doors to offer it to sale. Mr.
Johnson therefore set away the bottle, and went to the bookseller,
recommending the performance, and desiring some immediate relief; which
when he brought back to the writer, he called the woman of the house
directly to partake of punch, and pass their time in merriment.

It was not till ten years after, I dare say, that something in Dr.
Goldsmith's behaviour struck me with an idea that he was the very man,
and then Johnson confessed it was so; the novel was the charming "Vicar
of Wakefield."

There was a Mr. Boyce, too, who wrote some very elegant verses printed in
the magazines of five-and-twenty years ago, of whose ingenuity and
distress I have heard Dr. Johnson tell some curious anecdotes,
particularly that when he was almost perishing with hunger, and some
money was produced to purchase him a dinner, he got a piece of roast
beef, but could not eat it without ketchup, and laid out the last half-
guinea he possessed in truffles and mushrooms, eating them in bed, too,
for want of clothes, or even a shirt to sit up in.

Another man, for whom he often begged, made as wild use of his friend's
beneficence as these, spending in punch the solitary guinea which had
been brought him one morning; when resolving to add another claimant to a
share of the bowl, besides a woman who always lived with him, and a
footman who used to carry out petitions for charity, he borrowed a
chairman's watch, and pawning it for half-a-crown, paid a clergyman to
marry him to a fellow-lodger in the wretched house they all inhabited,
and got so drunk over the guinea bowl of punch the evening of his wedding-
day, that having many years lost the use of one leg, he now contrived to
fall from the top of the stairs to the bottom, and break his arm, in
which condition his companions left him to call Mr. Johnson, who,
relating the series of his tragi-comical distresses obtained from the
Literary Club a seasonable relief.

Of that respectable society I have heard him speak in the highest terms,
and with a magnificent panegyric on each member, when it consisted only
of a dozen or fourteen friends; but as soon as the necessity of enlarging
it brought in new faces, and took off from his confidence in the company,
he grew less fond of the meeting, and loudly proclaimed his carelessness
_who_ might be admitted, when it was become a mere dinner club. I
_think_ the original names, when I first heard him talk with fervour of
eve