Page:Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination, Walter de la Mare, 1919.djvu/10

4 choose to carry so many things any farther, or that we find other things which we like better."

Boswell persisted. "But, sir," said he, "why don't you give us something in some other way." "No, sir," Johnson replied, "I am not obliged to do any more. No man is obliged to do as much as he can do. A man is to have part of his life to himself." "But I wonder, sir," Boswell continued, "you have not more pleasure in writing than in not writing." Whereupon descended the crushing retort, "Sir, you may wonder."

Johnson then proceeded to discuss the actual making of verses. "The great difficulty," he observed—alas, how truly, "is to know when you have made good ones." Once, he boasted, he had written as many as a full hundred lines a day; but he was then under forty, and had been inspired by no less fertile a theme than "The Vanity of Human Wishes," a poem that, with other prudent counsel, bids the "young enthusiast" pause ere he choose literature and learning as a spiral staircase to fame:—

None the less, Johnson made haste to assure Goldsmith that his Muse even at this late day was not wholly mum:—"I am not quite idle; I made one line t'other day; but I made no more."