Apart from this, he was not afraid of illness in itself, except as
a prelude of mortality. Indeed I believe that he took a
hypochondriac pleasure in observing his symptoms minutely, and in
dosing himself in all sorts of ways. His mysterious preoccupations
with dried orange-peel had no doubt a medicinal end in view. But
when it came to suffering pain and even to enduring operations, he
had no tremors. His one constant fear was the fear of death. He
kept it at arm's length, he loved any social amusement that
banished it, but it is obvious, in several of his talks, when the
subject was under discussion, that the cloud descended upon him
suddenly and made him miserable. It was all summed up in this, that
life was to his taste, that even when oppressed with gloom and
depression, he never desired to escape. I have heard a great doctor
say that he believed that human beings were very sharply divided in
this respect, that there were some people in whom any extremity of
prolonged anguish, bodily or mental, never produced the smallest
desire to quit life; while there were others whose attachment to
life was slight, and that a very little pressure of care or
calamity developed a suicidal impulse. This is, I suppose, a
question of vitality, not necessarily of activity of mind and body,
but a deep instinctive desire to live; the thought of deliberate
suicide was wholly unintelligible to Johnson, death was his
ultimate fear, and however much he suffered from disease or
depression, his intention to live was always inalienable.

His fear then was one which no devoutness of faith, no resolute
tenacity of hope, no array of reasons could ever touch. It was
simply the unknown that he feared. Life had not been an easy
business for Johnson; he had known all the calamities of life, and