Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/343

 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

BY THOMAS TYERS*

��WHEN Charles the Second was informed of the death of Cowley, he pronounced, 'that he had not left a better man behind him in England 2 .' It may be affirmed with truth, that this was the case when Dr. Johnson breathed his last. Those who observed his declining state of health during the last winter, and heard his complaints, of painful days and sleepless nights, for which he took large quantities of opium 3, had no reason to expect that he could survive another season of frost and snow.

��1 From the Gentlemaris Magazine, December, 1784. 'The gentleman whom he thus familiarly mentioned [as Tom Tyers] was Mr. Thomas Tyers, son of Mr. Jonathan Tyers, the founder of that excellent place of publick amusement, Vauxhall Gar dens. Mr. Thomas Tyers was bred to the law ; but having a handsome for tune, vivacity of temper, and eccen tricity of mind, he could not confine himself to the regularity of practice. He therefore ran about the world with a pleasant carelessness, amusing everybody by his desultory conver sation. He abounded in anecdote, but was not sufficiently attentive to

��accuracy. I therefore cannot ven ture to avail myself much of a bio graphical sketch of Johnson which he published, being one among the various persons ambitious of append ing their names to that of my illus trious friend. That sketch is, how ever, an entertaining little collection of fragments.' Life, iii. 308.

2 Works, vii. 14.

3 ' I have such horrour of opiates,' he wrote, 'that I do not think of them but in extremis? Letters, ii. 367. See also ib. pp. 376, 383. Dr. Brocklesby noticed that ' opiate was never destructive of his readiness in conversation.' Ib. ii. 437.

His

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