cloud. He tortured himself over the unprofitableness of his life,
over his failure to achieve official prominence. He does not seem
to have brooded over the favourite subject for Englishmen to lose
heart over, namely, his financial position. It is a very
significant fact in our English life that if at an inquest upon a
suicide it can be established that a man has financial
difficulties, a verdict of temporary insanity is instantly
conceded. Loss of property rather than loss of affection is the
thing which the Englishman thinks is likely to derange a man. But
Johnson seems never to have been afraid of poverty, nor to have
ever troubled about fame. He was very angry once when it was
laughingly suggested to him that if he had gone to the Bar he might
have been Lord Chancellor; and I have no doubt, as I have said,
that one of his uncomfortable reflections was that he did not seem
to himself to be in a position of influence and authority. But,
apart from that, it is obvious that Johnson's broodings took the
form of lamenting his own sinfulness and moral worthlessness: what
the faults which troubled him were, it is hard to say. He does not
seem to have been repentant about the mortification he caused
others by his witty bludgeoning--indeed he considered himself a
polite man! But I believe, from many slight indications, that
Johnson was distressed by the consciousness of sensual impulses,
though he held them in severe restraint. His habit of ejaculatory
prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency. The agitation
with which he once said that corruption had entered into his heart
by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a tolerant
view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of the age
was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that here
Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous tendency
which he thought degrading, and which he constantly combated.