and when he called for his lines at the time agreed on--'Sit still a
moment,' says I, 'dear Mund, and I'll fetch them thee,' so stepped aside
for five minutes, and wrote the nonsense you now keep such a stir about."

Upon revising these anecdotes, it is impossible not to be struck with shame
and regret that one treasured no more of them up; but no experience is
sufficient to cure the vice of negligence. Whatever one sees constantly,
or might see constantly, becomes uninteresting; and we suffer every trivial
occupation, every slight amusement, to hinder us from writing down what,
indeed, we cannot choose but remember, but what we should wish to recollect
with pleasure, unpoisoned by remorse for not remembering more. While I
write this, I neglect impressing my mind with the wonders of art and
beauties of nature that now surround me; and shall one day, perhaps, think
on the hours I might have profitably passed in the Florentine Gallery, and
reflecting on Raphael's St. John at that time, as upon Johnson's
conversation in this moment, may justly exclaim of the months spent by me
most delightfully in Italy--

"That I prized every hour that passed by,
Beyond all that had pleased me before;
But now they are past, and I sigh
And I grieve that I prized them no more."
SHENSTONE.

Dr. Johnson delighted in his own partiality for Oxford; and one day, at my
house, entertained five members of the other University with various
instances of the superiority of Oxford, enumerating the gigantic names of
many men whom it had produced, with apparent triumph. At last I said to
him, "Why, there happens to be no less than five Cambridge men in the room
now." "I did not," said he, "think of that till you told me; but the wolf