gums.
Though us'd from morn to night on fruit to stuff,
He vow'd his belly never had enough."

Mr. Thackeray relates in his "Irish Sketches" that on his asking for
currant jelly for his venison at a public dinner, the waiter replied,
"It's all gone, your honour, but there's some capital lobster sauce
left." This would have suited Johnson equally well, or better: he was
so fond of lobster sauce that he would call for the sauce-boat and
pour the whole of its remaining contents over his plum pudding. A
clergyman who once travelled with him relates, "The coach halted as
usual for dinner, which seemed to be a deeply interesting business to
Johnson, who vehemently attacked a dish of stewed carp, using his
fingers only in feeding himself." At the dinner when he passed his
celebrated sentence on the leg of mutton--"That it was as bad as bad
could be: ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-dressed"--the
ladies, his fellow-passengers, observed his loss or equanimity with
wonder.

Two of Mrs. Thrale's marginal notes on Boswell refer to her
illustrious friend's mode of eating. On his reported remark, that "a
dog will take a small bit of meat as readily as a large, when both
are before him," she adds, "which Johnson would never have done."
When Boswell, describing the dinner with Wilkes at Davies', says, "No
man eat more heartily than Johnson, or loved better what was nice and
delicate," she strikes in with--"What was gustful rather: what was
strong that he could taste it, what was tender that he could chew
it."

When Boswell describes him as occupied for a considerable time in
reading the "Memoirs of Fontenelle," leaning and swinging upon the
low gate into the court (at Streatham) without his hat, her note is:
"I wonder how he liked the story of the asparagus,"--an obvious hint
at his selfish habits of indulgence at table.

With all this he affected great nicety of palate, and did not like
being asked to a plain dinner. "It was a good dinner enough," he
would remark, "but it was not a dinner to ask a man to." He was so
displeased with the performances of a nobleman's French cook, that he
exclaimed with vehemence, "I'd throw such a rascal into the river;"
and in reference to one of his Edinburgh hosts he said, "As for
Maclaurin's imitation of a made dish, it was a wretched attempt."

His voice was loud, and his gesticulations, voluntary or involuntary,
singularly uncouth. He had superstitious fancies about crossing
thre