eboding of our long,
long separation.'

We think of the dying Cervantes, and the student-admirer of the All
Famous and the Joy of the Muses--'parting at the Toledo bridge, he
turning aside to take the road to Segovia.'

CHAPTER VII

THE ENGLISH BAR--DEATH. 1784-1795

'Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.'--JULIUS CAESAR, iii. 2.

There is something unsatisfactory in the fact that Boswell was not with
Johnson as he died. It gives to his book an air of something distinctly
lacking, which is not with us as we close Lockhart's _Life of Scott_.
His own account is that he was indisposed during a considerable part of
the year, which may, or may not, be a euphemism for irregular habits;
yet, when we consider how easily he might have been with his old friend,
we must own to a feeling that Boswell's mere satisfaction at learning he
was spoken of with affection by Johnson at the close does not satisfy
the nature of things or the artistic sense of fitness. No literary
executor had been appointed, and the materials for a biography had been
mostly destroyed by Johnson's orders. This, we may be sure, had not been
expected by Boswell, who set himself, however, to prepare for the press
his own _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_, which his friend when alive
had not been willing to see appear as a pendant to the _Journey_.
'Between ourselves,' he tells Temple, 'he is not apt to encourage one to
share reputation with him.' Yet he felt, as he wrote to Percy on 20th
March 1785, that it was a great consolation to him now that he had, as
it was, collected so much of the wit and the wisdom of that wonderful
man. 'I do not expect,' he adds, 'to recover from it. I gaze after him
with an eager eye; and I hope again to be with him.'

Now that the strong hand of Johnson was removed, 'and the light of his
life as if gone out,' the rest of Boswell's life was but a downward
course. He struggles with himself, and feels instinctively the lack of
the curb which the powerful intellect of the Rambler had held on the
weaker character of the other. We find him repeating often to himself
the lines from the _Vanity of Human Wishes_:--

'Shall helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?'

The Lord Advocate had brought into the Commons a bill for the
reconstruction of the Court of Session, proposing to reduce the number
of judges from fifteen to ten, with a corresponding increase of salary.