bers, and are recorded by Boswell with the apology that he
wishes his readers to be 'acquainted with the slightest occasional
characteristics of so eminent a man.' Certainly, there is nothing
ridiculous in the fact of a man making a will. But this is the measure
of Johnson's achievement. He had created gloriously much out of nothing
at all. There he sat, old and ailing and unencouraged by the company,
but soaring higher and higher in absurdity, more and more rejoicing, and
still soaring and rejoicing after he had gone out into the night with
Boswell, till at last in Fleet Street his paroxysms were too much for
him and he could no more. Echoes of that huge laughter come ringing down
the ages. But is there also perhaps a note of sadness for us in them?
Johnson's endless sociability came of his inherent melancholy: he could
not bear to be alone; and his very mirth was but a mode of escape from
the dark thoughts within him. Of these the thought of death was the most
dreadful to him, and the most insistent. He was for ever wondering how
death would come to him, and how he would acquit himself in the extreme
moment. A later but not less devoted Anglican, meditating on his own
end, wrote in his diary that 'to die in church appears to be a great
euthanasia, but not,' he quaintly and touchingly added, 'at a time
to disturb worshippers.' Both the sentiment here expressed and the
reservation drawn would have been as characteristic of Johnson as they
were of Gladstone. But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a
great euthanasia; and I think that for Johnson to have died thus,
that night in Fleet Street, would have been a grand ending to 'a life
radically wretched.' Well, he was destined to outlive another decade;
and, selfishly, who can wish such a life as his, or such a Life as
Boswell's, one jot shorter?

Strange, when you come to think of it, that of all the countless folk
who have lived before our time on this planet not one is known in
history or in legend as having died of laughter. Strange, too, that not
to one of all the characters in romance has such an end been allotted.
Has it ever struck you what a chance Shakespeare missed when he was
finishing the Second Part of King Henry the Fourth? Falstaff was not the
man to stand cowed and bowed while the new young king lectured him and
cast him off. Little by little, as Hal proceeded in that portentous
allocution, the humour of the situation would have mastered old Sir
Joh