know that after a certain age we
cannot learn to pronounce a new language. No foreigner, who comes to
England when advanced in life, ever pronounces English tolerably well;
at least such instances are very rare. When I maintain that language
must have come by inspiration, I do not mean that inspiration is
required for rhetorick, and all the beauties of language; for when once
man has language, we can conceive that he may gradually form
modifications of it. I mean only that inspiration seems to me to be
necessary to give man the faculty of speech; to inform him that he may
have speech; which I think he could no more find out without
inspiration, than cows or hogs would think of such a faculty.' WALKER.
'Do you think, Sir, that there are any perfect synonimes in any
language?' JOHNSON. 'Originally there were not; but by using words
negligently, or in poetry, one word comes to be confounded
with another.'

He talked of Dr. Dodd[643]. 'A friend of mine, (said he,) came to me and
told me, that a lady wished to have Dr. Dodd's picture in a bracelet,
and asked me for a motto. I said, I could think of no better than
_Currat Lex_. I was very willing to have him pardoned, that is, to have
the sentence changed to transportation: but, when he was once hanged, I
did not wish he should be made a saint.'

Mrs. Burney, wife of his friend Dr. Burney, came in, and he seemed to be
entertained with her conversation.

Garrick's funeral was talked of as extravagantly expensive. Johnson,
from his dislike to exaggeration, would not allow that it was
distinguished by any extraordinary pomp. 'Were there not six horses to
each coach?' said Mrs. Burney. JOHNSON. 'Madam, there were no more six
horses than six phoenixes[644].'

Mrs. Burney wondered that some very beautiful new buildings should be
erected in Moorfields, in so shocking a situation as between Bedlam and
St. Luke's Hospital; and said she could not live there. JOHNSON. 'Nay,
Madam, you see nothing there to hurt you. You no more think of madness
by having windows that look to Bedlam, than you think of death by having
windows that look to a church-yard.' MRS. BURNEY. 'We may look to a
church-yard, Sir; for it is right that we should be kept in mind of
death.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Madam, if you go to that, it is right that we
should be kept in mind of madness, which is occasioned by too much
indulgence of imagination. I think a very moral use may be made of these
new buildings: I would have