or the worthy authour, and increasing veneration of
the wonderful and excellent man who is the subject of it. The writer
throws in, now and then, very properly some serious religious
reflections; but there is one remark, in my mind an obvious and just
one, which I think he has not made, that Johnson's "morbid melancholy,"
and constitutional infirmities, were intended by Providence, like St.
Paul's thorn in the flesh, to check intellectual conceit and arrogance;
which the consciousness of his extraordinary talents, awake as he was to
the voice of praise, might otherwise have generated in a very culpable
degree. Another observation strikes me, that in consequence of the same
natural indisposition, and habitual sickliness, (for he says he scarcely
passed one day without pain after his twentieth year,) he considered and
represented human life, as a scene of much greater misery than is
generally experienced. There may be persons bowed down with affliction
all their days; and there are those, no doubt, whose iniquities rob them
of rest; but neither calamities nor crimes, I hope and believe, do so
much and so generally abound, as to justify the dark picture of life
which Johnson's imagination designed, and his strong pencil delineated.
This I am sure, the colouring is far too gloomy for what I have
experienced, though as far as I can remember, I have had more sickness
(I do not say more severe, but only more in quantity,) than falls to the
lot of most people. But then daily debility and occasional sickness were
far overbalanced by intervenient days, and, perhaps, weeks void of pain,
and overflowing with comfort. So that in short, to return to the
subject, human life, as far as I can perceive from experience or
observation, is not that state of constant wretchedness which Johnson
always insisted it was; which misrepresentation, (for such it surely
is,) his Biographer has not corrected, I suppose, because, unhappily, he
has himself a large portion of melancholy in his constitution, and
fancied the portrait a faithful copy of life.'

The learned writer then proceeds thus in his letter to me:--

'I have conversed with some sensible men on this subject, who all seem
to entertain the same sentiments respecting life with those which are
expressed or implied in the foregoing paragraph. It might be added that
as the representation here spoken of, appears not consistent with fact
and experience, so neither does it seem to be countenance