vantages and disadvantages of smoking.
"Smoking has gone out. To be sure it is a shocking thing, blowing
smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses,
and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing
which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total
vacuity has gone out." Or if we demand a keener relish for our meal
than these {46} quiet joys of observation, there is of course the whole
store of Johnson's sallies of wit, the things we all quote and forget
and like to have recalled to us.

For all these reasons Boswell's book, stuffed full of matter, and such
matter as you can take up and lay down at pleasure, is the ideal
companion for the man who dines or sups alone. Provided, of course,
that he has some tincture of intellectual tastes. Those whose
curiosity is only awakened by a prospect of the "sporting tips" will
not care for Boswell. For, though the book moves throughout in the big
world, and not in an academic groove, it still always moves
intellectually. It asks a certain acquaintance with literature and
history and the life of the human mind. The talk may, indeed, be
almost said to deal with all subjects; but it tends mainly to be of the
kind which will come uppermost when able men of a serious and bookish
turn congregate together. It requires leisure, and that sense of the
value of talk which has grown rarer in the hurry of a generation in
which the idlest people affect to be busy, and those who do nothing at
all are in a bustle from morning till night. Johnson was never in a
hurry, especially in the later days, when he had done his work and was
enjoying his fame. Mrs. Thrale says that conversation was all he {47}
required to make him happy. He hated people who broke it up to go to
bed or to keep an appointment. Much as he delighted in John Wesley's
company, he complained that he was never at leisure, which, said
Johnson, "is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and
have out his talk as I do." The world has perhaps grown a more
industrious place since those days, though nobody yet has managed to
put so much into twenty-four hours as Wesley did. Anyhow the
conditions that made for such talk as fills Boswell's pages are no
doubt less common to-day: and perhaps it only lingers now in some rare
Common Room at Oxford or Cambridge, where the evil spirit of classes
and examinations has been strictly exorcised, or in an e