e dust resettled itself as speedily
as possible.

Dr. Johnson could make books better than anybody, but his notions of
dusting them were primitive and erroneous. But the room and the dust
are mere subterfuges. The truth is, there is a disinclination to pay
L4 9s. 3d. for the ten volumes containing the complete Johnsonian
legend. To quarrel with the public is idiotic and most un-Johnsonian.
'Depend upon it, sir,' said the Sage, 'every state of society is as
luxurious as it can be.' We all, a handful of misers excepted, spend
more money than we can afford upon luxuries, but what those luxuries
are to be is largely determined for us by the fashions of our time. If
we do not buy these ten volumes, it is not because we would not like
to have them, but because we want the money they cost for something we
want more. As for dictating to men how they are to spend their money,
it were both a folly and an impertinence.

These ten volumes ended Dr. Hill's labours as an editor of _Johnson's
Life and Personalia_, but did not leave him free. He had set his mind
on an edition of the _Lives of the Poets_. This, to the regret of all
who knew him either personally or as a Johnsonian, he did not live to
see through the press. But it is soon to appear, and will be a
storehouse of anecdote and a miracle of cross-references. A poet who
has been dead a century or two is amazing good company--at least, he
never fails to be so when Johnson tells us as much of his story as he
can remember without undue research, with that irony of his, that vast
composure, that humorous perception of the greatness and the
littleness of human life, that make the brief records of a Spratt, a
Walsh, and a Fenton so divinely entertaining. It is an immense
testimony to the healthiness of the Johnsonian atmosphere that Dr.
Hill, who breathed it almost exclusively for a quarter of a century
and upwards, showed no symptoms either of moral deterioration or
physical exhaustion. His appetite to the end was as keen as ever, nor
was his temper obviously the worse. The task never became a toil, not
even a tease. 'You have but two subjects,' said Johnson to Boswell:
'yourself and myself. I am sick of both.' Johnson hated to be talked
about, or to have it noticed what he ate or what he had on. For a
hundred years now last past he has been more talked about and noticed
than anybody else. But Dr. Hill never grew sick of Dr. Johnson.

The _Johnsonian Miscellanies_[A] open with t