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:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And, with _some_ sweet oblivious antidote,
Cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

To which Brocklesby promptly returned the answer, which is made by the
doctor in that play,

--Therein the patient
Must minister unto himself.

He now committed to the flames a large mass of papers, among which were
two 4to. volumes, containing a particular account of his life, from his
earliest recollections.

His few remaining days were occasionally cheered by the presence of such
men as have been collected about a death-bed in few ages and countries
of the world--Langton, Reynolds, Windham, and Burke. Of these, none was
more attentive to him than Mr. Langton, of whom he had been heard to
say, I could almost wish "anima mea sit cum Langtono," and whom he now
addressed in the tender words of Tibullus,

Te teneam moriens deficiente manu.

At another time, Burke, who was sitting with him in the company of four
or five others, expressed his fear that so large a number might be
oppressive to him, "No, Sir," said Johnson, "it is not so; and I must be
in a wretched state, indeed, when your company would no