Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/73

Rh portrait. Yet the eternal play of fancy in his mind is what gives their originality and delight to most of his sayings. What could be happier than his description of the habit of bustle—‘it is getting on horseback in a ship?’ Or than his remark on education—‘You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have done, that they do not delight in your company?’ A sentiment often felt and often expressed will almost always gain vividness and quaintness from Johnson’s rendering of it. He received with contempt, says Mrs. Thrale, the praises of a certain pretty lady’s face and behaviour. ‘She says nothing, sir,’ he replied, ‘a talking blackamoor were better than a white creature who adds nothing to life, and by sitting down before one thus desperately silent, takes away the confidence one should have in the company of her chair, if she were once out of it.’ His criticism of a sermon on Friendship, delivered at ‘the trading end of the town,’ shows the same activity of the faculty that bodies forth the forms of things unseen. ‘Why now,’ he said to Mrs. Thale, '‘is it not strange that a wise man, like our dear little Evans, should take it in his head to preach on such a subject, in a place where no one can be thinking of it?’ ‘Why, what are they thinking upon, sir?’ said she. ‘Why, the men are thinking on their money, I suppose, and the women are thinking of their mops.’

A distinguished psychologist has said that if the stupidest man on earth could be permitted for a moment to have a view of what is passing in the mind of a dog, he would be appalled at the total absence of fancy there. In the play of fancy Johnson excelled the stupid man as much as the stupid man excels the dog. If this power is, as some have thought it, the chief difference between