ue of Dean Swift, he could knock down booksellers and silence
bargees; he was melancholy almost to madness, "radically wretched,"
indolent, blinded, diseased. Poverty was long his portion; not that
genteel poverty that is sometimes behindhand with its rent, but that
hungry poverty that does not know where to look for its dinner. Against
all these things had this "old struggler" to contend; over all these
things did this "old struggler" prevail. Over even the fear of death,
the giving up of "this intellectual being," which had haunted his gloomy
fancy for a lifetime, he seems finally to have prevailed, and to have
met his end as a brave man should.

Carlyle, writing to his wife, says, and truthfully enough, "The more the
devil worries me the more I wring him by the nose;" but then if the
devil's was the only nose that was wrung in the transaction, why need
Carlyle cry out so loud? After buffeting one's way through the
storm-tossed pages of Froude's (Carlyle,)--in which the universe is
stretched upon the rack because food disagrees with man and cocks
crow,--with what thankfulness and reverence do we read once again the
letter in which Johnson tells Mrs. Thrale how he has been called to
endure, not dyspepsia or sleeplessness, but paralysis itself:--

"On Monday I sat for my picture, and walked a considerable way with
little inconvenience. In the afternoon and evening I felt myself light
and easy, and began to plan schemes of life. Thus I went to bed, and in
a short time waked and sat up, as has long been my custom; when I felt a
confusion in my head which lasted, I suppose, about half a minute; I was
alarmed, and prayed God that however much He might afflict my body He
would spate my understanding.... Soon after I perceived that I had
suffered a paralytic stroke, and that my speech was taken from me. I had
no pain, and so little dejection in this dreadful state that I wondered
at my own apathy, and considered that perhaps death itself, when it
should come, would excite less horror than seems now to attend it. In
order to rouse the vocal organs I took two drams.... I then went to bed,
and strange as it may seem I think slept. When I saw light it was time I
should contrive what I should do. Though God stopped my speech, He left
me my hand. I enjoyed a mercy which was not granted to my dear friend
Lawrence, who now perhaps overlooks me as I am writing, and rejoices
that I have what he wanted. My first note was necessarily to