It is said, that Mr. Pope expressed himself concerning it in terms of
strong approbation. Dr. Taylor told me, that it was first printed for
old Mr. Johnson, without the knowledge of his son, who was very angry
when he heard of it.

The 'morbid melancholy,' which was lurking in his constitution, and to
which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular
life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such
strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful manner.
While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he
felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual
irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom,
and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he
never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and
all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful
influence. He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and
inefficient, that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town-clock.

Johnson, upon the first violent attack of this disorder, strove to
overcome it by forcible exertions. He frequently walked to Birmingham
and back again, and tried many other expedients, but all in vain. His
expression concerning it to me was 'I did not then know how to manage
it.' His distress became so intolerable, that he applied to Dr. Swinfen,
physician in Lichfield, his god-father, and put into his hands a state
of his case, written in Latin. Dr. Swinfen was so much struck with the
extraordinary acuteness, research, and eloquence of this paper, that in
his zeal for his godson he shewed it to several people. His daughter,
Mrs. Desmoulins, who was many years humanely supported in Dr. Johnson's
house in London, told me, that upon his discovering that Dr. Swinfen