n hardly be considered as
prudent. I am sorry to find, what your solicitation seems to imply, that
you have already gone the whole length of your credit. This is to set
the quiet of your whole life at hazard. If you anticipate your
inheritance, you can at last inherit nothing; all that you receive must
pay for the past. You must get a place, or pine in penury, with the
empty name of a great estate. Poverty, my dear friend, is so great an
evil, and pregnant with so much temptation, and so much misery, that I
cannot but earnestly enjoin you to avoid it[468]. Live on what you have;
live if you can on less; do not borrow either for vanity or pleasure;
the vanity will end in shame, and the pleasure in regret: stay therefore
at home, till you have saved money for your journey hither.

_The Beauties of Johnson_ are said to have got money to the collector;
if the _Deformities_ have the same success, I shall be still a more
extensive benefactor.

'Make my compliments to Mrs. Boswell, who is, I hope, reconciled to me;
and to the young people whom I never have offended.

'You never told me the success of your plea against the Solicitors[469].

'I am, dear Sir,

'Your most affectionate,

'SAM. JOHNSON.'

'London, March 28, 1782.'

Notwithstanding his afflicted state of body[470] and mind this year, the
following correspondence affords a proof not only of his benevolence and
conscientious readiness to relieve a good man from errour, but by his
cloathing one of the sentiments in his _Rambler_ in different language,
not inferiour to that of the original, shews his extraordinary command
of clear and forcible expression.

A clergyman at Bath wrote to him, that in _The Morning Chronicle_, a
passage in _The Beauties of Johnson_[471], article DEATH, had been
pointed out as supposed by some readers to recommend suicide, the words
being, 'To die is the fate of man; but to die with lingering anguish is
generally his folly;' and respectfully suggesting to him, that such an
erroneous notion of any sentence in the writings of an acknowledged
friend of religion and virtue, should not pass uncontradicted.

Johnson thus answered the clergyman's letter:--

To THE REVEREND MR. ----, AT BATH.

'SIR,

'Being now[472] in the country in a state of recovery, as I hope, from a
very oppressive disorder, I cannot neglect the acknowledgement of your
Christian letter. The book called _The Beauties of Johnson_ is the
production of I know n