before the impression is erased by the
intervention of newer occurrences. He perfectly remembered the first
time he ever heard of Heaven and Hell," he said, "because when his mother
had made out such a description of both places as she thought likely to
seize the attention of her infant auditor, who was then in bed with her,
she got up, and dressing him before the usual time, sent him directly to
call a favourite workman in the house, to whom he knew he would
communicate the conversation while it was yet impressed upon his mind.
The event was what she wished, and it was to that method chiefly that he
owed his uncommon felicity of remembering distant occurrences and long
past conversations."

At the age of eighteen Dr. Johnson quitted school, and escaped from the
tuition of those he hated or those he despised. I have heard him relate
very few college adventures. He used to say that our best accounts of
his behaviour there would be gathered from Dr. Adams and Dr. Taylor, and
that he was sure they would always tell the truth. He told me, however,
one day how, when he was first entered at the University, he passed a
morning, in compliance with the customs of the place, at his tutor's
chambers; but, finding him no scholar, went no more. In about ten days
after, meeting the same gentleman, Mr. Jordan, in the street, he offered
to pass by without saluting him; but the tutor stopped, and inquired, not
roughly neither, what he had been doing? "Sliding on the ice," was the
reply, and so turned away with disdain. He laughed very heartily at the
recollection of his own insolence, and said they endured it from him with
wonderful acquiescence, and a gentleness that, whenever he thought of it,
astonished himself. He told me, too, that when he made his first
declamation, he wrote over but one copy, and that coarsely; and having
given it into the hand of the tutor, who stood to receive it as he
passed, was obliged to begin by chance and continue on how he could, for
he had got but little of it by heart; so fairly trusting to his present
powers for immediate supply, he finished by adding astonishment to the
applause of all who knew how little was owing to study. A prodigious
risk, however, said some one. "Not at all!" exclaims Johnson. "No man,
I suppose, leaps at once into deep water who does not know how to swim."

I doubt not but this story will be told by many of his biographers, and
said so to him when he told it me on t