n her journal as "so facetious that he
challenged Mr. Thrale to get drunk"; and the next year, when he was
seventy, she writes that he "has more fun and comical humour and love
of nonsense about him than almost anybody I ever saw." Even in 1783,
after he had had the stroke which was the beginning of the end, she
speaks of his "gaiety." The explanation is no doubt partly that Miss
Burney was a woman and saw him chiefly with women, Boswell a man who
saw him chiefly with men. Even without her genius she would not be the
first young woman whose admiring affection has seemed to an old man to
give him back his youth. And she had not only her own sudden and
surprising celebrity but all that happy ease of the Streatham life, and
the cleverness and good humour of Mrs. Thrale, to help her. No wonder
Johnson was at his brightest in such circumstances.

But his easy sociability there was no sudden revolution in his nature.
Sir John Hawkins, who, though never a very congenial companion, had
known him longer than almost any of his friends, says of him that he
was "a great contributor to the mirth of conversation." And constant
glimpses of his lighter side are caught all through Boswell, such as
that picture of him at Corrichatachin, in Skye, {132} sitting with a
young Highland lady on his knee and kissing her. We have already heard
his peals of midnight laughter ringing through the silent Strand. The
truth is that both by nature and by principle he was a very sociable
man. That is another of the elements in his permanent popularity. The
man who liked all sorts and conditions of men when he was alive has one
of the surest passports to the friendliness of posterity. Johnson,
like Walter Scott, could and did talk to everybody, or, rather, join in
any talk that anybody started; for he seldom spoke first even among his
friends. It was probably to this ease of intercourse that he owed the
stores of information with which he often surprised his hearers on all
sorts of unlikely subjects, such as on one occasion that of the various
purposes to which bones picked up in the streets by the London poor are
put, and the use of a particular paste in melting iron. But in these
casual conversations he was not consciously seeking information as
Scott partly was; he was just giving play to his natural sociability,
or perhaps deliberately acting on the principle of _humani nihil_,
which no one ever held more strongly than he.

He always co