��Anecdotes.
��firmness, and though he would follow the hounds fifty miles an end sometimes, would never own himself either tired or amused x .
- I have now learned (said he), by hunting, to perceive, that it is
no diversion at all, nor ever takes a man out of himself for a moment : the dogs have less sagacity than I could have pre vailed on myself to suppose ; and the gentlemen often call to me not to ride over them. It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them 2 .' He was however proud to be amongst the sportsmen ; and I think no praise ever went so close to his heart, as when Mr. Hamilton 3 called out one day upon Brighthelmstone Downs, Why Johnson rides as well, for aught I see, as the most illiterate fellow in England.
Though Dr. Johnson owed his very life to air and exercise, given him when his organs of respiration could scarcely play, in the year ij66 4 , yet he ever persisted in the notion, that neither of them had any thing to do with health 5 . ' People live as long
��1 ' Dr. Johnson told us at break fast that he rode harder at a fox chace than anybody.' Life, v. 253. Writing to Mrs. Thrale on August 27, 1777, in the midst of an abundant harvest, he says: 'Barley, malt, beer, and money. There is the se ries of ideas. The deep logicians call it a sorites. I hope my master will no longer endure the reproach of not keeping me a horse.' Letters, ii. 25.
' Riding had no tendency to raise Johnson's spirits ; and he once told me that in a journey on horseback he fell asleep.' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 458.
a ' The public pleasures of far the greater part of mankind are coun- feit.' The Idler, No. 18.
3 William Gerard Hamilton.
4 Ante, p. 234.
5 In \h& Rambler, No. 85, he points out * how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped, by frequent and violent agitation of the
��body. . . . Exercise cannot secure us from that dissolution to which we are decreed : but while the soul and body continue united, it can make the as sociation pleasing, and give probable hopes that they shall be disjoined by an easy separation.'
He wrote to Dr. Taylor : ' I hope you are diligent to take as much exercise as you can bear. ... I take the true definition of exercise to be labour without weariness.' Letters, ii. 102. ' Exercise short of great fatigue must be your great medicine.' Ib. ii. 355. He urged Mr. Thrale to ride. Ib. ii. 73, 106.
He recommended to Boswell as a remedy against melancholy ' a great deal of exercise.' Life, i. 446.
Though in his strength he ridiculed the notion that weather much affects us (Ib. i. 332, 452 ; ii. 358), neverthe less when ill he owned the effect of change of air. In 1773 he wrote : ' My cold was once so bad that I
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