desires to read an account of what
he has seen: so much does description fall short of reality. Description
only excites curiosity: seeing satisfies it. Other people may go and
see the Hebrides.' BOSWELL. 'I should wish to go and see some country
totally different from what I have been used to; such as Turkey, where
religion and every thing else are different.' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; there
are two objects of curiosity,--the Christian world, and the Mahometan
world. All the rest may be considered as barbarous.' BOSWELL. 'Pray,
Sir, is the Turkish Spy a genuine book?' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir. Mrs. Manley,
in her Life, says that her father wrote the first two volumes: and
in another book, Dunton's Life and Errours, we find that the rest was
written by one Sault, at two guineas a sheet, under the direction of Dr.
Midgeley.'

About this time he wrote to Mrs. Lucy Porter, mentioning his bad health,
and that he intended a visit to Lichfield. 'It is, (says he,) with no
great expectation of amendment that I make every year a journey into the
country; but it is pleasant to visit those whose kindness has been often
experienced.'

On April 18, (being Good-Friday,) I found him at breakfast, in his usual
manner upon that day, drinking tea without milk, and eating a cross-bun
to prevent faintness; we went to St. Clement's church, as formerly. When
we came home from church, he placed himself on one of the stone-seats at
his garden-door, and I took the other, and thus in the open air and in
a placid frame of mind, he talked away very easily. JOHNSON. 'Were I a
country gentleman, I should not be very hospitable, I should not have
crowds in my house.' BOSWELL. 'Sir Alexander Dick tells me, that he
remembers having a thousand people in a year to dine at his house:
that is, reckoning each person as one, each time that he dined there.'
JOHNSON. 'That, Sir, is about three a day.' BOSWELL. 'How your statement
lessens the idea.' JOHNSON. 'That, Sir, is the good of counting. It
brings every thing to a certainty, which before floated in the mind
indefinitely.'

BOSWELL. 'I wish to have a good walled garden.' JOHNSON. 'I don't think
it would be worth the expence to you. We compute in England, a park wall
at a thousand pounds a mile; now a garden-wall must cost at least as
much. You intend your trees should grow higher than a deer will leap.
Now let us see; for a hundred pounds you could only have forty-four
square yards, which is very little; for two hu