His favourite place of worship was St Clement Danes and in the churchyard to-day we may see his figure facing the street he loved best and still seeming ready to "defend the most minute circumstance connected with the Church of England."
Partly from ill-health, partly by natural disposition, Johnson was incurably lazy.
"I have been trying" he told Boswell "to cure my laziness all my life, and could not do it."
He slept badly and had no inclination to go to bed; indeed he seldom came home till two in the morning. Nor, as we shall see[15], did he mind being roused in the middle of the night, if there was some fun to be had.
"He has more fun" said his friend Miss Burney "and comical humour and love of nonsense about him than almost anybody I ever saw."
His laugh was "a kind of good humoured growl" or, as Tom Davies the bookseller described it, "he laughed like a rhinoceros."
Boswell could not always share this boisterous amusement and was puzzled at his hero being "exceedingly diverted at what seemed to others a very small sport."
One evening they were sitting in the Temple with a lawyer named Chambers who had just been drawing up a will for Johnson's friend, Langton. Johnson's sense of humour was for some reason keenly tickled by this; he twitted Chambers with having made the will himself and ran on in a playful manner, "which certainly was not such as might be expected from the authour of The Rambler."
"Ha, ha, ha!" he bellowed "I hope he has left me a legacy. I'd have his will turned into verse, like a ballad."
In the street, "Johnson could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till we got without the Temple-gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter, that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch."