asks Boswell.  “Yes, sir; and eat it as if he were eating with me.  Why there’s Baretti, who’s to be tried for his life to-morrow.  Friends have risen up for him upon every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plum-pudding the less.  Sir, that sympathetic feeling goes a very little way in depressing the mind.”  Boswell illustrated the subject by saying that Tom Davies had just written a letter to Foote, telling him that he could not sleep from concern about Baretti, and at the same time recommending a young man who kept a pickle-shop.  Johnson summed up by the remark:  “You will find these very feeling people are not very ready to do you good.  They pay you by feeling.”  Johnson never objected to feeling, but to the waste of feeling.

In a similar vein he told Mrs. Thrale that a “surly fellow” like himself had no compassion to spare for “wounds given to vanity and softness,” whilst witnessing the common sight of actual want in great cities.  On Lady Tavistock’s death, said to have been caused by grief for her husband’s loss, he observed that her life might have been saved if she had been put into a small chandler’s shop, with a child to nurse.  When Mrs. Thrale suggested that a lady would be grieved because her friend had lost the chance of a fortune, “She will suffer as much, perhaps,” he replied, “as your horse did when your cow miscarried.”  Mrs. Thrale testifies that he once reproached her sternly for complaining of the dust.  When he knew, he said, how many poor families would perish next winter for want of the bread which the drought would deny, he could not bear to hear ladies sighing for rain on account of their complexions or their clothes.  While reporting such sayings, she adds, that he loved the poor as she never saw any one else love them, with an earnest desire to make them happy.  His charity was unbounded; he proposed to allow himself one hundred a year out of the three hundred of his pension; but the Thrales could never discover that he really spent upon himself more than 70_l_., or at most 80_l_.  He had numerous dependants, abroad as well as at home, who “did not like to see him latterly, unless he brought ’em money.”  He filled his pockets with small cash which he distributed to beggars in defiance of political economy.  When told that the recipients only laid it out upon gin or tobacco, he replied that it was savage to deny them the few coarse pleasures which the richer disdained.  Numerous instances are given of more judicious charity.  When, for example, a Benedictine monk, whom he had seen in Paris, became a Protestant, Johnson supported him for some months in London, till he could get a living.  Once coming home late at night, he found a poor woman lying in the street.  He carried her to his house on his back, and found that she was reduced to the lowest stage of want, poverty, and disease.  He took care of her at his own charge, with all tenderness, until she was restored to health,