ar,
and he pretended to allow himself a hundred. He had numberless
dependents out of doors as well as in, who, as he expressed it, "did not
like to see him latterly unless he brought 'em money." For those people
he used frequently to raise contributions on his richer friends; "and
this," says he, "is one of the thousand reasons which ought to restrain a
man from drony solitude and useless retirement. Solitude," added he one
day, "is dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue:
pleasures of some sort are necessary to the intellectual as to the
corporeal health; and those who resist gaiety will be likely for the most
part to fall a sacrifice to appetite; for the solicitations of sense are
always at hand, and a dram to a vacant and solitary person is a speedy
and seducing relief. Remember," concluded he, "that the solitary mortal
is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad: the
mind stagnates for want of employment, grows morbid, and is extinguished
like a candle in foul air." It was on this principle that Johnson
encouraged parents to carry their daughters early and much into company:
"for what harm can be done before so many witnesses? Solitude is the
surest nurse of all prurient passions, and a girl in the hurry of
preparation, or tumult of gaiety, has neither inclination nor leisure to
let tender expressions soften or sink into her heart. The ball, the
show, are not the dangerous places: no, it is the private friend, the
kind consoler, the companion of the easy, vacant hour, whose compliance
with her opinions can flatter her vanity, and whose conversation can just
soothe, without ever stretching her mind, that is the lover to be feared.
He who buzzes in her ear at court or at the opera must be contented to
buzz in vain." These notions Dr. Johnson carried so very far, that I
have heard him say, "If you shut up any man with any woman, so as to make
them derive their whole pleasure from each other, they would inevitably
fall in love, as it is called, with each other; but at six months' end,
if you would throw them both into public life, where they might change
partners at pleasure, each would soon forget that fondness which mutual
dependence and the paucity of general amusement alone had caused, and
each would separately feel delighted by their release."

In these opinions Rousseau apparently concurs with him exactly; and Mr.
Whitehead's poem, called "Variety," is written solely to