When we arrived at the summit, Mr. Langton said, ' Poor, dear Dr. Johnson, when he came to this spot, turned to look down the hill, and said he was determined "to take a roll down V When we understood what he meant to do, we endeavoured to dissuade him ; but he was resolute, saying, he had not had a roll for a long time ; and taking out of his lesser pockets whatever might be in them keys, pencil, purse, or pen-knife, and laying himself parallel with the edge of the hill, he actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom.'

The story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak of the great lexicographer to have been a fiction or invention of Mr. Langton.

��BY SIR BROOKE BOOTHBY.

[The following anecdotes were communicated to Dr. Anderson by Sir Brooke Boothby, Bart., ' who had frequent opportunities of enjoying the company of Johnson at Lichfield and Ashbourne.' Anderson's Life of Johnson, ed. 1815, p. 332.

Sir Brooke Boothby was the brother of Miss Hill Boothby. Ante, i. 18 ; Life, i. 83 ; Letters, i. 45.]

Johnson spoke as he wrote. He would take up a topic, and utter upon it a number of the Rambler 2. On a question, one day, at Miss Porter's, concerning the authority of a newspaper for some fact, he related, that a lady of his acquaintance im plicitly believed every thing she read in the papers ; and that, by way of curing her credulity, he fabricated a story of a battle between the Russians and Turks, then at war ; and * that it

1 Johnson visited Langton in 1764. que ceux qui dcrivent comme ils Life, i. 476 ; ante, i. 286, 291. parlent, quoiqu'ils parlent tres-bien,

2 Ante, i. 348 ; ii. 92. e"crivent mal.' Correspondance de
 * M. de Buffon remarque tres-bien Grimm, ed. 1814, i. 33.

might

�� �