It seems strange that Johnson’s influence over his minion’s habits was so slight. At any rate the following anecdote points to this conclusion:-- Lord Eldon tells us, in his ‘Anecdote Book,’ that at an assize in Lancaster about the year 1782, Jemmy Boswell, the biographer of Dr. Johnson, was found dead drunk and stretched upon the pavement. His merry colleagues, of whom the sage Lord Eldon was one, subscribed among them a guinea at supper, which they sent next morning to Boswell, with instructions to move in Court for the writ of ‘Quare adhæsit pavimento.’ In vain did the perplexed and bibulous barrister apply to all the attorneys of his acquaintance for information as to the nature of the writ for which he was instructed to move, and great was the astonishment of the Judge when the application was made to him. At last one of the Bar, amidst the laughter of the Court, exclaimed, ‘My Lord, Mr. Boswell adhæsit pavimento last night. There was no moving him for some time. At length he was carried to bed, and has been dreaming of what happened to himself.’ It is unfortunate that Johnson should have been guilty of the _lapsus linguæ_ for which Bacchanalians have often claimed him as their hero, and by which careful historians have been misled. Mr. Mallet, speaking of the Icelanders of the middle ages, tells that ‘after they had finished eating their boiled horseflesh, they generally sat swilling their ale out of capacious drinking-horns and listening to the lay of a skald, or the tale of a Saga-man, until they were most of them in that happy state of mind, when, according to Johnson, man is alone capable of enjoying the passing moment of his fleeting existence.’ He refers doubtless to a saying of the _savant_ recorded by his biographer. Johnson being asked whether a man was not sometimes happy in the moment that was present, answered, ‘Never but when he is drunk.’ Most Johnsonians would readily admit that this was a _lapsus_, a sally of the moment, not his deliberate judgment, such as is obtainable from a set work like his incomparable _Rasselas_. There we read:--‘Intemperance, though it may fire the spirits for an hour, will make life short or miserable.’ Oliver Goldsmith, in _The Bee_, has some pungent observations upon _ale-houses_:--