be pitied?  They have our sympathy, and the Doctor has our applause.  I am not prepared to say, with the simpering fellow with weak legs whom David Copperfield met at Mr. Waterbrook’s dinner-table, that I would sooner be knocked down by a man with blood than picked up by a man without any; but, argumentatively speaking, I think it would be better for a man’s reputation to be knocked down by Dr. Johnson than picked up by Mr. Froude.

Johnson’s claim to be the best of our talkers cannot, on our present materials, be contested.  For the most part we have only talk about other talkers.  Johnson’s is matter of record.  Carlyle no doubt was a great talker—­no man talked against talk or broke silence to praise it more eloquently than he, but unfortunately none of it is in evidence.  All that is given us is a sort of Commination Service writ large.  We soon weary of it.  Man does not live by curses alone.

An unhappier prediction of a boy’s future was surely never made than that of Johnson’s by his cousin, Mr. Cornelius Ford, who said to the infant Samuel, “You will make your way the more easily in the world as you are content to dispute no man’s claim to conversation excellence, and they will, therefore, more willingly allow your pretensions as a writer.”  Unfortunate Mr. Ford!  The man never breathed whose claim to conversation excellence Dr. Johnson did not dispute on every possible occasion; whilst, just because he was admittedly so good a talker, his pretensions as a writer have been occasionally slighted.

Johnson’s personal character has generally been allowed to stand high.  It, however, has not been submitted to recent tests.  To be the first to “smell a fault” is the pride of the modern biographer.  Boswell’s artless pages afford useful hints not lightly to be disregarded.  During some portion of Johnson’s married life he had lodgings, first at Greenwich, afterwards at Hampstead.  But he did not always go home o’ nights; sometimes preferring to roam the streets with that vulgar ruffian Savage, who was certainly no fit company for him.  He once actually quarreled with Tetty, who, despite her ridiculous name, was a very sensible woman with a very sharp tongue, and for a season, like stars, they dwelt apart.  Of the real merits of this dispute we must resign ourselves to ignorance.  The materials for its discussion do not exist; even Croker could not find them.  Neither was our great moralist as sound as one would have liked to see him in the matter of the payment of small debts.  When he came to die, he remembered several of these outstanding accounts; but what assurance have we that he remembered them all?  One sum of L10 he sent across to the honest fellow from whom he had borrowed it, with an apology for his delay; which, since it had extended over a period of twenty years, was not superfluous.  I wonder whether he ever repaid Mr. Dilly the guinea he once borrowed of him to give to a very small boy who had just been apprenticed to a printer.  If