Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/129

 Hawkins's Life of Johnson.

��/-The visits of idle, and some of them very worthless persons, ^ere never unwelcome to Johnson ; and though they interrupted feim in his studies and meditations, yet, as they gave him oppor tunities of discourse, and furnished him with intelligence, he strove K^-ther to protract than shorten or discountenance them ; and, when abroad, such was the laxity of his mind, that he consented to the doing of many things, otherwise indifferent, for the avowed reason that they would drive on time I. (Page 565.)

In his return to London, he stopped at Lichfield, and from thence wrote to me several letters 2, that served but to prepare me for meeting him in a worse state of health than I had ever seen him in. The concluding paragraph of the last of them is as follows : ' I am relapsing into the dropsy very fast, and shall make such haste to town that it will be useless to write to me ; but when I come, let me have the benefit of your advice, and the consolation of your company.' [Dated Nov. 7, 1784.] After about a fortnight's stay there, he took his leave of that city, and of Mrs. Porter, whom he never afterwards saw, and arrived in town on the sixteenth day of November 3.

After the declaration he had made of his intention to provide for his servant Frank, and before his going into the country, I had frequently pressed him to make a will, and had gone so far as to make a draft of one, with blanks for the names of the executors and residuary legatee, and directing in what manner it was to be executed and attested ; but he was exceedingly averse to this business ; and, while he was in Derbyshire, I repeated my solicitations, for this purpose, by letters. When he arrived in town he had done nothing in it 4, and, to what I formerly said,

��1 'When I, in a low-spirited fit, was talking to him with indifference of the pursuits which generally en gage us in a course of action, and in quiring a reason for taking so much trouble ; " Sir." said he, in an ani mated tone, "it is driving on the system of life." ' Life, iv. 112.

2 None of these have been pub lished.

3 Life, iv. 377.

��4 Five years earlier Johnson had been urging Thrale to make his will. He wrote to Mrs. Thrale : ' Some days before our last separation Mr. Thrale and I had one evening an earnest discourse about the business with Mr. Scrase [a solicitor]. . . . Do not let those fears prevail which you know to be unreasonable ; a will brings the end of life no nearer.' Letters, ii. 115.

I now

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