hnson, yet
nobody had a more just aversion to general satire; he always hated and
censured Swift for his unprovoked bitterness against the professors of
medicine, and used to challenge his friends, when they lamented the
exorbitancy of physicians' fees, to produce him one instance of an estate
raised by physic in England. When an acquaintance, too, was one day
exclaiming against the tediousness of the law and its partiality: "Let us
hear, sir," said Johnson, "no general abuse; the law is the last result
of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the
public."

As the mind of Dr. Johnson was greatly expanded, so his first care was
for general, not particular or petty morality; and those teachers had
more of his blame than praise, I think, who seek to oppress life with
unnecessary scruples. "Scruples would," as he observed, "certainly make
men miserable, and seldom make them good. Let us ever," he said,
"studiously fly from those instructors against whom our Saviour denounces
heavy judgments, for having bound up burdens grievous to be borne, and
laid them on the shoulders of mortal men." No one had, however, higher
notions of the hard task of true Christianity than Johnson, whose daily
terror lest he had not done enough, originated in piety, but ended in
little less than disease. Reasonable with regard to others, he had
formed vain hopes of performing impossibilities himself; and finding his
good works ever below his desires and intent, filled his imagination with
fears that he should never obtain forgiveness for omissions of duty and
criminal waste of time. These ideas kept him in constant anxiety
concerning his salvation; and the vehement petitions he perpetually made
for a longer continuance on earth, were doubtless the cause of his so
prolonged existence: for when I carried Dr. Pepys to him in the year
1782, it appeared wholly impossible for any skill of the physician or any
strength of the patient to save him. He was saved that time, however, by
Sir Lucas's prescriptions; and less skill on one side, or less strength
on the other, I am morally certain, would not have been enough. He had,
however, possessed an athletic constitution, as he said the man who
dipped people in the sea at Brighthelmstone acknowledged; for seeing Mr.
Johnson swim, in the year 1766, "Why, sir," says the dipper, "you must
have been a stout-hearted gentleman forty years ago."

Mr. Thrale and he used to laugh about th