it was to live on fourpence halfpenny a day and scorned the
life of sofa cushions and beef-tea into which well-attended old
gentlemen so easily slip. Once, when Mrs. Thrale asked him how he was,
his reply was "Ready to become a scoundrel, Madam" (his word for a
self-indulgent invalid); "with a little more spoiling you will make me
a complete rascal." But in that she never succeeded. Rather he
carried the war into her camp, and when they were driving together
would never allow her to complain of rain, dust, or any such
inconveniences. "How do other people bear them?" he would ask, and
would treat those who talked of such topics as evidently having nothing
intelligent to say. "A mill that goes without grist is as good a
companion as such creatures," he once broke out. He required no
valeting, or nursing; bathed at Brighton in October when he was nearing
sixty, refused to be carried to land by the boatmen at Iona, as Boswell
and Sir Allan Maclean were, but sprang into the sea and waded ashore;
would not change his clothes when he got wet at Inverary; was a hundred
years before his time in his love of open windows, and rode fifty miles
with fox-hounds, only to declare that hunting was a dull business and
that its popularity merely showed the paucity of human pleasures.
{113} Mrs. Thrale says that no praise ever pleased him more than when
some one said of him on Brighton Downs, "Why, Johnson rides as well as
the most illiterate fellow in England." He was always eager to show
that his legs and arms could do as much as other people's. When he was
past sixty-six he ran a race in the rain at Paris with his friend
Baretti. He insisted on rolling down a hill like a schoolboy when
staying with Langton in Lincolnshire: once at Lichfield when he was
over seventy he slipped away from his friends to find a railing he used
to jump when he was a boy, threw away his coat, hat, and wig, and, as
he reported with pride, leapt over it twice; and on another occasion at
Oxford was bold enough to challenge a Fellow, "eminent for learning and
worth," and "of an ancient and respectable family in Berkshire," to
climb over a wall with him. Apparently, however, the climbing did not
actually take place, for the dignified person very properly refused to
compromise his dignity.

It is evident that this runner of races and climber of walls was very
far from being the sedentary weakling, afraid to enjoy the pleasures of
the body or face its pain