Dr. Johnson and his Contemporaries

Te Aroha News, Volume V, 3 December 1887, Page 3

Dr. Johnson and his Contemporaries

Dr. Johnson had given up wine, but, as Macaulay remarks, his thirst for tea was inextinguishable. He avowed himself, in his answer to Hanway's attack upon that bevera"^ "as a hardened and shameless teach inker, who has for twenty years diluted hi* nio'ila with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whoso kettle has scarcely time to cool.' 1 Dr. Hill suggests with great plausibility that his habits of invotoiato tea-chinking account for the sleeplessness of which he perpetually complained. Had lie been as temperate in tea as in fermented liquors, refreshing nights might have relieved the most troublesome ot his maladies, and he might havo risen at reasonable hours to regular work, which would have occupied the mind that was always preying upon itself. Until the Government granted his pension he was continually in pecuniary trouble. K\en in 1859 he had found it necessary to retrench. He gave up th House in Gough-square ; he sent his old pensioner, Mrs Williams, into lodgings, and: removod to chambers. Thoie, according to Murphy, "he lived in poverty total idleness, and the pude ot literature; for unquestionably the man Smollett called the " Cham of Literature "was the ! laziest of authors, and could only plead miserable health and a morbid temperament for the systematic neglect of hw magnificent powers. Murphy quotes documents to show that in a single year he had twice borrowed considerable sums ol Newberry, the bookseller. At thaj JUB«. Goldsmith was still more miserably lodged in a dingy court off Fleet-street. Dr. Percy found him writing his " Inquiry into Polite Learning" "in a wretched, dirty room, in which there was bub a single chair. Johnson was by no means blind to his own failings, but he was extraordinarily clearsighted when they were the failings of his neighbours.