Your present method of making your sermons seems very judicious. Few frequent preachers can be supposed to have Sermons more their own than yours will be. Take care to register, somewhere or other, the authors from whom your several discourses are borrowed; and do not imagine that you shall always remember even what perhaps you now think it impossible to forget.

My advice however is, that you attempt, from time to time, an original sermon; and, in the labour of composi❤ tion, do not burden your mind with too much at once; do not exact from yourself, at one effort of excogitation, propriety of thought and elegance of expression. Invent first, and then embellish. The production of something, where nothing was before, is an act of greater energy than the expansion or decoration of the thing produced. Set down diligently your thoughts as they rise, in the first words that occur; and when you have matter you will easily give it form: nor, perhaps, will this method be always necessary, for, by habit, your thoughts and diction will flow together.

The composition of sermons is not very difficult: the divisions not only help the memory of the hearer, but direct the judgment of the writer; they supply sources of invention, and keep every part in its proper place.

What I like least in your letter is your account of the manners of your parish; from which I gather, that it has been long neglected by the parson. The dean of Carlisle, when he was a little rector in Northamptonshire, told me, that it might be discerned whether or not there was a clergyman resident in a parish, by the civil or savage manners of the people. Such a congregation as yours stand in much need of reformation; and I would not have you think it impossible to reform them.

A very savage parish was civilized by a decayed gentlewoman, who went thither to teach a petty school. My learned friend, Dr. Wheeler, of Oxford, when he was a young man, had the care of a neighbouring parish for fifteen pounds a year, which he was never paid; but he counted it an advantage that it compelled him to make a sermon weekly. One woman he could not bring to the communion; and, when he reproved or exhorted her, she only answered that she was no scholar. He was advised to set some good woman or man of the parish, a little wiser than herself, to talk to her in a language level to her mind. Such honest (I may call them holy) artifices, must be practised by every clergyman; for all means must be tried by which souls may be saved. Talk to your people, however, as much as you can; and you will find that the more frequently you converse with them upon religious subjects, the more willingly they will attend, and the more submissively they will learn. A clergyman's diligence always makes him venerable.

I think I have now only to say, that, in the momentous work which you have undertaken, I pray God to bless you.

I am, sir,

Your most humble servant,

Samuel Johnson

LETTER XVIII.

To Mrs. Thrale.-On the death of Mr. Thrale.

Dearest madam,

London, April 5, 1781.

Of your injunctions, to pray for you and write to you, I hope to leave neither unobserved. I am not without my part of the calamity. No death since that of my wife, has ever oppressed me like this.

But let us remember, that we are in the hands of HIM who knows when to give, and when to take away: who will look upon us, with mercy, through all our variations of existence; and who invites us to call upon him in the day of trouble. Call upon HIM in this great revolution of life, and call with confidence. You will then find comfort for the past, and support for the future. HE who has given you happiness in marriage, to a degree, of which, without personal knowledge, I should have thought the description fabulous, can give you another mode of happiness, as a mother; and at last, the happiness of losing all temporal cares in the thoughts of an eternity in Heaven.

I do not exhort you to reason yourself into tranquillity. We must first pray, and then labour; first implore the blessing of God, and then use those means which he puts into our hands. Cultivated ground has few weeds: a mind occupied by lawful business, has little room for useless regret.

We read the will to-day: but I will not fill my first letter with any other account than that, with all my zeal for your advantage, I am satisfied; and that the other executers, more used to consider property than I, commended it for wisdom and equity. Yet why should I not tell you that you have five hundred pounds for your immediate expenses, and two thousand pounds a year, with both the houses, and all the goods?

Let us pray for one another, that the time, whether long or short, that shall yet be granted us, may be well spent; and that when this life, which at the longest is very short, shall come to an end, a better may begin, which shall never end.

I am, dearest madam, yours, &c.

Samuel Johnson,

M

Dear sir,

LETTER XIX.

To Bennet Langton, esq.

Bolt Court, March 20, 1782.

It is now long since we saw one another; and whatever has been the reason, neither you have written to me, nor I to you. To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage; of which when it is taken finally away, he who travels on alone, will wonder how his esteem could be so little. Do not forget me; you see that I do not forget you. It is pleasing in the silence of solitude, to think, that there is one at least, however distant, of whose benevolence there is little doubt, and whom there is yet hope of seeing again.

Of my life, from the time we parted, the history is mournful. The spring of last year deprived me of Thrale, a man whose eye for fifteen years had scarcely been turned upon me but with respect or tenderness; for such another friend, the general course of human things will not suffer man to hope. I passed the summer at Streatham, but there was no Thrale; and having idled away the summer with a weakly body and a neglected mind, I made a journey to Staffordshire on the edge of winter. The season was dreary; I was sickly; and I found the friends sickly whom I went to see. After a sorrowful sojourn, I returned to a habitation possessed for the present by two sick women; where my dear old friend, Mr. Levett, (to whom, he used to tell me, I owe your acquaintance,) died a few weeks ago, suddenly in his bed; there passed not, I believe, a minute between health and death. At night, as at Mrs. Thrale's, I was

musing in my chamber, I thought, with uncommon ear◄ nestness, that however I might alter my mode of life, or whithersoever I might remove, I would endeavour to retain Levett about me: in the morning, my servant brought me word that Levett was called to another state; a state for which, I think, he was not unprepared. How much soever I valued him, I now wish that I had valued

him more.

I have myself been ill more than eight weeks of a disorder, from which, at the expense of about fifty ounces of blood, I hope I am now recovering.

You, dear sir, have, I trust, a more cheerful scene: you see George fond of his books, and my own little Jenny equal to the best; and in every thing that can contribute to your quiet or pleasure, you have lady Rothes ready to concur. May whatever you enjoy of good be increased, and whatever you suffer of evil be diminished!

That you should have care or curiosity about my health, gives me that pleasure which every man feels from finding himself not forgotten. In age, we feel again that love of our native place and our early friends, which, in the bustle or amusement of middle life, was overborne and suspended. You and I should now naturally cling to one another: we have outlived most of those who could pretend to rival us in each other's kindness. In our walk through life, we have dropped our