degree of kindness. I have loved you with virtuous affection; I have honoured you with sincere esteem. Let not all our endearments be forgotten; but let me have, in this great distress, your pity and your prayers. You see I yet turn to you with my complaints as a settled and unalienable friend; do not drive me from you, for I have not deserved either neglect, or hatred. To the girls, who do not write often, (for Susy has written only once, and miss Thrafe owes me a letter,) I earnestly recommend, as their guardian and friend, that they remember their Creator in the days of their youth. O God! give me comfort and confidence in Thee; forgive my sins; and, if it be thy good pleasure, relieve my diseases for Jesus Christ's sake! I am, &c. SAMUEL JOHNSON. Dear madam, LETTER XXV. To Mrs. Thrale. London, Nov. 13, 1783. Since you have written to me with the attention and tenderness of ancient time, your letters give me a great part of the pleasure which a life of solitude admits. You will never bestow any share of your good will on one who deserves it better. Those who have loved longest, love best. A sudden blaze of kindness may by a single blast of coldness be extinguished; but that fondness which length of time has connected with many circumstances and occasions, though it may for a while be suppressed by disgust or resentment, with or without a cause, is hourly revived by accidental recollection. To those who have lived long together, every thing heard and every thing seen recalls some pleasure communicated, or some bene fit conferred, some petty quarrel, or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered, may embroider a day or a week; but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life. A friend may be often found and lost; but an old friend never can be found, and Nature has provided that he cannot easily be lost. I I have not forgotten the Davenants, though they seen to have forgotten me. I began very early to tell them what they have commonly found to be true. am sorry to hear of their building. I have always warned those whom I loved against that mode of ostentatious expense. The frequency of death, to those who look upon it We all in the leisure of Arcadia, is very dreadful. know what it should teach us; let us all be diligent to learn. Lucy Porter has lost her brother. But whom I have lost-let me not now remember. Let not your loss be added to the mournful catalogue. again to, madam, your, &c. Write soon SAMUEL JOHNSON. Dear madain, LETTER XXVI. To Mrs. Thrale. London, Nov. 20, 1783. I began to grieve and wonder that I had no letter; but not being much accustomed to fetch in evil by circumspection or anticipation, I did not suspect that the omission had so dreadful a cause as the sickness of one of your dear children. As her physi cian thought so well of her when you wrote, I hope she is now out of danger. You do not tell me her disease; and perhaps you have not been able yourself fully to understand it. That frigid stillness with which my pretty Sophy melts away, exhibits a temper very incommodious in sickness, and by no means amiable in the tenor of life. Incommunicative taciturnity neither imparts nor invites friendship, but reposes on a stubborn sufficiency self-centred, and neglects the interchange of that social officiousness by which we are habitually endeared. to one another. They who mean to make no use of friends, will be at little trouble to gain them; and to be without friendship, is to be without one of the first comforts of our present state. To have no assistance from other minds, in resolving doubts, in appeasing scruples, in balancing deliberations, is a very wretched destitution. If therefore your daughters have this silence by temper, do not let them have it by principle; show them that it is a perverse and inordinate disposition, which must be counteracted and reformed. Have I said enough? Poor Dr. Taylor represents himself as ill; and I am afraid he is worse than in the summer.- -My nights are very bad; but of the sarcocele I have now little except the memory. The life of my dear, lovely miss Sophy is safe! let us return thanks to the great Giver of existence; and pray that her continuance amongst us may be a blessing to herself, and to those who love her. Now she is recovered, she must write me a little bistory of her sufferings, and impart her schemes of stu dy and improvement. Life, to be worthy of a rational being, must be always in progression; we must always purpose to do more or better than in time past. The mind is enlarged and elevated by mere purposes, though they end as they begin, by airy contemplation. We compare and judge, though we do not practise. She will go back to her arithmetic again: a science which will always delight her more, as by advancing further she discerns more of its use; and a science suited to Sophy's ease of mind, for you told me, last winter, that she loved metaphysics more than romances. Her choice is certainly as laudable as it is un common. God bless you and your children! so says, dear madam, your old friend, SAMUEL JOHNSON. Dear madam, LETTER XXVIII. To Mrs. Thrale. London, Dec. 27, 1785. The time of the year, for I hope the fault is rather in the weather than in me, has been very hard upon me. The muscles of my breast are much convulsed. Dr. Heberden recommends opiates, of which I have such horror that I do not think of them but in extremes. I was however driven to them last night for refuge. Having taken the usual quantity, I durst not go to bed, for fear of that uneasiness to which a supine posture exposes me: but I rested all night in a chair, with much relief; and I have been to-day more warm, active, and cheerful. You have more than once wondered at my complaint of solitude, when you hear that I am crowded with visits. Visiters are no proper companions in the chamber of sickness. They come when I could sleep or read; they stay till I am weary; they force me to attend when my mind calls for relaxation, and to speak when my powers will hardly actuate my tongue. The amusements and consolations of languor and depression, are conferred by familiar and domestic companions; who can be visited or called at will, and can occasionally be quitted or dismissed; who do not obstruct accommodation by ceremony, or destroy indolence by awakening effort. Such society I had with Levet and Williams; such I had where I am never likely to have it more. I wish, dear lady, to you and your dear girls many a cheerful and pious Christmas. I am your, &c. What can be the reason that I do not hear from you? I hope nothing disables you from writing. Do not omit giving me the comfort of knowing, that, after all my losses, I have yet a friend left. My life is very solitary, and very cheerless. Though. it has pleased God wonderfully to deliver me from the dropsy, I am still very weak; and I have not passed the door since the thirteenth of December, I hope for some help from warm weather, which will surely come in time. I could not have the consent of the physicians to go to church yesterday; I therefore received the holy sacrament at home, in the room where I communicated with dear Mrs. Williams, a little before her death. It is vain to look round for that help which cannot be had. Yet we hope and hope, and fancy that he who |