The creator of the first English language dictionary, a playwright and poet, literary critic, and subject of the one the great biographies, Samuel Johnson was one of the great conversationalists of the time and a man who was a center of intellectual and artistic life. Among his friends was Oliver Goldsmith, an Anglo-Irish writer living in London, known today (if at all) for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield and his play She Stoops to Conquer. This story appears in The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell.
Someone mentioned Goldsmith, a and Johnson responded:
“It is amazing how little Goldsmith knows. He seldom comes where he is not more ignorant than any one else.”
Sir Joshua Reynolds: “Yet there is no man whose company is more liked.”
Johnson: “To be sure, Sir. When people find a man of the most distinguished abilities as a writer, their inferiour while he is with them, it must be highly gratifying to them. What Goldsmith comically says of himself is very true, — he always gets the better when he argues alone; meaning, that he is master of a subject in his study, and can write well upon it; but when he comes into company, grows confused, and unable to talk. . . .
“Whether, indeed, we take him as a poet, — as a comick writer, — or as an historian, he stands in the first class.”
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