Drop asleep upon his lyre.
This is all, be quick and go,
More than all thou canst not know;
Let me now my pinions ply,
I have chattered like a pie.'"

When I had finished, "But you must remember to add," says Mr. Johnson,
"that though these verses were planned, and even begun, when I was sixteen
years old, I never could find time to make an end of them before I was
sixty-eight."

This facility of writing, and this dilatoriness ever to write, Mr. Johnson
always retained, from the days that he lay abed and dictated his first
publication to Mr. Hector, who acted as his amanuensis, to the moment he
made me copy out those variations in Pope's "Homer" which are printed in
the "Poets' Lives." "And now," said he, when I had finished it for him, "I
fear not Mr. Nicholson of a pin." The fine 'Rambler,' on the subject of
Procrastination, was hastily composed, as I have heard, in Sir Joshua
Reynolds's parlour, while the boy waited to carry it to press; and
numberless are the instances of his writing under immediate pressure of
importunity or distress. He told me that the character of Sober in the
'Idler' was by himself intended as his own portrait, and that he had his
own outset into life in his eye when he wrote the Eastern story of
"Gelaleddin." Of the allegorical papers in the 'Rambler,' Labour and Rest
was his favourite; but Scrotinus, the man who returns late in life to
receive honours in his native country, and meets with mortification instead
of respect, was by him considered as a masterpiece in the science of life
and manners. The character of Prospero in the fourth volume Garrick took
to be his; and I have heard the author say that he never forgave the
offence. Sophron was likewise a picture drawn from reality, and by