thy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief; but for
the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had
no pity, for it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely
conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl
from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd
of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all
their peevishness and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But the
pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt
sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had
seen and felt so much of sharp misery that he was not affected by paltry
vexations; and he seemed to think that everybody ought to be as much
hardened to those vexations as himself. He was angry with Boswell for
complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust
on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in his phrase,
"foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a
world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because _The
Good-natured Man_ had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own
health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary
losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him
very little. People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might
weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a
plain man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by the spectacle
of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such
grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A
washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have
sobbed herself to death.

A person who troubled himself so little about small or sentimental
grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others
in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could not understand how a
sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. "My dear
doctor," said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call
him Holofernes?" "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, "who is the
worse for being talked of uncharitably?" Politeness has been well
defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not
because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared
smaller to him than to people who had never known what it was to live
f