ll they stare their eyes out. But consider how
easy it is to make people stare by being absurd. I may do it by going
into a drawing-room without my shoes. You remember the gentleman in The
Spectator, who had a commission of lunacy taken out against him for his
extreme singularity, such as never wearing a wig, but a night-cap.
Now, Sir, abstractedly, the night-cap was best; but, relatively, the
advantage was overbalanced by his making the boys run after him.'

Talking of a London life, he said, 'The happiness of London is not to be
conceived but by those who have been in it. I will venture to say, there
is more learning and science within the circumference of ten miles from
where we now sit, than in all the rest of the kingdom.' BOSWELL. 'The
only disadvantage is the great distance at which people live from one
another.' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir; but that is occasioned by the largeness of
it, which is the cause of all the other advantages.' BOSWELL. 'Sometimes
I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desart.' JOHNSON.
'Sir, you have desart enough in Scotland.'

Although I had promised myself a great deal of instructive conversation
with him on the conduct of the married state, of which I had then a near
prospect, he did not say much upon that topick. Mr. Seward heard him
once say, that 'a man has a very bad chance for happiness in that
state, unless he marries a woman of very strong and fixed principles of
religion.' He maintained to me, contrary to the common notion, that a
woman would not be the worse wife for being learned; in which, from all
that I have observed of Artemisias, I humbly differed from him.

When I censured a gentleman of my acquaintance for marrying a second
time, as it shewed a disregard of his first wife, he said, 'Not at all,
Sir. On the contrary, were he not to marry again, it might be concluded
that his first wife had given him a disgust to marriage; but by taking a
second wife he pays the highest compliment to the first, by shewing that
she made him so happy as a married man, that he wishes to be so a second
time.' So ingenious a turn did he give to this delicate question. And
yet, on another occasion, he owned that he once had almost asked a
promise of Mrs. Johnson that she would not marry again, but had checked
himself. Indeed, I cannot help thinking, that in his case the request
would have been unreasonable; for if Mrs. Johnson forgot, or thought it
no injury to the memory of her first l