'Exercise cannot secure us from that dissolution to which we are decreed: but while the soul and body continue united, it can make the association pleasing, and give probable hopes that they shall be disjoined by an easy separation. It was a principle among the ancients, that acute diseases are from Heaven, and chronical from ourselves; the dart of death, indeed, falls from Heaven, but we poison it by our own misconduct: to die is the fate of man; but to die with lingering anguish is generally his folly.' [The Rambler, No. 85.] BOSWELL.
[474] The Correspondence may be seen at length in the Gent. Mag. Feb. 1786. BOSWELL. Johnson, advising Dr. Taylor 'to take as much exercise as he can bear,' says:-'I take the true definition of exercise to be labour without weariness.' Notes and Queries, 6th S. v. 461.
[475] Here he met Hannah More. 'You cannot imagine,' she writes (Memoirs, i. 261), 'with what delight he showed me every part of his own college. Dr. Adams had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry. We spent the day and evening at his house. After dinner, Johnson begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one show it me but himself. "This was my room; this Shenstone's." Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who had been of his college, "In short," said he, "we were a nest of singing-birds." When we came into the common-room, we spied a fine large print of Johnson, hung up that very morning, with this motto:--And is not Johnson ours, himself a host? Under which stared you in the face--From Miss More's "Sensibility." This little incident amused us; but, alas! Johnson looks very ill indeed--spiritless and wan. However, he made an effort to be cheerful.' Miss Adams wrote on June 14, 1782:--'On Wednesday we had here a delightful blue-stocking party. Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott and Miss More, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Henderson, &c., dined here. Poor Dr. Johnson is in very bad health, but he exerted himself as much as he could, and being very fond of Miss More, he talked a good deal, and every word he says is worth recording. He took great delight in showing Miss More every part of Pembroke College, and his own rooms, &c., and told us many things about himself when here. .. June 19, 1782. We dined yesterday for the last time in the company with Dr. Johnson; he went away to-day. A warm dispute arose; it was about cider or wine freezing, and all the spirit retreating to the center.' Pemb. Coll. MSS.
[476] 'I never retired to rest without feeling the justness of the Spanish proverb, "Let him who sleeps too much borrow the pillow of a debtor."' Johnson's Works, iv. 14.
[477] See ante, i. 441.
[478] Which I celebrated in the Church of England chapel at Edinburgh, founded by Lord Chief Baron Smith, of respectable and pious memory. BOSWELL.
[479] See ante, p. 80.
[480] The Reverend Mr. Temple, Vicar of St. Gluvias, Cornwall. BOSWELL. See ante, i. 436, and ii. 316.
[481] 'He had settled on his eldest son,' says Dr. Rogers (Boswelliana, p. 129), 'the ancestral estate, with an unencumbered rental of Ll,600 a year.' That the rental, whatever it was, was not unencumbered is shewn by the passage from Johnson's letter, post, p. 155, note 4. Boswell wrote to Malone in 1791 (Croker's Boswell, p. 828):--'The clear money on which I can reckon out of my estate is scarcely L900 a year.'
[482] Cowley's Ode to Liberty, Stanza vi.
[483] 'I do beseech all the succeeding heirs of entail,' wrote Boswell in his will, 'to be kind to the tenants, and not to turn out old possessors to get a little more rent.' Rogers's Boswelliana, p. 186.
[484] Macleod, the Laird of Rasay. See Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 8.
[485] A farm in the Isle of Skye, where Johnson wrote his Latin Ode to Mrs. Thrale. Ib. Sept. 6.
[486] Johnson wrote to Dr. Taylor on Oct. 4:--'Boswel's (sic) father is dead, and Boswel wrote me word that he would come to London for my advice. [The] advice which I sent him is to stay at home, and [busy] himself with his own affairs. He has a good es[tate], considerably burthened by settlements, and he is himself in debt. But if his wife lives, I think he will be prudent.' Notes and Queries, 6th S. v. 462.
[487] Miss Burney wrote in the first week in December:--'Dr. Johnson was in most excellent good humour and spirits.' She describes later on a brilliant party which he attended at Miss Monckton's on the 8th, where the people were 'superbly dressed,' and where he was 'environed with listeners.' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, ii. 186, and 190. See ante, p. 108, note 4.
[488] See ante,, iii. 337, where Johnson got 'heated' when Boswell maintained this.
[489] See ante, in. 395.
[490] The greatest part of the copy, or manuscript of The Lives of the Poets had been given by Johnson to Boswell (ante, iv. 36).
[491] Of her twelve children but these three were living. She was forty-one years old.
[492] 'The family,' writes Dr. Burney, 'lived in the library, which used to be the parlour. There they breakfasted. Over the bookcases were hung Sir Joshua's portraits of Mr.