f the executors of the will, who, when he found that this negro
servant would receive about fifteen hundred pounds, including an
annuity of seventy pounds a year, grumbled and muttered "a caveat
against ostentatious bounty and favor to negroes." But however much
the Sir Johns may grumble, we cannot think the less of Johnson for his
kindness in remembering a faithful and deserving servant.

Johnson's refusal to take either wine or opiates recalls that in an
age in which the use of alcoholic drinks was very common he was an
uncompromising foe to wine, and that he was, in his latter years, loud
in his praise of water. "As we drove back to Ashbourne," says Boswell,
"Dr. Johnson recommended to me, as he had often done, to drink water
only. 'For,' said he, 'you are then sure not to get drunk; whereas if
you drink wine, you are never sure.'" And this was not the only matter
in which he was in advance of his contemporaries, and of most of ours
too. Johnson liked satisfying food, such as a leg of pork, or veal pie
well stuffed, with plum pie and sugar, and he devoured enormous
quantities of fruit, especially peaches. His inordinate love of tea
has almost passed into a proverb,--he has actually been credited with
twenty-five cups at a sitting, and he would keep Mrs. Thrale brewing
it for him till four o'clock in the morning. The following impromptu,
spoken to Miss Reynolds, points its own moral:

For hear, alas, the dreadful truth,
Nor hear it with a frown:
Thou can'st not make the tea so fast
As I can gulp it down.

VIII

GRAY WRITES THE ELEGY

Recently I was conversing with a practical man of affairs who had just
returned from his first visit to Europe. Art galleries had proved
tiresome and Westminster Abbey had bored him. But there was one place
that he had determined to see and see it he did.

"What place was that?" I asked.

"Stoke Pogis," was the reply.

Is not this answer indicative of the attitude of thousands who can
never forget the exquisite charm cast over their youth by the
melancholy beauty of the _Elegy in a Country Church-yard_? If fame was
the end of General Wolfe's ambition, he was wise in saying that he
would rather have written the _Elegy_ than be able to take Quebec on
the morrow; for of all English poems the _Elegy_ is the most popular
and widely known; it is the flower of the "literature of melancholy."
The _Elegy_ is the glorification of the obscure; therein lies its