I told him that Voltaire, in a conversation with me, had distinguished Pope and Dryden thus:—­’Pope drives a handsome chariot, with a couple of neat trim nags; Dryden a coach, and six stately horses.’  Johnson.  ’Why, Sir, the truth is, they both drive coaches and six; but Dryden’s horses are either galloping or stumbling:  Pope’s go at a steady even trot.’  He said of Goldsmith’s Traveller, which had been published in my absence, ‘There has not been so fine a poem since Pope’s time.’

     * 1766.

Talking of education, ’People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures.  Now, I cannot see that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the lectures are taken.  I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures, except where experiments are to be shewn.  You may teach chymistry by lectures.—­You might teach making of shoes by lectures!’

At night I supped with him at the Mitre tavern, that we might renew our social intimacy at the original place of meeting.  But there was now a considerable difference in his way of living.  Having had an illness, in which he was advised to leave off wine, he had, from that period, continued to abstain from it, and drank only water, or lemonade.

I told him that a foreign friend of his, whom I had met with abroad, was so wretchedly perverted to infidelity, that he treated the hopes of immortality with brutal levity; and said, ’As man dies like a dog, let him lie like a dog.’  Johnson.  ’If he dies like a dog, let him lie like a dog.’  I added, that this man said to me, ’I hate mankind, for I think myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.’  Johnson.  ’Sir, he must be very singular in his opinion, if he thinks himself one of the best of men; for none of his friends think him so.’—­He said, ’no honest man could be a Deist; for no man could be so after a fair examination of the proofs of Christianity.’  I named Hume.  Johnson.  ’No, Sir; Hume owned to a clergyman in the bishoprick of Durham, that he had never read the New Testament with attention.’  I mentioned Hume’s notion, that all who are happy are equally happy; a little miss with a new gown at a dancing school ball, a general at the head of a victorious army, and an orator, after having made an eloquent speech in a great assembly.  Johnson.  ’Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true.  A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy.  Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness.  A peasant has not capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.’