l said. These things are often of the
lighter sort, but Hawthorne's charming diction lingers in the
memory--almost in the ear. I have always remembered a certain
admirable characterisation of Doctor Johnson, in the account of the
writer's visit to Lichfield--and I will preface it by a paragraph
almost as good, commemorating the charms of the hotel in that
interesting town.

"At any rate I had the great, dull, dingy, and dreary
coffee-room, with its heavy old mahogany chairs and tables,
all to myself, and not a soul to exchange a word with except
the waiter, who, like most of his class in England, had
evidently left his conversational abilities uncultivated. No
former practice of solitary living, nor habits of reticence,
nor well-tested self-dependence for occupation of mind and
amusement, can quite avail, as I now proved, to dissipate
the ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under such
circumstances as these, with no book at hand save the county
directory, nor any newspaper but a torn local journal of
five days ago. So I buried myself, betimes, in a huge heap
of ancient feathers (there is no other kind of bed in these
old inns), let my head sink into an unsubstantial pillow,
and slept a stifled sleep, compounded of the night-troubles
of all my predecessors in that same unrestful couch. And
when I awoke, the odour of a bygone century was in my
nostrils--a faint, elusive smell, of which I never had any
conception before crossing the Atlantic."

The whole chapter entitled "Lichfield and Uttoxeter" is a sort of
graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson, who certainly has nowhere else
been more tenderly spoken of.

"Beyond all question I might have had a wiser friend than
he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was dense; his
awful dread of death showed how much muddy imperfection was
to be cleansed out of him, before he could be capable of
spiritual existence; he meddled only with the surface of
life, and never cared to penetrate further than to
ploughshare depth; his very sense and sagacity were but a
one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laughed at him, sometimes
standing beside his knee. And yet, considering that my
native propensities were toward Fairy Land, and also how
much yeast is generally mixed up with the mental sustenance
of a New Englander, it may not have