On Sunday, April 16, being Easter Day, after having attended the solemn service at St. Paul’s, I dined with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Williams.  I maintained that Horace was wrong in placing happiness in Nil admirari, for that I thought admiration one of the most agreeable of all our feelings; and I regretted that I had lost much of my disposition to admire, which people generally do as they advance in life.  Johnson.  ’Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration—­judgement, to estimate things at their true value.’  I still insisted that admiration was more pleasing than judgement, as love is more pleasing than friendship.  The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.  Johnson.  ’No, Sir; admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgement and friendship like being enlivened.  Waller has hit upon the same thought with you:  but I don’t believe you have borrowed from Waller.  I wish you would enable yourself to borrow more.’

He then took occasion to enlarge on the advantages of reading, and combated the idle superficial notion, that knowledge enough may be acquired in conversation.  ’The foundation (said he,) must be laid by reading.  General principles must be had from books, which, however, must be brought to the test of real life.  In conversation you never get a system.  What is said upon a subject is to be gathered from a hundred people.  The parts of a truth, which a man gets thus, are at such a distance from each other that he never attains to a full view.’

On Tuesday, April 15, he and I were engaged to go with Sir Joshua Reynolds to dine with Mr. Cambridge, at his beautiful villa on the banks of the Thames, near Twickenham.  Dr. Johnson’s tardiness was such, that Sir Joshua, who had an appointment at Richmond, early in the day, was obliged to go by himself on horseback, leaving his coach to Johnson and me.  Johnson was in such good spirits, that every thing seemed to please him as we drove along.

Our conversation turned on a variety of subjects.  He thought portrait-painting an improper employment for a woman.  ’Publick practice of any art, (he observed,) and staring in men’s faces, is very indelicate in a female.’  I happened to start a question, whether, when a man knows that some of his intimate friends are invited to the house of another friend, with whom they are all equally intimate, he may join them without an invitation.  Johnson.  ’No, Sir; he is not to go when he is not invited.  They may be invited on purpose to abuse him’ (smiling).