160 Anecdotes.
��instruction for them ; but I would not have set their future friendship to hazard for the sake of thrusting into their heads knowledge of things for which they might not perhaps have either taste or necessity. You teach your daughters the dia meters of the planets, and wonder when you have done that they do not delight in your company. No science can be communi cated by mortal creatures without attention from the scholar; no attention can be obtained from children without the infliction of pain x , and pain is never remembered without resentment.' That something should be learned, was however so certainly his opinion, that I have heard him say, how education had been often compared to agriculture, yet that it resembled it chiefly in this : ' that if nothing is sown, no crop (says he) can be obtained.' His contempt of the lady who fancied her son could be eminent without study, because Shakespeare was found wanting in scholastic learning, was expressed in terms so gross and so well known, I will not repeat them here.
To recollect, however, and to repeat the sayings of Dr. John son, is almost all that can be done by the writers of his life ; as his life, at least since my acquaintance with him, consisted in little else than talking, when he was not absolutely employed in some serious piece of work ; and whatever work he did, seemed so much below his powers of performance, that he appeared the idlest of all human beings ; ever musing till he was called out to converse, and conversing till the fatigue of his friends, or the promptitude of his own temper to take offence, consigned him back again to silent meditation 2 .
1 ' Johnson upon all occasions ex- a book from the shelves ' and began, pressed his approbation of enforcing without further ceremony, to read to instruction by means of the rod.' himself, all the time standing at a Life, i. 46. distance from the company. We
2 Most of this paragraph is quoted were all very much provoked, as we in the Life, iv. 343, 346. perfectly languished to hear him
For his musing see ib. v. 73 and talk ; but it seems he is the most Letters, i. 359, n. 2, 388, n. 2, and silent creature, when not particularly Piozzi's Anecdotes, p. 208. drawn out, in the world.' Early
Miss Burney describes how at a Diary of F. Burney, ii. 156. party at her father's house he took
The
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