up a narrative
of what passed in the visits which he paid him during that time, from
the 10th of November to the 13th of December, the day of his death,
inclusive, and has favoured me with a perusal of it, with permission to
make extracts, which I have done. Nobody was more attentive to him than
Mr. Langton, to whom he tenderly said, Te teneam moriens deficiente
manu. And I think it highly to the honour of Mr. Windham, that his
important occupations as an active statesman did not prevent him from
paying assiduous respect to the dying Sage whom he revered, Mr. Langton
informs me, that, 'one day he found Mr. Burke and four or five more
friends sitting with Johnson. Mr. Burke said to him, "I am afraid, Sir,
such a number of us may be oppressive to you." "No, Sir, (said Johnson,)
it is not so; and I must be in a wretched state, indeed, when your
company would not be a delight to me." Mr. Burke, in a tremulous voice,
expressive of being very tenderly affected, replied, "My dear Sir, you
have always been too good to me." Immediately afterwards he went away.
This was the last circumstance in the acquaintance of these two eminent
men.'

The following particulars of his conversation within a few days of his
death, I give on the authority of Mr. John Nichols:--

'He said, that the Parliamentary Debates were the only part of his
writings which then gave him any compunction: but that at the time he
wrote them, he had no conception he was imposing upon the world, though
they were frequently written from very slender materials, and often from
none at all,--the mere coinage of his own imagination. He never
wrote any part of his works with equal velocity. Three columns of the
Magazine, in an hour, was no uncommon effort, which was faster than most
persons could have transcribed that quantity.

'Of his friend Cave, he always spoke with great affection. "Yet (said
he,) Cave, (who never looked out of his window, but with a view to the
Gentleman's Magazine,) was a penurious pay-master; he would contract
for lines by the hundred, and expect the long hundred; but he was a good
man, and always delighted to have his friends at his table."

'He said at another time, three or four days only before his death,
speaking of the little fear he had of undergoing a chirurgical
operation, "I would give one of these legs for a year more of life, I
mean of comfortable life, not such as that which I now suffer;"--and
lamented much his inability to r