gentle, had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick.  Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command.  It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be eo immitior, quia toleraverat; that, though his heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic.  For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief; but for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity, for it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive.  He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets.  He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence.  But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection.  He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself.  He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen.  These were, in his phrase, “foppish lamentations,” which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow.  Goldsmith crying because The Good-natured Man had failed, inspired him with no pity.  Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians.  Pecuniary losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little.  People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh.  He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord.  Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy.  A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have sobbed herself to death.

A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society.  He could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy.  “My dear doctor,” said he to Goldsmith, “what harm does it do to a man to call him Holofernes?” “Pooh, ma’am,” he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, “who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?” Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.  Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller to him than to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence halfpenny a day....