he _Prayers and
Meditations_, first published by the Rev. Dr. Strahan in 1785. Strahan
was the Vicar of Islington, and into his hands at an early hour one
morning Dr. Johnson, then approaching his last days, put the papers,
'with instructions for committing them to the press and with a promise
to prepare a sketch of his own life to accompany them.' This promise
the doctor was not able to keep, and shortly after his death his
reverend friend published the papers just as they were put into his
hands. One wonders he had the heart to do it, but the clerical mind is
sometimes strangely insensitive to the privacy of thought. But, as in
the case of most indelicate acts, you cannot but be glad the thing was
done. The original manuscript is at Pembroke College, Oxford. In these
_Prayers and Meditations_ we see an awful figure. The _solitary_
Johnson, perturbed, tortured, oppressed, in distress of body and of
mind, full of alarms for the future both in this world and the next,
teased by importunate and perplexing thoughts, harassed by morbid
infirmities, vexed by idle yet constantly recurring scruples, with an
inherited melancholy and a threatened sanity, is a gloomy and even a
terrible picture, and forms a striking contrast to the social hero,
the triumphant dialectician of Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Madame
D'Arblay. Yet it is relieved by its inherent humanity, its fellowship
and feeling. Dr. Johnson's piety is delightfully full of human
nature--far too full to please the poet Cowper, who wrote of the
_Prayers and Meditations_ as follows:

'If it be fair to judge of a book by an extract, I do not wonder
that you were so little edified by Johnson's Journal. It is even
more ridiculous than was poor Rutty's of flatulent memory. The
portion of it given us in this day's paper contains not one
sentiment worth one farthing, except the last, in which he resolves
to bind himself with no more unbidden obligations. Poor man! one
would think that to pray for his dead wife and to pinch himself
with Church fasts had been almost the whole of his religion.'

[Footnote A: Two volumes. Oxford Clarendon Press, 1897.]

It were hateful to pit one man's religion against another's, but it
is only fair to Dr. Johnson's religion to remember that, odd compound
as it was, it saw him through the long struggle of life, and enabled
him to meet the death he so honestly feared like a man and a
Christian. The _Prayers and Meditations_