2];' and with those lighter
strokes of Dr. Johnson's satire, proceeding from a warmth and quickness
of imagination, not from any malevolence of heart, and which, on account
of their excellence, could not be omitted, I trust that they who are the
subject of them have good sense and good temper enough not to be
displeased.

I have only to add, that I shall ever reflect with great pleasure on a
Tour, which has been the means of preserving so much of the enlightened
and instructive conversation of one whose virtues will, I hope, ever be
an object of imitation, and whose powers of mind were so extraordinary,
that ages may revolve before such a man shall again appear.

APPENDIX.

No. I.

_In justice to the ingenious_ DR. BLACKLOCK, _I publish the following
letter from him, relative to a passage in p. 47._

'TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ.

'DEAR SIR,

'Having lately had the pleasure of reading your account of the journey
which you took with Dr. Samuel Johnson to the Western Isles, I take the
liberty of transmitting my ideas of the conversation which happened
between the doctor and myself concerning Lexicography and Poetry, which,
as it is a little different from the delineation exhibited in the former
edition of your _Journal_, cannot, I hope, be unacceptable; particularly
since I have been informed that a second edition of that work is now in
contemplation, if not in execution: and I am still more strongly tempted
to encourage that hope, from considering that, if every one concerned in
the conversations related, were to send you what they can recollect of
these colloquial entertainments, many curious and interesting
particulars might be recovered, which the most assiduous attention could
not observe, nor the most tenacious memory retain. A little reflection,
Sir, will convince you, that there is not an axiom in Euclid more
intuitive nor more evident than the doctor's assertion that poetry was
of much easier execution than lexicography. Any mind therefore endowed
with common sense, must have been extremely absent from itself, if it
discovered the least astonishment from hearing that a poem might be
written with much more facility than the same quantity of a dictionary.

'The real cause of my surprise was what appeared to me much more
paradoxical, that he could write a sheet of dictionary _with as much
pleasure_ as a sheet of poetry. He acknowledged, indeed, that the latter
was much easier than the former. For in the on