me, and I knew just what
Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking and doing;
what were his feelings about life; what changes the years had wrought in
his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his reputation. It
was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both playing that
old familiar air, "Life,"--one a bassoon, if you will, and the other an
oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still keeping pace
with each other until the players both grew old and gray. At last the
thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep accompaniment
rolls out its thunder no more.

I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years has
left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with many
of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know him. I
can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend Dr.
Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted him,--he
hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample coat, too,
I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs, and
beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat, arching in
front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence,
involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons, and the
strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns of support to the
massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over it. I can hear
him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened
to make room for his portly figure. "A fine day," says Sir Joshua.
"Sir," he answers, "it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and
the skies are nebulous," at which the great painter smiles, shifts his
trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.

Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the
eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,
between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and
dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the
snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the
shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the
Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what
I shall find when it is opened.

Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear
old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster