less practice. Now, Sir, the good I can do by my conversation bears the
same proportion to the good I can do by my writings, that the practice
of a physician, retired to a small town, does to his practice in a great
city[44].' BOSWELL. 'But I wonder, Sir, you have not more pleasure in
writing than in not writing.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, you _may_ wonder.'

He talked of making verses, and observed, 'The great difficulty is to
know when you have made good ones. When composing, I have generally had
them in my mind, perhaps fifty at a time, walking up and down in my
room; and then I have written them down, and often, from laziness, have
written only half lines. I have written a hundred lines in a day. I
remember I wrote a hundred lines of _The Vanity of Human Wishes_ in a
day[45]. Doctor, (turning to Goldsmith,) I am not quite idle; I have one
line t'other day; but I made no more.'

GOLDSMITH. 'Let us hear it; we'll put a bad one to it..

JOHNSON. 'No, Sir, I have forgot it.[46]'

Such specimens of the easy and playful conversation of the great Dr.
Samuel Johnson are, I think, to be prized; as exhibiting the little
varieties of a mind so enlarged and so powerful when objects of
consequence required its exertions, and as giving us a minute knowledge
of his character and modes of thinking.


'To BENNET LANGTON, ESQ., AT LANGTON, NEAR SPILSBY, LINCOLNSHIRE.

'DEAR SIR,