Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/214

 ��Anecdotes by Hannah More.

��said to him a little before he died, Doctor, you are a worthy man, and my friend, but I am afraid you are not a Christian ! what can I do better for you than offer up in your presence a prayer to the great God that you may become a Christian in my sense of the word. Instantly he fell on his knees, and put up a fervent prayer ; when he got up he caught hold of his hand with great earnestness, and cried, Doctor, you do not say Amen. The Doctor looked foolishly, but after a pause, cried, Amen! Johnson said, My dear doctor, believe a dying man, there is no salvation but in the sacrifice of the Lamb of God ; go home, write down my prayer, and every word I have said, and bring it me to-morrow. Brocklesby did so J. ...

No action of his life became him like the leaving it. His death makes a kind of era in literature 2 ; piety and goodness will not easily find a more able defender, and it is delightful to see him set, as it were, his dying seal to the professions of his life, and to the truth of Christianity. Memoirs, i. 392.

Adelphi, 1785.

Boswell tells me he is printing anecdotes of Johnson, not his life, but, as he has the vanity to call it, \\ispyramid 3. I besought his tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend, and begged he would mitigate some of his asperities. He said, roughly, ' He would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please anybody 4 .' It will, I doubt not, be a very amusing book, but I hope not an indiscreet one ; he has great enthusiasm, and some fire 5. Memoirs, i. 403.

��1 Life, \v. 414, 416 ; ante, ii. 146, 152.

2 ' He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up.' Life, iv. 420.

3 'What Boswell was printing in 1785 was his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

4 Life, i. 30.

5 The following is endorsed on a letter addressed by Boswell to Lord Buchan on Jan. 5, 1767 : 1 Boswell was my relative by his

��mother. ... In consequence of a letter he wrote to me I desired him to call at Mr. Pitt's, and took care to be with him when he was introduced. . . . Boswell came in the Corsican dress and presented a letter from Paoli. Lord Chatham smiled, but received him very graciously in his pompous manner. Boswell had genius, but wanted ballast to coun teract his whim. He preferred being a showman to keeping a shop of his own.' Buchan MSS. quoted in Croker's Boswell, x. 122.

I remember

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