When he again talked of Mrs. Careless to-night, he seemed to have had his affection revived; for he said, ’If I had married her, it might have been as happy for me.’  Boswell.  ’Pray, Sir, do you not suppose that there are fifty women in the world, with any one of whom a man may be as happy, as with any one woman in particular?’ Johnson.  ’Ay, Sir, fifty thousand.’  Boswell.  ’Then, Sir, you are not of opinion with some who imagine that certain men and certain women are made for each other; and that they cannot be happy if they miss their counterparts?’ Johnson.  ’To be sure not, Sir.  I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter.’

I wished to have staid at Birmingham to-night, to have talked more with Mr. Hector; but my friend was impatient to reach his native city; so we drove on that stage in the dark, and were long pensive and silent.  When we came within the focus of the Lichfield lamps, ’Now (said he,) we are getting out of a state of death.’  We put up at the Three Crowns, not one of the great inns, but a good old fashioned one, which was kept by Mr. Wilkins, and was the very next house to that in which Johnson was born and brought up, and which was still his own property.  We had a comfortable supper, and got into high spirits.  I felt all my Toryism glow in this old capital of Staffordshire.  I could have offered incense genio loci; and I indulged in libations of that ale, which Boniface, in The Beaux Stratagem, recommends with such an eloquent jollity.

Next morning he introduced me to Mrs. Lucy Porter, his step-daughter.  She was now an old maid, with much simplicity of manner.  She had never been in London.  Her brother, a Captain in the navy, had left her a fortune of ten thousand pounds; about a third of which she had laid out in building a stately house, and making a handsome garden, in an elevated situation in Lichfield.  Johnson, when here by himself, used to live at her house.  She reverenced him, and he had a parental tenderness for her.

We then visited Mr. Peter Garrick, who had that morning received a letter from his brother David, announcing our coming to Lichfield.  He was engaged to dinner, but asked us to tea, and to sleep at his house.  Johnson, however, would not quit his old acquaintance Wilkins, of the Three Crowns.  The family likeness of the Garricks was very striking; and Johnson thought that David’s vivacity was not so peculiar to himself as was supposed.  ’Sir, (said he,) I don’t know but if Peter had cultivated all the arts of gaiety as much as David has done, he might have been as brisk and lively.  Depend upon it, Sir, vivacity is much an art, and depends greatly on habit.’  I believe there is a good deal of truth in this, notwithstanding a ludicrous story told me by a lady abroad, of a heavy German baron, who had lived much with the young English at Geneva, and was ambitious to be as lively as they; with which view, he, with assiduous exertion, was jumping over the tables and chairs in his lodgings; and when the people of the house ran in and asked, with surprize, what was the matter, he answered, ‘Sh’ apprens t’etre fif.’