We then went to Trinity College, where he introduced me to Mr. Thomas
Warton, with whom we passed a part of the evening. We talked of
biography--JOHNSON. 'It is rarely well executed. They only who live with
a man can write his life with any genuine exactness and discrimination;
and few people who have lived with a man know what to remark about him.
The chaplain of a late Bishop, whom I was to assist in writing some
memoirs of his Lordship, could tell me scarcely any thing.'
I said, Mr. Robert Dodsley's life should be written, as he had been so
much connected with the wits of his time, and by his literary merit had
raised himself from the station of a footman. Mr. Warton said, he
had published a little volume under the title of The Muse in Livery.
JOHNSON. 'I doubt whether Dodsley's brother would thank a man who should
write his life: yet Dodsley himself was not unwilling that his original
low condition should be recollected. When Lord Lyttelton's Dialogues of
the Dead came out, one of which is between Apicius, an ancient epicure,
and Dartineuf, a modern epicure, Dodsley said to me, "I knew Dartineuf
well, for I was once his footman.
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