JOHNSON. 43 



minute inquiries, no kind of discrimination is observable 

 as having directed his curiosity, and very meagre general 

 information shines through the page. His ignorance of 

 things very generally known, is sufficiently remarkable. 

 Thus he seems never before to have been aware that 

 monks are not necessarily in orders ; but he might also 

 have known that though originally they were laymen, 

 yet for many centuries they have been, as indeed their 

 name implies, (regular clergy,) always in orders. He 

 notes with surprise, apparently, that an iron ball swims 

 in quicksilver. He mentions the French cookery at the 

 best tables as unbearably bad, and accounts for their 

 meat being so much dressed, that its bad quality (the 

 best, he says, only fit to be sent to a gaol in England,) 

 would make it uneatable if cooked plain. 



The life which he continued to lead during these latter 

 years was on the whole far more agreeable as well as easy 

 than he had ever before enjoyed : for beside the entire 

 freedom from all care for his subsistence, and the power 

 which he thus had of indulging in the love of much, but 

 desultory and discontinuous, reading, as well as in the 

 society which looked up to him and humoured his some- 

 what capricious habits, his melancholy was considerably 

 abated, and could be better kept under control. The 

 family of the Thrales served to give him the quiet and 

 soothing pleasures of a home without any of the anxieties 

 of the domestic state, and with as much authority and 

 more liberty than he could have enjoyed within his own 

 household. His other friends, with whom also much of 

 his time was passed according to the more convivial 

 habits of that day, were among the most distinguished of 

 the age for their talents and their accomplishments. Be- 



