authors of his disappointment have incurred the sentence denounced on
them by the humanity of Thurlow. In this, Dr. Brocklesby, the physician,
has no share; for by him a noble offer of £100 a year was made to
Johnson during his life.

In the meantime he had paid the summer visit, which had now become
almost an annual one to his daughter-in-law, at Lichfield, from whence
he made an excursion to Dr. Taylor's, at Ashbourne, and to Chatsworth,
still labouring under his asthma, but willing to believe that as Floyer,
the celebrated physician of his native city, had been allowed to pant on
till near ninety, so he might also yet pant on a little longer. Whilst
he was on this journey, he translated an ode of Horace, and composed
several prayers. As he passed through Birmingham and Oxford, he once
more hailed his old schoolfellow Hector, and his fellow collegian,
Adams. It is delightful to see early intimacies thus enduring through
all the accidents of life, local attachments unsevered by time, and the
old age and childhood of man bound together by these natural charities.
The same willow tree which Johnson had known when a boy, was still his
favourite, and still flourishing in the meadow, near Lichfield. Hector
(whom I can remember several years after, a man of erect form, and grave
deportment) still met him with the same, or perhaps more cordiality than
in their first days; and the virtues of Adams, which he had seen opening
in their early promise, had now grown up to full maturity. To London he
returned, only to prove that death was not the terrible thing which he
had fancied it. He arrived there on the 15th of November. In little more
than a fortnight after, when Dr. Brocklesby (with whom three other
eminent physicians, and a chirurgeon, were in the habit of attending him
gratuitously) was paying him a morning visit, he said that he had been
as a dying man all night, and then with much emphasis repeated the words
of Macbeth: