The infirmity to which Mr. Pope alludes, appeared to me also, as I have
elsewhere observed, to be of the convulsive kind, and of the nature
of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance; and in this opinion I am
confirmed by the description which Sydenham gives of that disease. 'This
disorder is a kind of convulsion. It manifests itself by halting or
unsteadiness of one of the legs, which the patient draws after him like
an ideot. If the hand of the same side be applied to the breast, or any
other part of the body, he cannot keep it a moment in the same
posture, but it will be drawn into a different one by a convulsion,
notwithstanding all his efforts to the contrary.' Sir Joshua Reynolds,
however, was of a different opinion, and favoured me with the following
paper.

'Those motions or tricks of Dr. Johnson are improperly called
convulsions. He could sit motionless, when he was told so to do, as well
as any other man; my opinion is that it proceeded from a habit which
he had indulged himself in, of accompanying his thoughts with certain
untoward actions, and those actions always appeared to me as if they
were meant to reprobate some part of his past conduct. Whenever he was
not engaged in conversation, such thoughts were sure to rush into his
mind; and, for this reason, any company, any employment whatever, he
preferred to being alone. The great business of his life (he said) was
to escape from himself; this disposition he considered as the disease of
his mind, which nothing cured but company.

'One instance of his absence and particularity, as it is characteristick
of the man, may be worth relating. When he and I took a journey together
into the West, we visited the late Mr. Banks, of Dorsetshire; the
conversation turning upon pictures, which Johnson could not well see, he