Edwards.  ’How do you live, Sir?  For my part, I must have my regular meals, and a glass of good wine.  I find I require it.’  Johnson.  ’I now drink no wine, Sir.  Early in life I drank wine:  for many years I drank none.  I then for some years drank a great deal.’  Edwards.  ’Some hogs-heads, I warrant you.’  Johnson.  ’I then had a severe illness, and left it off, and I have never begun it again.  I never felt any difference upon myself from eating one thing rather than another, nor from one kind of weather rather than another.  There are people, I believe, who feel a difference; but I am not one of them.  And as to regular meals, I have fasted from the Sunday’s dinner to the Tuesday’s dinner, without any inconvenience.  I believe it is best to eat just as one is hungry:  but a man who is in business, or a man who has a family, must have stated meals.  I am a straggler.  I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo, without being missed here or observed there.’  Edwards.  ‘Don’t you eat supper, Sir?’ Johnson.  ‘No, Sir.’  Edwards.  ’For my part, now, I consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in order to get to bed.’

Johnson.  ’You are a lawyer, Mr. Edwards.  Lawyers know life practically.  A bookish man should always have them to converse with.  They have what he wants.’  Edwards.  ‘I am grown old:  I am sixty-five.’  Johnson.  ’I shall be sixty-eight next birth-day.  Come, Sir, drink water, and put in for a hundred.’

This interview confirmed my opinion of Johnson’s most humane and benevolent heart.  His cordial and placid behaviour to an old fellow-collegian, a man so different from himself; and his telling him that he would go down to his farm and visit him, showed a kindness of disposition very rare at an advanced age.  He observed, ’how wonderful it was that they had both been in London forty years, without having ever once met, and both walkers in the street too!’ Mr. Edwards, when going away, again recurred to his consciousness of senility, and looking full in Johnson’s face, said to him, ’You’ll find in Dr. Young,

“O my coevals! remnants of yourselves."’

Johnson did not relish this at all; but shook his head with impatience.  Edwards walked off, seemingly highly pleased with the honour of having been thus noticed by Dr. Johnson.  When he was gone, I said to Johnson, I thought him but a weak man.  Johnson.  ’Why, yes, Sir.  Here is a man who has passed through life without experience:  yet I would rather have him with me than a more sensible man who will not talk readily.  This man is always willing to say what he has to say.’  Yet Dr. Johnson had himself by no means that willingness which he praised so much, and I think so justly; for who has not felt the painful effect of the dreary void, when there is a total silence in a company, for any length of time; or, which is as bad, or perhaps worse, when the conversation is with difficulty kept up by a perpetual effort?