virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him
conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,
they have made him immortal.

Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the
enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other
man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his
face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his
blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation
of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with
plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the
posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of
orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his
contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous,
acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his
insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr.
Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all
are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded
from childhood....

From nature, he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his
manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his
moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings
who were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his
hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence,
and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence contrasted with
the constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of his manners in
society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the