n what it
was to _lose a wife_. It had almost broke my heart."

EDWARDS: "How do you live, sir? For my part, I must have my
regular meals, and a glass of good wine. I find I require it."
JOHNSON: "I now drink no wine, sir. Early in life I drank wine:
for many years I drank none, I then for some years drank a
great deal." EDWARDS: "Some hogsheads, I warrant you." JOHNSON:
"I then had a severe illness, and left it off. I am a
straggler. I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo, without
being missed here or observed there." EDWARDS: "Don't you eat
supper, sir?" JOHNSON: "No, sir." EDWARDS: "For my part, now, I
consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in
order to get to bed." JOHNSON: "You are a lawyer, Mr Edwards.
Lawyers know life practically. A bookish man should always have
them to converse with. They have what he wants." EDWARDS: "I am
grown old, I am sixty-five." JOHNSON: "I shall be sixty-eight
next birthday. Come, sir, drink water, and put in for a
hundred." ... Mr Edwards, when going away, again recurred to
his consciousness of senility, and looking full in Johnson's
face, said to him, "You'll find in Dr Young,

'O my coevals! remnants of yourselves.'"

Johnson did not relish this at all; but shook his head with
impatience. Edwards walked off seemingly highly pleased with
the honour of having been thus noticed by Dr Johnson. When he
was gone, I said to Johnson I thought him but a weak man.
JOHNSON: "Why, yes, sir. Here is a man who has passed through
life without experience: yet I would rather have him with me
than a more sensible man who will not talk readily. This man is
always willing to say what he has to say."'

How admirable is the art in this scene, how numerous and fine are the
strokes of character, and the easy turn of the dialogue! No fool with a
note-book, no tippling reporter, as the shallow critics say, could have
written this. To them there would have appeared in a chance meeting of
two old men nothing worthy of notice, yet how dramatically does Boswell
touch off the Philistine side of Edwards, and insert the fine shading
and the inimitable remarks about the setting up for the philosopher, and
supper being a turnpike to bed! This art of the biographer is what gives
a memorableness to slight incidents, by the object being real and really
seen; it is the 'infinitu