elly very studiously and very
carefully, for I look upon it that he who does not mind his belly will
hardly mind anything else." Avowing this principle he would innocently
give himself the airs of a scientific epicure. "I, madam," he said to
the terror of a lady with whom he was about to sup, "who live at a
variety of good tables, am a much better judge of cookery than any
person who has a very tolerable cook, but lives much at home, for his
palate is gradually adapted to the taste of his cook, whereas, madam,
in trying by a wider range, I can more exquisitely judge." But his
pretensions to exquisite taste are by no means borne out by independent
witnesses. "He laughs," said Tom Davies, "like a rhinoceros," and he
seems to have eaten like a wolf--savagely, silently, and with
undiscriminating fury. He was not a pleasant object during this
performance. He was totally absorbed in the business of the moment, a
strong perspiration came out, and the veins of his forehead swelled. He
liked coarse satisfying dishes--boiled pork and veal-pie stuffed with
plums and sugar; and in regard to wine, he seems to have accepted the
doctrines of the critic of a certain fluid professing to be port, who
asked, "What more can you want? It is black, and it is thick, and it
makes you drunk." Claret, as Johnson put it, "is the liquor for boys,
and port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy." He
could, however, refrain, though he could not be moderate, and for all
the latter part of his life, from 1766, he was a total abstainer. Nor,
it should be added, does he ever appear to have sought for more than
exhilaration from wine. His earliest intimate friend, Hector, said that
he had never but once seen him drunk.

His appetite for more innocent kinds of food was equally excessive. He
would eat seven or eight peaches before breakfast, and declared that he
had only once in his life had as much wall-fruit as he wished. His
consumption of tea was prodigious, beyond all precedent. Hawkins quotes
Bishop Burnet as having drunk sixteen large cups every morning, a feat
which would entitle him to be reckoned as a rival. "A hardened and
shameless tea-drinker," Johnson called himself, who "with tea amuses the
evenings, with tea solaces the midnights, and with tea welcomes the
mornings." One of his teapots, preserved by a relic-hunter, contained
two quarts, and he professed to have consumed five and twenty cups at a
sitting. Poor Mrs. Thrale