great distance from each other. Boswell practised in the
Parliament House of Edinburgh, and could pay only occasional visits to
London. During those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson,
to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to subjects
about which Johnson was likely to say something remarkable, and to fill
quarto note books with minutes of what Johnson had said. In this way
were gathered the materials out of which was afterwards constructed the
most interesting biographical work in the world.

Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connection less
important indeed to his fame, but much more important to his happiness,
than his connection with Boswell. Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent
brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound and cultivated understanding,
rigid principles, and liberal spirit, was married to one of those
clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women, who are
perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly right, but who, do or
say what they may, are always agreeable. In 1765 the Thrales became
acquainted with Johnson; and the acquaintance ripened fast into
friendship. They were astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of
his conversation. They were flattered by finding that a man so widely
celebrated, preferred their house to any other in London. Even the
peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for civilised society, his
gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the strange
way in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which
he devoured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of anger, his
frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity, increased the interest which
his new associates took in him. For these things were the cruel marks
left behind by a life which had been one long conflict with disease and
with adversity. In a vulgar hack writer such oddities would have excited
only disgust. But in a man of genius, learning, and virtue their effect
was to add pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an apartment
at the brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment at the
villa of his friends on Streatham Common. A large part of every year he
passed in those abodes, abodes which must have seemed magnificent and
luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in which he had generally
been lodged. But his chief pleasures were derived from what the
astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called "the endear