acknowledgment. Upon this discovery, Mr. Murphy thought it right to make
his excuses to Dr. Johnson. He went next day, and found him covered with
soot, like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, as if he had been acting
Lungs, in the Alchemist, "making ether." This being told by Mr. Murphy,
in company, "Come, come," said Dr. Johnson, "the story is black enough;
but it was a happy day that brought you first to my house." After this
first visit, the author of this narrative, by degrees, 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