‘A bountiful disposition’

Abstract

His eyesight was not good; but he never wore spectacles; not on account of such a ridiculous vow as Swift made not to use them, but because he was assured they would be of no service to him. He once declared, that he ‘never saw the human face divine’. He saw better with one eye than the other, which however was not like that of Camoens, the Portuguese poet, as expressed on his medal. He chose to say to an observer and inquirer after the apparent blemish of his left eye, that ‘he had not seen out of that little scoundrel for a great many years’. ‘It is inconceivable,’ he used to observe, ‘how little light or sight are necessary for the purpose of reading.’ Latterly, perhaps, he meant to save his eyes, and did not read so much as he otherwise would. He preferred conversation to books; but when driven to the refuge of reading, by being left alone, he then attached himself to that amusement. ‘Till this year,’ said he to an intimate, ‘I have done tolerably well without sleep, for I have been able to read like Hercules.’ But he picked and culled his companions for his midnight hours, ‘and chose his author as he chose his friend’. The mind is as fastidious about its intellectual meal as the appetite is as to its culinary one; and it is observable that the dish or the book that palls at one time is a banquet at another.

‘A Biographical Sketch of Dr Samuel Johnson’, Gentleman’s Magazine (1784); revised and republished as a pamphlet in 1785; reprinted in Brack and Kelley, Early Biographies, pp. 66–7, 81–2.