d him for many weeks to
write a recommendatory letter of a little boy to his schoolmaster; and
after he had faithfully promised to do this prodigious feat before we met
again--"Do not forget dear Dick, sir," said I, as he went out of the
coach. He turned back, stood still two minutes on the
carriage-step--"When I have written my letter for Dick, I may hang
myself, mayn't I?" and turned away in a very ill humour indeed.

Though apt enough to take sudden likings or aversions to people he
occasionally met, he would never hastily pronounce upon their character;
and when, seeing him justly delighted with Solander's conversation, I
observed once that he was a man of great parts who talked from a full
mind--"It may be so," said Mr. Johnson, "but you cannot know it yet, nor
I neither: the pump works well, to be sure! but how, I wonder, are we to
decide in so very short an acquaintance, whether it is supplied by a
spring or a reservoir?" He always made a great difference in his esteem
between talents and erudition; and when he saw a person eminent for
literature, though wholly unconversible, it fretted him. "Teaching such
tonies," said he to me one day, "is like setting a lady's diamonds in
lead, which only obscures the lustre of the stone, and makes the
possessor ashamed on't." Useful and what we call everyday knowledge had
the most of his just praise. "Let your boy learn arithmetic, dear
madam," was his advice to the mother of a rich young heir: "he will not
then be a prey to every rascal which this town swarms with. Teach him
the value of money, and how to reckon it; ignorance to a wealthy lad of
one-and-twenty is only so much fat to a sick sheep: it just serves to
call the _rooks_ about him."

"And all that prey in vice or folly
Joy to see their quarry fly;
Here the gamester light and jolly,
There the lender grave and sly."

These improviso lines, making part of a long copy of verses which my
regard for the youth on whose birthday they were written obliges me to
suppress, lest they should give him pain, show a mind of surprising
activity and warmth; the more so as he was past seventy years of age when
he composed them; but nothing more certainly offended Mr. Johnson than
the idea of a man's faculties (mental ones, I mean) decaying by time. "It
is not true, sir," would he say; "what a man could once do, he would
always do, unless, indeed, by dint of vicious indolence, and compliance
with the nephe