We
were much wet. I changed my clothes in part, and was at pains to get
myself well dried. Dr. Johnson resolutely kept on all his clothes, wet
as they were, letting them steam before the smoky turf fire. I thought
him in the wrong; but his firmness was, perhaps, a species of heroism.
I remember but little of our conversation. I mentioned Shenstone's
saying of Pope, that he had the art of condensing sense more than any
body[922]. Dr. Johnson said, 'It is not true, Sir. There is more sense
in a line of Cowley than in a page (or a sentence, or ten lines,--I am
not quite certain of the very phrase) of Pope.' He maintained that
Archibald, Duke of Argyle[923], was a narrow man. I wondered at this;
and observed, that his building so great a house at Inverary was not
like a narrow man. 'Sir, (said he,) when a narrow man has resolved to
build a house, he builds it like another man. But Archibald, Duke of
Argyle, was narrow in his ordinary expences, in his quotidian
expences.'
The distinction is very just. It is in the ordinary expences of life
that a man's liberality or narrowness is to be discovered. I never heard
the word _quotidian_ in this sense, and I imagined it to be a word of
Dr. Johnson's own fabrication; but I have since found it in _Young's
Night Thoughts_, (Night fifth,)
'Death's a destroyer of quotidian prey,'
and in my friend's _Dictionary_, supported by the authorities of Charles
I.
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