as the most
nicely balanced period of _The Rambler_. But in his talk there were no
pompous triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in
_osity_ and _ation_. All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He uttered
his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice, and a
justness and energy of emphasis, of which the effect was rather
increased than diminished by the rollings of his huge form, and by the
asthmatic gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence
generally ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit
down to his desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment
orally. To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in
language so exact and so forcible that it might have been printed
without the alteration of a word, was to him no exertion, but a
pleasure. He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk
out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on
anybody who would start a subject, on a fellow-passenger in a
stage-coach, or on the person who sat at the same table with him in an
eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant and
striking as when he was surrounded by a few friends, whose abilities
and knowledge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to send him back
every ball that he threw.

On Easter eve, 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting which
consisted of forty of the first booksellers in London, called upon
Johnson. Though he had some scruples about doing business at that
season, he received his visitors with much civility. They came to
inform him that a new edition of the English poets, from Cowley
downward, was in contemplation, and to ask him to furnish short
biographical prefaces. He readily undertook the task, a task for which
he was pre-eminently qualified. His knowledge of the literary history
of England since the Restoration was unrivalled. That knowledge he had
derived partly from books, and partly from sources which had long been
closed; from old Grub-Street traditions; from the talk of forgotten
poetasters and pamphleteers who had long been lying in parish vaults;
from the recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who had
conversed with the wits of Button; Cibber, who had mutilated the plays
of two generations of dramatists; Orrery, who had been admitted to the
society of Swift; and Savage, who had rendered services of no very
honorable kind to Pope. The biographer, therefore,