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 establish a record for jumping. When Miss Reynolds took a walk with him in Twickenham meadows, he collected a crowd by these 'extraordinary antics/ and afterwards seesawed so violently while reading Grotius's De Veritate that people came up to ask what was the matter. Dr. Campbell also declares that Johnson looked like an idiot, without a rag of sense, and was 'for ever dancing the devil's jig,' or making a drivelling effort to 'whistle in his absent paroxysms.' No other biographer speaks so strongly of these amazing performances; and probably they had got upon Miss Reynolds's nerves. She amiably wishes to explain his apparently 'asperous' conduct; and certainly a man who was half deaf, so blind, as she declared, that he could not recognise a friend's face half a yard off, and, moreover, liable to become at any moment a mere bundle of automatic contortions, might be expected to tread on other people's toes, literally and metaphorically, without bad intentions. The 'two primæval causes,' as Miss Reynolds has it, his 'intellectual excellence' and his 'corporeal defects,' made him apparently harsh. The corporeal defects 'tended to darken his perceptions of what may be called propriety and impropriety