��Anecdotes.
��This facility of writing, and this dilatoriness ever to write, Mr. Johnson always retained, from the days that he lay a-bed and dictated his first publication l to Mr. Hector, who acted as his amanuensis, to the moment he made me copy out those variations in Pope's Homer which are printed in the Poets' Lives 2 : ' And now (said he, when I had finished it for him) I fear not Mr. Nichols 3 of a pin.' The fine Rambler on the subject of Procrastination was hastily composed, as I have heard, in Sir Joshua Reynolds's parlour, while the boy waited to carry it to press 4 : and numberless are the instances of his writing under immediate pressure of importunity or dis tress. He told me that the character of Sober s in the Idler, was by himself intended as his own portrait ; and that he had his own outset into life in his eye when he wrote the eastern story of Gelaleddin 6 . Of the allegorical papers in the Rambler, Labour and Rest 7 was his favourite ; but Serotinus, the man
��says : * I will tell you some time what I think of Anacreon.' An Account of the Life of Dr. Johnson, &c., 1805, p. 109.
1 His translation of Lobo's Abys sinia. Life, i. 86.
2 Works, viii. 256.
3 The printer of the Lives. Life, iv. 36. The Life of Pope was one of the last to be written. Letters, ii. 196, n. 5. In the proof of the Life of Johnson I found 'the following sentence in one of Johnson's letters to Mrs. Thrale, "I have finished Prior ; so a fig for Mr. Nichols." ' Boswell struck it out.
4 The Rambler on Procrastination, No. 134, was published on June 29, 1751. Reynolds left England for Italy in May, 1749, an ^ returned in October, 1752 (Taylor's Reynolds, i. 35, 87), seven months after the last Rambler had appeared.
For Johnson's hasty composition, see Life, i. 203, 331 ; iii. 42. He wrote part of the Lives of the Poets in the parlour at Stow Hill, 'sur rounded by five or six ladies engaged
��in work or conversation.' Letters, ii. 46 n. Miss Boothby wrote to him in 1754 : ' You can write amidst the tattle of women, because your atten tion is so strong to sense that you are deaf to sound.' An Account of the Life of Dr. Johnson, &c., 1805, i. 80.
5 Idler, No. 31. Life, iii. 398, n. 3.
6 Ib. No. 75. Gelaleddin is a Persian student ' amiable in his manners and beautiful in his form, of boundless curiosity, incessant dili gence, and irresistible genius, of quick apprehension and tenacious memory, accurate without narrowness and eager for novelty without inconstancy. ..." I will instruct the modest," he said, " with easy gentleness, and re press the ostentatious by seasonable superciliousness." . . . He was some times admitted to the tables of the viziers, where he exerted his wit and diffused his knowledge; but he ob served that where by endeavour or accident he had remarkably excelled he was seldom invited a second time.'
7 No. 33. It contains a passage
who
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