302 Anecdotes by William Seward, F.R.S.
afterwards. Upon asking him, why he had not put his plan in execution, he replied, ' I have been returned these ten days from the West Indies. The sight of slavery was so horrid to me. that I could only stay two days in one of the islands V This man, who had been once a man of literature, and a private tutor to some young men of consequence, became so extremely torpid and careless in point of further information, that the Doctor, when he called upon him one day, and asked him to lend him a book, was told by him, that he had not one in the house.
Dr. Johnson, on learning the death of a celebrated West India Planter 2 , said, 'He is gone, I believe, to a climate in which he will not find the country much warmer and the men much blacker than that he has left.' Ib. p. 186.
Johnson was much pleased with a French expression made use of by a lady towards a person whose head was confused with a multitude of knowledge, at which he had not arrived in a regular and principled way, // a bdti sans fchafaud, 'he has built without his scaffold.'
He was once told that a friend of his, who had long lived in London, was about to quit it, to retire into the country, as being tired of London. ' Say rather, Sir,' said Johnson, ' that he is tired of life 3 .' European Magazine > 1797, p. 418.
Dr. Johnson said that he should be much pleased to write the Life of that man [Bacon], from whose writings alone a Dictionary of the English Language might be compiled 4 .
1 Johnson described Jamaica as a Jamaica gentleman, then lately
'a place of great wealth and dread- dead : " He will not, whither he is
ful wickedness, a den of tyrants now gone, find much difference, I
and a dungeon of slaves.' Life, ii. believe, either in the climate or the
478. company." '
' Great merit,' wrote Franklin, ' is 3 ' No, Sir, when a man is tired of
assumed for the gentlemen of the London, he is tired of life ; for there
West-Indies, on the score of their is in London all that life can afford.'
residing and spending their money in Life, iii. 178. Charles Lamb, writing
England.' Franklin's Works, ed. to Wordsworth, speaks of 'the im-
1887, iii. 105. possibility of being dull in Fleet
- Perhaps Alderman Beckford. Street.' Lamb's Letters, i. 165.
Life,\\\. 76, 201. See ante, i. 211, 4 For my note on this, see Life, iii.
where he is reported to have said * of 194, n. 2. See also ante, ii. 229.
He
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