His strong constitution enabled him to recover
rapidly, and within a month he was paying visits in Kent and Wiltshire.
But he had other complaints, and never again knew even that modest
measure of health which he had once enjoyed.

The inevitable loss of friends, that saddest and most universal sorrow
of old age, joined with illness to depress his last years. Beauclerk
died in 1780, Thrale in 1781, Levett and Mrs. Williams, two of the
humble friends to whom his charity had given a home in his house, in
1782 and 1788. He was left almost alone. Yet the old courage and love
of society asserted itself to the last, and he founded a new dining
club the year before he died. But it was too late. The year 1784
opened with a prolonged illness lasting for months, and though in the
summer he was well enough to get away to Oxford with Boswell once more,
all could see that the end could not be far off. It came on the 18th
of December 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on December 20th.
Burke and Windham, with Colman the dramatist and Sir Joseph Bankes the
President of the Royal Society, were among the {109} pall-bearers, and
the mourners included Reynolds and Paoli. Seldom has the death of a
man of letters created such a sense of loss either in the public at
large or among his friends. Murphy, the editor of Fielding, and
biographer of Garrick, says in his well-known essay that Johnson's
death "kept the public mind in agitation beyond all previous example."
Those great men, then, who attended his funeral represented not merely
themselves and his other friends but the intelligence of the whole
nation, which saw in the death of Johnson the fall of one of the mighty
in the moral and intellectual Israel.

CHAPTER IV

JOHNSON'S CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTICS

Something has already been said in the first chapter of this book about
the character of Johnson. The argument of that chapter was that the
singular position of Johnson as, in a way, the most national of our men
of letters, was due not so much to anything he wrote, or even to
anything written about him, as to the quality of his own mind and
character, to a sort of central sanity that there was about him which
Englishmen like {110} to think of as a thing peculiarly English. We
may now pass on to look at this character in a little more detail.

Visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk
round the space under the dome to come upon a