n my thanks; and why I did it not sooner I ought to
tell you. I went into Wiltshire as soon as I well could, and was there
much employed in palliating my own malady. Disease produces much
selfishness. A man in pain is looking after ease; and lets most other
things go as chance shall dispose of them. In the mean time I have lost
a companion[746], to whom I have had recourse for domestick amusement
for thirty years, and whose variety of knowledge never was exhausted;
and now return to a habitation vacant and desolate. I carry about a very
troublesome and dangerous complaint, which admits no cure but by the
chirurgical knife. Let me have your prayers. I am, &c.

SAM. JOHNSON. London, Sept. 29, 1783.'

Happily the complaint abated without his being put to the torture of
amputation. But we must surely admire the manly resolution which he
discovered while it hung over him.

In a letter to the same gentleman he writes, 'The gout has within these
four days come upon me with a violence which I never experienced before.
It made me helpless as an infant.' And in another, having mentioned Mrs.
Williams, he says,--'whose death following that of Levett, has now made
my house a solitude. She left her little substance to a charity-school.
She is, I hope, where there is neither darkness, nor want, nor sorrow.'

I wrote to him, begging to know the state of his health, and mentioned
that Baxter's _Anacreon_[747], 'which is in the library at Auchinleck,
was, I find, collated by my father in 1727, with the MS. belonging to
the University of Leyden, and he has made a number of Notes upon it.
Would you advise me to publish a new edition of it?'

His answer was dated September 30:--

'You should not make your letters such rarities, when you know, or might
know, the uniform state of my health. It is very long since I heard from
you; and that I have not answered is a very insufficient reason for the
silence of a friend. Your _Anacreon_ is a very uncommon book; neither
London nor Cambridge can supply a copy of that edition. Whether it
should be reprinted, you cannot do better than consult Lord
Hailes.--Besides my constant and radical disease, I have been for these
ten days much harassed with the gout; but that has now remitted. I hope
GOD will yet grant me a little longer life, and make me less unfit to
appear before him.'

He this autumn received a visit from the celebrated Mrs. Siddons. He
gives this account of it in one of his letters[7