��possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not ashamed to shew even visible dis pleasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from their mouths.' In consequence of these principles he nursed whole nests of people in his house, where the lame, the blind, the sick, and the sorrowful found a sure retreat from all the evils whence his little income could secure them r : and commonly spending the middle of the week at our house, he kept his numerous family in Fleet-street upon a settled allowance 2 ; but returned to them every Saturday, to give them three good dinners, and his company, before he came back to us on the Monday night treating them with the same, or perhaps more cere monious civility, than he would have done by as many people
of fashion making the holy scriptures thus the rule of his
conduct, and only expecting salvation as he was able to obey its precepts.
While Dr. Johnson possessed however the strongest com passion for poverty or illness, he did not even pretend to feel for those who lamented the loss of a child, a parent, or a friend 3 .
' that you are doing good when you ii. 336. To Mrs. Desmoulins and
pay money to those who work, as her daughter and Miss Carmichael
the recompense of their labour, than he gave a room ; but they did not
when you give money merely in come to live with him till about the
charity.' Life, iii. 56. * It is an un- year 1777. To Mrs. Desmoulins he
happy circumstance,' he said, 'that allowed also half-a-guinea a week,
one might give away five hundred Life, iii. 222.
pounds in a year to those that im- 3 ' The death of my mother/ he
portune in the streets, and not do wrote, is one of the few calamities on
any good.' Ib. iv. 3. which I think with terror.' Letters,
1 There is great exaggeration in i. 20. 'Of his friend Bathurst he this passage. For some of the in- hardly ever spoke without tears in mates of his house see Ib. iii. 222, his eyes.' Murphy's Johnson, p. 56. 368, 461. To Mr. Elphinston, who had lost his
2 To Levett he gave house-room mother, he wrote : ' I read the letters and breakfast, and now and then in which you relate your mother's a dinner on Sunday. Ib. i. 243, n. 3. death to Mrs. Strahan, and I think Miss Williams was not wholly depen- I do myself honour when I tell you dent on him. Ib. i. 393, n. i ; Letters, that I read them with tears.' Life,
' These
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