During this interview at Ashbourne, Johnson seemed to be more uniformly social, cheerful, and alert, than I had almost ever seen him.  He was prompt on great occasions and on small.  Taylor, who praised every thing of his own to excess; in short, ‘whose geese were all swans,’ as the proverb says, expatiated on the excellence of his bull-dog, which, he told us, was ‘perfectly well shaped.’  Johnson, after examining the animal attentively, thus repressed the vain-glory of our host:—­’No, Sir, he is not well shaped; for there is not the quick transition from the thickness of the fore-part, to the tenuity—­the thin part—­behind,—­which a bull-dog ought to have.’  This tenuity was the only hard word that I heard him use during this interview, and it will be observed, he instantly put another expression in its place.  Taylor said, a small bull-dog was as good as a large one.  Johnson.  ’No, Sir; for, in proportion to his size, he has strength:  and your argument would prove, that a good bull-dog may be as small as a mouse.’  It was amazing how he entered with perspicuity and keenness upon every thing that occurred in conversation.  Most men, whom I know, would no more think of discussing a question about a bull-dog, than of attacking a bull.

I cannot allow any fragment whatever that floats in my memory concerning the great subject of this work to be lost.  Though a small particular may appear trifling to some, it will be relished by others; while every little spark adds something to the general blaze:  and to please the true, candid, warm admirers of Johnson, and in any degree increase the splendour of his reputation, I bid defiance to the shafts of ridicule, or even of malignity.  Showers of them have been discharged at my Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides; yet it still sails unhurt along the stream of time, and, as an attendant upon Johnson,

‘Pursues the triumph, and partakes the gale.’

One morning after breakfast, when the sun shone bright, we walked out together, and ‘pored’ for some time with placid indolence upon an artificial water-fall, which Dr. Taylor had made by building a strong dyke of stone across the river behind the garden.  It was now somewhat obstructed by branches of trees and other rubbish, which had come down the river, and settled close to it.  Johnson, partly from a desire to see it play more freely, and partly from that inclination to activity which will animate, at times, the most inert and sluggish mortal, took a long pole which was lying on a bank, and pushed down several parcels of this wreck with painful assiduity, while I stood quietly by, wondering to behold the sage thus curiously employed, and smiling with an humorous satisfaction each time when he carried his point.  He worked till he was quite out of breath; and having found a large dead cat so heavy that he could not move it after several efforts, ‘Come,’ said he, (throwing down the pole,) ‘you shall take it now;’ which I accordingly did, and being a fresh man, soon made the cat tumble over the cascade.  This may be laughed at as too trifling to record; but it is a small characteristick trait in the Flemish picture which I give of my friend, and in which, therefore I mark the most minute particulars.  And let it be remembered, that Aesop at play is one of the instructive apologues of antiquity.