established a close bond of relationship between the
great English scholar and writer and myself. Year by year, and almost
month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in
the last century. I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew
just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking
and doing; what were his feelings about life; what changes the years
had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his
reputation. It was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both
playing that old familiar air, "Life,"--one a bassoon, if you will, and
the other an oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still
keeping pace with each other until the players both grew old and gray.
At last the thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep
accompaniment rolls out its thunder no more.

I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years
has left me. I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with
many of my living friends. I can hardly remember when I did not know
him. I can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend
Dr. Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted
him,--he hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase. His ample
coat, too, I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous
cuffs, and beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat,
arching in front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian
prominence, involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned
buttons, and the strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns
of support to the massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over
it. I can hear him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and
a gap is widened to make room for his portly figure. "A fine day," says
Sir Joshua. "Sir," he answers, "it seems propitious, but the atmosphere
is humid and the skies are nebulous," at which the great painter smiles,
shifts his trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.

Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the
eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club,
between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and
dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the
snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the
shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" p