es, grew intimate
with Dr. Johnson. The first striking sentence, that he heard from him,
was in a few days after the publication of lord Bolingbroke's posthumous
works. Mr. Garrick asked him, "If he had seen them." "Yes, I have seen
them." "What do you think of them?" "Think of them!" He made a long
pause, and then replied: "Think of them! A scoundrel, and a coward! A
scoundrel, who spent his life in charging a gun against christianity;
and a coward, who was afraid of hearing the report of his own gun; but
left half a crown to a hungry Scotchman to draw the trigger, after his
death." His mind, at this time strained, and over-laboured by constant
exertion, called for an interval of repose and indolence. But indolence
was the time of danger: it was then that his spirits, not employed
abroad, turned with inward hostility against himself. His reflections on
his own life and conduct were always severe; and, wishing to be
immaculate, he destroyed his own peace by unnecessary scruples. He tells
us, that when he surveyed his past life, he discovered nothing but a
barren waste of time, with some disorders of body, and disturbances of
mind, very near to madness. His life, he says, from his earliest years,
was wasted in a morning bed; and his reigning sin was a general
sluggishness, to which he was always inclined, and, in part of his life,
almost compelled, by morbid melancholy, and weariness of mind. This was
his constitutional malady, derived, perhaps, from his father, who was,
at times, overcast with a gloom that bordered on insanity. When to this
it is added, that Johnson, about the age of twenty, drew up a
description of his infirmities, for Dr. Swinfen, at that time an eminent
physician, in Staffordshire; and received an answer to his letter,
importing, that the symptoms indicated a future privation of reason; who
can wonder, that he was troubled with melancholy, and dejection of
spirit? An apprehension of the worst calamity that can befall human
nature hung over him all the rest of his life, like the sword of the
tyrant suspended over his guest. In his sixtieth year he had a mind to
write the history of his melancholy; but he desisted, not knowing
whether it would not too much disturb him. In a Latin poem, however, to
which he has prefixed, as a title, [Greek: GNOTHI SEAUTON], he has left
a picture of himself, drawn with as much truth, and as firm a hand, as
can be seen in the portraits of Hogarth, or sir Joshua Reynolds. Th