260 Anecdotes.
��Oft in danger, yet alive,
We are come to thirty-five;
Long may better years arrive,
Better years than thirty-five.
Could philosophers contrive
Life to stop at thirty-five,
Time his hours should never drive
O'er the bounds of thirty-five.
High to soar, and deep to dive,
Nature gives at thirty-five.
Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at thirty-five:
For howe'er we boast and strive,
Life declines from thirty-five I :
He that ever hopes to thrive
Must begin by thirty-five ; And all who wisely wish to wive Must look on Thrale at thirty-five.
6 And now (said he, as I was writing them down), you may see what it is to come for poetry to a Dictionary-maker ; you may
observe that the rhymes run in alphabetical order exactly.'
And so they do.
Mr. Johnson did indeed possess an almost Tuscan power of improvisation 2 : when he called to my daughter, who was con sulting with a friend about a new gown and dressed 3 hat she thought of wearing to an assembly, thus suddenly, while she hoped he was not listening to their conversation,
Wear the gown, and wear the hat, Snatch thy pleasures while they last;
Hadst thou nine lives like a cat, Soon those nine lives would be past.
1 Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale on fifth year in men of perfect consti-
August 14, 1780: 'If you try to tution."'
plague me I shall tell you that, ac- 2 This word is not in Johnson's
cording to Galen, life begins to Dictionary.
decline from thirty-five? Letters^ 3 'Your father intends you six
ii. 192. Dr. John Carlyle, in a note suits (three of them dressed suits) at
on the first line of Dante's Inferno, his own expense.' Clarissa, ed. 1810,
says : ' Dante speaks of our life i. 35- * conjecture that ' dress
as an arch, which we ascend and clothes ' was originally ' dressed
descend ; and in which the highest, clothes.' or middle point, "is at the thirty-
It
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