the Tuesday's
dinner, without any inconvenience. I believe it is best to eat just as
one is hungry: but a man who is in business, or a man who has a family,
must have stated meals. I am a straggler. I may leave this town and go
to Grand Cairo, without being missed here or observed there.' EDWARDS.
'Don't you eat supper, Sir?' JOHNSON. 'No, Sir.' EDWARDS. 'For my part,
now, I consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in
order to get to bed.'

JOHNSON. 'You are a lawyer, Mr. Edwards. Lawyers know life practically.
A bookish man should always have them to converse with. They have what
he wants.' EDWARDS. 'I am grown old: I am sixty-five.' JOHNSON. 'I shall
be sixty-eight next birth-day. Come, Sir, drink water, and put in for a
hundred.'

This interview confirmed my opinion of Johnson's most humane
and benevolent heart. His cordial and placid behaviour to an old
fellow-collegian, a man so different from himself; and his telling him
that he would go down to his farm and visit him, showed a kindness of
disposition very rare at an advanced age. He observed, 'how wonderful it
was that they had both been in London forty years, without having ever
once met, and both walkers in the street too!' Mr. Edwards, when going
away, again recurred to his consciousness of senility, and looking full
in Johnson's face, said to him, 'You'll find in Dr. Young,

"O my coevals! remnants of yourselves."'

Johnson did not relish this at all; but shook his head with impatience.
Edwards walked off, seemingly highly pleased with the honour of having
been thus noticed by Dr. Johnson. When he was gone, I said to Johnson,
I thought him but a weak man. JOHNSON. 'Why, yes, Sir. Here is a man who
has passed through life without experience: yet I would rather have him
with me than a more sensible man who will not talk readily. This man is
always willing to say what he has to say.' Yet Dr. Johnson had himself
by no means that willingness which he praised so much, and I think so
justly; for who has not felt the painful effect of the dreary void, when
there is a total silence in a company, for any length of time; or, which
is as bad, or perhaps worse, when the conversation is with difficulty
kept up by a perpetual effort?

Johnson once observed to me, 'Tom Tyers described me the best: "Sir,
(said he,) you are like a ghost: you never speak till you are spoken
to."'

The gentleman whom he thus familiarly mentioned was Mr. Thomas Tyers,