used to take women of the town to taverns and hear them relate their history.]
This seems to have been suggested by Mr. Boswell, to account for Johnson's religious terrors on the approach of death ; as if they proceeded from his having been led by Savage to vicious indulgences with the women of the town, in his nocturnal rambles 1 . This, if true, Johnson was not likely to have con fessed to Mr. Boswell, and therefore must be received as a pure invention of his own. But if Johnson ever conversed with those unfortunate females, it is believed to have been in order to reclaim them from their dissolute life, by moral and religious impressions ; for to one of his friends he once related a con versation of that sort which he had with a young female in the street, and that asking her what she thought she was made for, 'she supposed to please the gentlemen 2 .' His friend intimating his surprise, that he should have had communica tions with street-walkers, implying a suspicion that they were not of a moral tendency, Johnson expressed the highest indignation that any other motive could ever be suspected. (Page 90.)
The account of the manner in which Johnson compiled his Dictionary, as given by Mr. Boswell, is confused and erroneous 3 ; and a moment's reflection will convince every person of judg ment could not be correct ; for, to write down an alphabetical
1 Life, i. 164. in the Rambler' [Nos. 170 and 171].
2 Hawkins, who tells this story Prior's Malone, p. 161.
(p. 321), says: It is too well 3 'The words, partly taken from attested for me to omit it? Malorie other dictionaries, and partly sup- says that ' Baretti used sometimes plied by himself, having been first to walk with Johnson through the written down with spaces left be- streets at night, and occasionally tween them, he delivered in writing entered into conversation with the their etymologies, definitions, and unfortunate women who frequent significations. The authorities were them, for the sake of hearing their copied from the books themselves, in stories. It was from a history of which he had marked the passages one of these, which a girl told under with a black-lead pencil, the traces a tree in the King's Bench Walk in of which could easily be effaced.' the Temple to Baretti and Johnson, Life, i. 188. See ante, ii. 95. that he formed the story of Misella
arrangement
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