loped the
most delightful biography in all literature. Boswell's taste for
literary adventures, and Johnson's literary vagrancy met in a
companionship that found much satisfaction in the bohemianism of the
inns and coffee houses of old London. Boswell thus describes the
eccentric doctor's outlook on this mode of living:

We dined today at an excellent inn at Chapel-House, where Mr.
Johnson commented on English coffee houses and inns remarking that
the English triumphed over the French in one respect, in that the
French had no perfection of tavern life. There is no private house,
(said he) in which people can enjoy themselves so well, as at a
capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things,
ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so much desire
that everybody should be easy; in the nature of things it cannot
be: there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The
master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests; the guests
are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man, but a very impudent
dog indeed, can as freely command what is in another man's house,
as if it were his own. Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general
freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome: and the more
noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you
call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with
the alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect of
an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, Sir, there is
nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much
happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn. He then repeated,
with great emotion, Shenstone's lines:

"Whoe'er has travell'd life's dull round,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
His warmest welcome at an inn."

Patient delving into Johnsoniana is rewarded with many anecdotes about
the mad doctor philosopher and his faithful reporter who delighted in
translating his genius to the world.

Boswell was a wine-bibber, but Johnson confessed to being "a hardened
and shameless tea drinker." When Boswell twigged him for abstaining from
the stronger drink, the doctor replied: "Sir, I have no objection to a
man's drinking wine if he can do it in moderation. I find myself apt to
go to excess in it and therefore, after having been for s