found Dr. Johnson in a good house
in Johnson's Court, Fleet-street, in which he had accommodated Miss
Williams with an apartment on the ground floor, while Mr. Levet occupied
his post in the garret: his faithful Francis was still attending upon
him. He received me with much kindness. The fragments of our first
conversation, which I have preserved, are these:

I told him that Voltaire, in a conversation with me, had distinguished
Pope and Dryden thus:--'Pope drives a handsome chariot, with a couple of
neat trim nags; Dryden a coach, and six stately horses.' JOHNSON. 'Why,
Sir, the truth is, they both drive coaches and six; but Dryden's horses
are either galloping or stumbling: Pope's go at a steady even trot.' He
said of Goldsmith's Traveller, which had been published in my absence,
'There has not been so fine a poem since Pope's time.'

* 1766.

Talking of education, 'People have now a-days, (said he,) got a strange
opinion that every thing should be taught by lectures. Now, I cannot see
that lectures can do so much good as reading the books from which the
lectures are taken. I know nothing that can be best taught by lectures,
except where experiments are to be shewn. You may teach chymistry by
lectures.--You might teach making of shoes by lectures!'

At night I supped with him at the Mitre tavern, that we might renew our
social intimacy at the original place of meeting. But there was now a
considerable difference in his way of living. Having had an illness,
in which he was advised to leave off wine, he had, from that period,
continued to abstain from it, and drank only water, or lemonade.

I told him that a foreign friend of his, whom I had met with abroad,
was so wretchedly perverted to infidelity, that he treated the hopes of
immortality with brutal levity; and said, 'As man dies like a dog, let
him lie like a dog.' JOHNSON. 'IF he dies like a dog, LET him lie like
a dog.' I added, that this man said to me, 'I hate mankind, for I think
myself one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.' JOHNSON. 'Sir,
he must be very singular in his opinion, if he thinks himself one of the
best of men; for none of his friends think him so.'--He said, 'no honest
man could be a Deist; for no man could be so after a fair examination of
the proofs of Christianity.' I named Hume. JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; Hume owned
to a clergyman in the bishoprick of Durham, that he had never read the
New Testament with attention.' I mentioned H