So, again, with the many little stories he tells which no one else would have told. Who but he would have treasured up every word of that curious meeting in April 1778, between Johnson and his unimportant old friend Edwards, the man who said that he had tried to be a philosopher, but "cheerfulness was always breaking in"? Yet it is not only one of the most Boswellian but one of the very best things in the whole book. It exactly illustrates what was newest in his method. In an age of generality and abstraction he saw the advantage of the concrete and particular, and put into practice the lesson his master could only preach, "Nothing is too little for so little a creature as man." So the total-abstaining Johnson and the bibulous Reynolds and Boswell will each come before us exactly as they were: and we are amused as we picture { 45} the confusion of Reynolds's distinguished parties where the servants had never been taught to wait, and make a note of the progress of social manners as we sympathize with Johnson at Edinburgh throwing the fingered lump of sugar out of the window. Some people, again, like Mr. Gladstone, are fond of observing and discoursing upon the changes of taste in the matter of wine: and such people will find in Boswell almost as much to interest their curiosity as Johnson's own fellowship of tea-drinkers. The drinker of champagne will have to accept the mere modernity of his beverage, which finds no place in Johnson's famous hierarchy: "Claret for boys, port for men, brandy for heroes." Or, once more, if our meal ends in tobacco, we may please ourselves by contemplating the alternate, but never contemporaneous, glories of snuff and tobacco, and note the sage's curious, but strictly truthful, account of the advantages and disadvantages of smoking. "Smoking has gone out. To be sure it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity has gone out." Or if we demand a keener relish for our meal than these { 46} quiet joys of observation, there is of course the whole store of Johnson's sallies of wit, the things we all quote and forget and like to have recalled to us.