[294] Johnson (Works, vii. 449) thus describes Addison’s ’familiar day,’ on the authority of Pope:—­’He studied all morning; then dined at a tavern; and went afterwards to Button’s [coffee-house].  From the coffee-house he went again to a tavern, where he often sat late, and drank too much wine.’  Spence (Anec. p. 286) adds, on the authority of Pope, that ’Addison passed each day alike, and much in the manner that Dryden did.  Dryden employed his mornings in writing; dined en famille; and then went to Wills’s; only he came home earlier a’nights’

[295] Mr. Foss says of Blackstone:—­’Ere he had been long on the bench he experienced the bad effects of the studious habits in which he had injudiciously indulged in his early life, and of his neglect to take the necessary amount of exercise, to which he was specially averse.’  He died at the age of 56.  Foss’s Judges, viii. 250.  He suffered greatly from his corpulence.  His portrait in the Bodleian shews that he was a very fat man.  Malone says that Scott (afterwards Lord Stowell) wrote to Blackstone’s family to apologise for Boswell’s anecdote.  Prior’s Malone, p. 415.  Scott would not have thought any the worse of Blackstone for his bottle of port; both he and his brother, the Chancellor, took a great deal of it.  ’Lord Eldon liked plain port; the stronger the better.’  Twiss’s Eldon, iii. 486.  Some one asked him whether Lord Stowell took much exercise.  ‘None,’ he said, ’but the exercise of eating and drinking.’ Ib. p. 302.  Yet both men got through a vast deal of hard work, and died, Eldon at the age of 86, and Stowell of 90.

[296] See this explained, pp. 52, 53 of this volume.  BOSWELL.

[297] See ante, ii. 7.

[298] William Scott was a tutor of University College at the age of nineteen.  He held the office for ten years—­to 1775.  He wrote to his father in 1772 about his younger brother John (afterwards Lord Eldon), who had just made a run-away match:—­’The business in which I am engaged is so extremely disagreeable in itself, and so destructive to health (if carried on with such success as can render it at all considerable in point of profit) that I do not wonder at his unwillingness to succeed me in it.’  Twiss’s Eldon, i. 47, 74.

[299] The account of her marriage given By John Wesley in a letter to his brother-in-law, Mr. Hall, is curious.  He wrote on Dec. 22, 1747:—­’More than twelve years ago you told me God had revealed it to you that you should marry my youngest sister ...  You asked and gained her consent...  In a few days you had a counter-revelation, that you was not to marry her, but her sister.  This last error was far worse than the first.  But you was not quite above conviction.  So, in spite of her poor astonished parents, of her brothers, of all your vows and promises, you shortly after jilted the younger and married the elder sister.’  Wesley’s Journal, ii. 39.  Mrs. Hall suffered greatly for marrying a wretch who had so cruelly treated her own sister, Southey’s Wesley, i. 369.