tance from the stage, he was wrapped up in grave abstraction, and seemed quite a cloud amidst all the sunshine of glitter and gayety. I wondered at his patience in sitting out a play of five acts and a farce of two.-Boswell.

Being urged by a lady to go to see Mrs. Siddons, he said, "Well, madam, if you desire it, I will go. See her I shall not, nor hear her; but I'll go, and that will do."-Madame D'Arblay.

In the year 1766 Mr. Johnson's health grew so bad that he could not stir out of his room, in the court he inhabited, for many weeks together-I think, months. Mr. Thrale's attentions and my own now became so acceptable to him that he often lamented to us the horrible condition of his mind, which, he said, was nearly distracted.-Mrs. Piozzi.

Young Johnson had the misfortune to be much afflicted with the scrofula, or king's evil, which disfigured a countenance naturally well-formed, and hurt his visual nerves so much that he did not see at all with one of his eyes, though its appearance was little different from that of the other. There is among his prayers one inscribed, "When my EYE was restored to its use," which ascertains a defect that many of his friends knew he had, though I never perceived it.Boswell.

Dr. Johnson loved late hours extremely, or, more properly, hated early ones. Nothing was more terrifying to him than the idea of retiring to bed, which he never would call going to rest, or suffer another to call so. "I lie down," said he, "that my acquaintance may sleep; but I lie down to endure oppressive misery, and soon rise again to pass the night in anxiety and pain."-Mrs. Piozzi.

In his seventy-third year, Johnson wrote to his friend, Mr.

Hector, "My health has been, from my twentieth year, such as has seldom afforded me a single day of ease; but it is at least not worse, and I sometimes make myself believe that it is better. My disorders are, however, still sufficiently oppressive." It seems probable that he inherited a tendency to insanity from his father. All through his life he was subject to that nervous affection which Boswell considered a kind of St. Vitus's dance; and at different periods he was afflicted by asthma, gout, dropsy, and paralysis.-Editor.

MELANCHOLY.

THE "morbid melancholy," which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which at a very early period marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year as to afflict him in a dreadful manner. While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with a horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterward was perfectly relieved; and all his labors and all his enjoyments were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence. How wonderful, how unsearchable are the ways of God! Johnson, who was blest with all the powers of genius and understanding, in a degree far above the ordinary state of human nature, was at the same time visited with a disorder so afflictive, that they who know it by dire experience will not envy his exalted endowments. That it was, in some degree, occasioned by a defect in his nervous system, that inexplicable part of our frame, appears. highly probable. He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and inefficient that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town clock.-Boswell.

In 1764 he was afflicted with a very severe return of the hypochondriac disorder, which was ever lurking about him. He was so ill, as, notwithstanding his remarkable love of company, to be entirely averse to society-the most fatal symptom of that malady. Dr. Adams told me that, as an old friend, he was admitted to visit him, and that he found him in a deplorable state-sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room. He then used this emphatical expression of the misery which he felt: "I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits."-Boswell.

He asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope. Being pressed upon this subject, and asked if he really was of opinion that, though in general happiness was very rare in human life, a man was not sometimes happy in the moment that was present, he answered, "Never, but when he is drunk."-Boswell.

I talked to him of misery being the "doom of man," in this life, as displayed in his "Vanity of Human Wishes." Yet I observed that things were done upon the supposition of happiness: grand houses were built, fine gardens were made, splendid places of public amusement were contrived, and crowded with company. Johnson: "Alas, sir, these are all only struggles for happiness. When I first entered Ranelagh, it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind, such as I never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he viewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterward, so it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and think; but that the thoughts of

each individual there would be distressing when alone."Boswell.

In 1777, it appears, from his "Prayers and Meditations," that Johnson suffered much from a state of mind "unsettled and perplexed," and from that constitutional gloom which, together with his extreme humility and anxiety with regard to his religious state, made him contemplate himself through too dark and unfavorable a medium. It may be said of him that he "saw GOD in clouds." Certain we may be of his injustice to himself in the following lamentable paragraph, which it is painful to think came from the contrite heart of this great man, to whose labors the world is so much indebted: "When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of body and disturbances of mind very near to madness, which I hope He that made me will suffer to extenuate many faults, and excuse many deficiencies."-Boswell.

To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason, the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal apprehension; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigor of judgment.-Boswell.

It was observed to Dr. Johnson, that it seemed strange that he who has so often delighted his company by his lively and brilliant conversation should say he was miserable. Johnson: "Alas! it is all outside; I may be cracking my joke, and cursing the sun: Sun, how I hate thy beams!" -Boswell.

An axiom of his was that the pains and miseries incident to human life far outweighed its happiness and good. But

much may be said in Dr. Johnson's justification, supposing this notion should not meet with universal approbation, he having, it is probable, imbibed it in the early part of his life, when under the pressure of adverse fortune, and in every period of it under the still heavier pressure and more adverse influence of nature herself; for I have often heard him lament that he inherited from his father a morbid disposition both of body and of mind—an oppressive melancholy, which robbed him of the common enjoyments of life.—Miss Reynolds.

His "Prayers and Meditations" are full of indications of the deepest melancholy. He writes, "I have made no reformation; I have lived totally useless." Again, "A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year, and perceive that incidents and intelligence pass over me without leaving any impression." A lady once said to him that she could not understand why men got drunk; she wondered how a man could find pleasure in making a beast of himself; and Johnson said, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Boswell says, in his account of their tour together in the Hebrides, "Before breakfast, Dr. Johnson came up to my room, to forbid me to mention that this was his birthday; but I told him I had done it already; at which he was displeased." And in a letter to Mrs. Thrale Johnson writes as follows: "Boswell, with some of his troublesome kindness, has informed this family and reminded me that the eighteenth of September is my birthday. The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon threescoreand-four years, in which little has been done and little has been enjoyed; a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of poverty, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent or importunate distress. But perhaps