ion became intensely real to
him, sometimes, it almost seems, the nightmare of his life, often its
comfort and strength, present, at any rate, audibly and visibly, in
every company where he was; for no man was ever so little ashamed of
his religion as Johnson. It was the principle of his life in public as
well as in private. Hence that spectacle which Carlyle found so
memorable, of "Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire able to purify
and fortify his soul, and hold real Communion with the Highest, in the
Church of St. Clement Danes; a thing to be looked at with pity,
admiration, awe."

That church still remains; the least altered, {139} perhaps, with the
possible exception of the house in Gough Square, of all the buildings
which once had the body of Johnson inside them; a place of pilgrimage
for many Johnsonians who, refusing to be driven away by the commonplace
window which officially honours his memory, are grateful to find the
seat he used to occupy marked out for their veneration: and not
altogether ungrateful even for the amateur statue which stands in the
churchyard, looking towards his beloved Fleet Street. There were
performed the central acts of those half tragic Good Fridays, those
self-condemning Easter Days, recorded in his private note-books: there,
on the Good Friday of 1773, he took Boswell with him, and Boswell
observed, what he said he should never forget, "the tremulous
earnestness with which Johnson pronounced the awful petition in the
Litany: 'In the hour of death, and at the day of judgment, good Lord
deliver us.'"

We now know more in some ways about his religious life than his friends
did, because we have the private prayers he wrote for his own use, the
sermons he composed for others, and a few notes, chiefly of a religious
kind, describing his doings and feelings on certain days of his life.
But all the evidence, private and public, points the same way. His
prayers are among the best in English, pulsing {140} and throbbing with
earnest faith and fear, yet entirely free from the luscious
sentimentality of so many modern religious compositions. He was in the
habit of making special prayers for all important occasions: he made
them, for instance, sometimes before he entered upon new literary
undertakings, as in the case of _The Rambler_; and he took Boswell into
the Church at Harwich and prayed with him before he saw him off for
Utrecht. No one who was with him on such occasions failed to