o had been with Johnson as he died. Some slight hopes of a
recovery had been held out; and, with the ruling passion strong in death
to interview a celebrity, he rallied in a letter to Warren Hastings.
With the spirit on him of the days when he had told Chatham that his
disinterested soul had enjoyed the contemplation of the great minister
in the bower of philosophy, he tells him, 'the moment I am able to go
abroad, I will fly to Mr Hastings and expand my soul in the purest
satisfaction.' On May 19th 1795, at two in the morning, after an illness
of five weeks, he died. He was in his fifty-fifth year.

A life which cannot challenge the world's attention--like that of John
Sterling--which perhaps does not even modestly solicit it, yet one which
no less certainly will be found to reward the critic of literary history
and pathology. A complex, weak, unsteady life enough, and no one did
more than Boswell himself to bring into glaring prominence the faults
that lie on the surface, by that frank, open, and ostentatious
peculiarity which he avowed, and which he compared to the
characteristics of the old seigneur, Michael de Montaigne. Never was
there a franker critic of James Boswell, Esq., than himself; 'the most
unscottified of mortals,' as Johnson called him, has little or none of
the reserve and reticence that are generally supposed to be marks of the
national character. A rare and curious _Epistle in Verse_, by the Rev.
Samuel Martin of Monimail, 1795, touches on the main points of his life,
and the author, who was apparently a friend of Boswell, had learned
'with affectionate concern and respect that at the end prayer was his
stay.' He criticises, in rather halting and prosaic lines,

'The prison scenes, his prying into death,
How felons and how saints resign their breath;
How varying and conflicting passions roll,
How scaffold exhibitions shew the soul.'

He laments his 'injurious hilarity,' his degrading himself as 'the
little bark, attendant on the huge all-bearing ark,' his political and
ecclesiastical aberrations from the surer and better standpoints of his
family and country. The feeling of this friend of Boswell would
represent, we cannot doubt, the verdict at the time of his own circle.

The 'prison scenes' are an integral part in Boswell's psychology. Never
did George Selwyn attend them with greater regularity, or Wyndham run
after prize fights more assiduously. In the _Public Advertizer_, April