��Anecdotes.
��either power or wealth (continued he), every body produces some hindrance to his advancement, some sage remark, or some un favourable prediction ; but let him once say slightly, I have had enough of this troublesome bustling world, 'tis time to leave it now : Ah, dear Sir ! cries the first old acquaintance he meets, I am glad to find you in this happy disposition : yes, dear friend ! do retire and think of nothing but your own ease : there's Mr. William will find it a pleasure to settle all your accounts and relieve you from the fatigue ; Miss Dolly makes the charmingest chicken broth in the world, and the cheesecakes we eat of her's once, how good they were : I will be coming every two or three days myself to chat with you in a quiet way; so snug ! and tell you how matters go upon 'Change, or in the House, or according to the blockhead's first pursuits, whether lucrative or politic, which thus he leaves ; and lays himself down a voluntary prey to his own sensuality and sloth, while the ambition and avarice of the nephews and nieces, with their rascally adherents, and co adjutors, reap the advantage, while they fatten their fool V
As the votaries of retirement had little of Mr. Johnson's ap plause, unless that he knew that the motives were merely devo tional, and unless he was convinced that their rituals were accompanied by a mortified state of the body, the sole proof of their sincerity which he would admit, as a compensation for such fatigue as a worldly life of care and activity requires 2 ; so of the various states and conditions of humanity, he despised none more I think than the man who marries for a maintenance : and of a friend who made his alliance on no higher principles, he said once, ' Now has that fellow (it was a nobleman of whom we were speaking) at length obtained a certainty of three meals a day, and for that certainty, like his brother dog in the fable, he will get his neck galled for life with a collar 3 .'
��1 ' Every man has those about him who wish to soothe him into inactivity and delitescence, nor is there any semblance of kindness more vigor ously to be repelled than that which voluntarily offers a vicarious per formance of the tasks of life, and
��conspires with the natural love of ease against diligence and perseve rance.' Letters, i. 401. See Life, ii. 337 ; iii. 176, n. i.
2 Ib. v. 62 ; ante, p. 209.
3 This nobleman was Lord Sandys. Hay ward's Piozzi, i. 296. ' He mar- That
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