��' I cannot bear (replied he, with much asperity and an altered look), when I know how many poor families will perish next winter for want of that bread which the present drought will deny them, to hear ladies sighing for rain, only that their com plexions may not suffer from the heat, or their clothes be incommoded by the dust ; for shame! leave off such foppish lamentations, and study to relieve those whose distresses are real.'
With advising others to be charitable however, Dr. Johnson did not content himself. He gave away all he had, and all he ever had gotten, except the two thousand pounds he left behind z ; and the very small portion of his income which he spent on himself, with all our calculation, we never could make more than seventy, or at most fourscore pounds a year, and he pretended to allow himself a hundred. He had numberless dependents out of doors as well as in, ' who, as he expressed it, did not like to see him latterly unless he brought 'em money.' For those people he used frequently to raise contributions on his richer friends 2 ; 'and this (says he) is one of the thousand reasons which ought to restrain a man from drony 3 solitude and useless retirement. Solitude (added he one day) is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue : pleasures of some sort are necessary to the intellectual as to the corporeal health ; and those who resist gaiety, will be likely for the most part to fall a sacrifice to appetite ; for the solicitations of sense are always at hand, and a dram to a vacant and solitary person is a speedy and seducing relief. Remember (continued he) that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad : the mind stagnates for want of employment, grows morbid, and is extinguished like a candle in foul air V
1 'The amount of his property given what I can be expected to proved to be considerably more than spare. The man importunes me, and he had supposed it to be.' Life, iv. the blow goes round.' Ib. iv. 283. 404. 3 Dronish is in Johnson's Diction-
2 As for instance he wrote to ary but not drony.
Reynolds in June, 1784: 'I am 4 * Solitude to Johnson,' wrote ashamed to ask for some relief for a Reynolds, * was horror ; nor would poor man, to whom, I hope, I have he ever trust himself alone but when
It
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