fame was great and was greatly enjoyed by him. He had in large measure— 'that which should accompany old age, As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends 1.' But the clouds gathered once more. The death of the two inmates who had lived with him for nearly thirty years 'had made his house,' as he sadly said, 'a solitude?' The ranks of his friends began to thin rapidly, as one dropped off after the other; but the greatest gap was made by the loss of Thrale. 'I looked for the last time upon the face that for fifteen years had never been turned upon me but with respect and benignity. So Johnson recorded a few days after he had 'felt the last flutter of his pulse.' For a time he still had his Streatham 'home'-so he delighted to call it; but as months passed on, it was seen that it was in the 'plain, independent' brewer, not in his sprightly wife, that the constancy of friendship had existed. She began to weary of her old friends. Forgetful of her three living children, and of the nine whom she had lost, she was carried away by a violent passion for an Italian music-master; a man, indeed, of an irreproachable character. That house is lost to me for ever,' Johnson tremulously exclaimed, as he one day drove from Streatham with Miss Burney. He made 'a parting use of the library,' reading in it St. Paul's touching farewell 5, and uttering a prayer for the family in the midst of which he had spent so many happy hours. He attended the church for the last time. 'Templo valedixi cum osculo,' he recorded. It was in Streatham that the hours of sickness and suffering that were now coming upon him should have been soothed by a woman's hand. She to whom he had been almost as a father, 'who had loved her with virtuous affection, who had honoured her with sincere esteem, who for a great part of human life had done her 1 Macbeth, Act v. Sc. 3. 2 Boswell's Life of Johnson, iv. 241. 3 Ib. iv. 84. 4 Ib. iv. 158, n. 4. 5 Acts xx. 17 to end. • Boswell's Life of Johnson, iv. 159. what good he could, and had never done her evil',' left him, distressed and broken down by a complication of sufferings, 'to gasp his last in the river fog and coal smoke of Fleetstreet 2, With her musical husband she had hastened to enjoy the bright skies of sunny Italy. Johnson was laid to rest in that spot where he had hoped to find a grave. 'Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis 3, he had once said to Goldsmith, as they surveyed the Poets Corner. There, among the famous dead, we can read the fine Latin epitaph with which the elder of the two men graced the walls of Westminster Abbey and the memory of his friend; and there, as we cast down our eyes we trace on the massy stone beneath our feet the name of Samuel Johnson. THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA. 'The miseries of life would be increased beyond all human power of endurance, if we were to enter the world with the same opinions as we carry from it.' So Johnson wrote in one of the last of his Ramblers, when the sands of life were rapidly running out in the glass that Death held before his wife. A few weeks passed by, and in the sight of God he was recording his purposes as she lay dead before him. He felt, to use his own words, how by the death of a wife 'the continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless till it is driven by external causes into a new channel? Three years passed on, and his great Dictionary was ready for publication, that noble piece of work which had been done 'not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, iv. 229, n. 3. 2 Macaulay's Misc. Writings, ed. 1871, p. 413. 3 Ovid. Ars. Am. iii. 339. 4 Boswell's Life of Johnson, ii. 238. 5 No. 196. • Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 354, n. 2. 7 Ib. iii. 419. He was under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. I have protracted my work,' he continued, 'till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave; and success and miscarriage are empty sounds 1. Four more years went by, years of gloom and poverty. 'His mind, strained and overlaboured by constant exertion, called for an interval of repose and indolence. But indolence was the time of danger; it was then that his spirits, not employed abroad, turned with inward hostility against himself 2.' Repose, however, whether it was a curse or a blessing, was not at this time for him. 'He found that the great fame of his Dictionary had not set him above the necessity of "making provision for the day that was passing over him3." arrested for debt. The man who was 'the chief glory' of his age*, whose life had been laborious and frugal, could not pay five pounds eighteen shillings. It was by the benevolence of Richardson the novelist that he was saved from that 'picture of hell upon earth,' a debtors' prison. His lodgings were mean, and, if we may trust his friend Miss Reynolds, at this time 'he literally dressed like a beggar'.' When Reynolds brought Roubiliac the sculptor to visit him, ‘he took them up into a garret, which he considered as his library: where, besides his books, all covered with dust, there was an old crazy deal table, and a still worse and older elbow chair having only three legs. In this chair Johnson seated himself, after having, with considerable dexterity and evident practice, first drawn it up against the wall, which served to support it on that side on which the leg was deficient". The gloom had not as yet surrounded him on all sides. 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 297. 2 Ib. i. 268, n. 4. 3 Ib. i. 303. ✦‘The chief glory of every people,' he wrote, arises from its authors,' Ib. i. 297, n. 3. 5 So John Wesley three years earlier had described the Marshalsea prison. Ib. i. 303, n. I. Every heart must lean to somebody',' he said, and his still leant to his aged mother, far off though she was in Lichfield. He had one day been 'frighted with a black wafer' on a letter from that town. 'I was afraid,' he wrote, 'it had brought me ill news of my mother, whose death is one of the few calamities on which I think with terror?' She lived nine years longer, to comfort him, not with her presence, for they never met, but with the thought that she was still spared to him, with the hope that they might some day meet, and with her letters. He burned many letters in the last week of his life, and those written by his mother drew from him a flood of tears. One of his friends saw him cast a melancholy look upon their ashes, which he took up and examined to see if a word was still legible 3. It was on January 23, 1759, that the news came to him that 'the life which made his own life pleasant was at an end, and the gates of death were shut upon his prospects".' The first tidings of her illness 'pierced his heart". 'Pray send me your blessing,' he wrote, and forgive all that I have done amiss to you. And whatever you would have done, and what debts you would have paid first, or anything else that you would direct, let Miss [Porter] put it down; I shall endeavour to obey you. I have got twelve guineas to send you, but unhappily am at a loss how to send it to-night.' Six of these twelve guineas Johnson appears to have borrowed. Had he had money he would at once have hastened to her dying bed. On January 20th he wrote to his stepdaughter, ‘I will, if it be possible, come down to you. God grant I may yet [find] my dear mother breathing and sensible. Do not tell her, lest I disappoint her. If I miss to write next post I am on the road". On the other side he wrote to his mother, a letter which she was never to read. Her spirit had perhaps fled before he began to write. 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 515. 3 Ib. iv. 405, n. I. • Ib. n. I. 4 Ib. i. 339, n. 3. 2 Ib. i. 212, n. I. 5. Ib. i. 512. 'DEAR HONOURED MOTHER, Neither your condition nor your character make it fit for me to say much. You have been the best mother, and I believe the best woman in the world. I thank you for your indulgence to me, and beg forgiveness of all that I have done ill, and all that I have omitted to do well. God grant you his Holy Spirit, and receive you to everlasting happiness, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. Lord Jesus receive your spirit. Amen. I am, dear, dear mother, Your dutiful son, SAM. JOHNSON.' With the Three days later he heard of her death. tenderness of conscience which always marked him he wrote: -You will conceive my sorrow for the loss of my mother, of the best mother. If she were to live again surely I should behave better to her. But she is happy, and what is past is nothing to her; and for me, since I cannot repair my faults to her, I hope repentance will efface them.' He continues:'I shall send a bill of twenty pounds in a few days, which I thought to have brought to my mother; but God suffered it not. I have not power or composure to say much more.' These twenty pounds he had earned by his Rasselas. While she was still breathing, while 'her weakness afflicted him beyond what he was willing to communicate to her,' he had to wrestle with poverty, and to call on his swelling heart for a book for which the booksellers would be willing to give him money. He would fain sit down and weep. But there was required of him a song and melody in his heaviness. It is little wonderful that the song was a song of sadness. He had not only to write a story, but what to a man of his nature was no doubt still more painful, to make a bargain about it. He must have some money and have it quickly. On the very day on which he sent his last letter to his mother, he wrote to Mr. Strahan, the printer, as follows :— |