grapher likes, and seldom dares, to torture the sensibilities of a
great man's widow and daughters. And the strength as well as the
weakness of the feminine point of view is that women have a power not
so much of not observing, as of actually obliterating the weaknesses of
those whom they love. It is sentiment which ruins biographies, the
sentiment that cannot bear the truth.

Boswell did not shrink from admitting the reader to a sight of
Johnson's hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries, his
dread of illness, his terror of death. Johnson's horror of annihilation
was insupportable. He so revelled in life, in the contact and company
of other human beings, that he once said that the idea of an infinity
of torment was preferable to the thought of annihilation. He wrote, in
his last illness, to his old friend Dr. Taylor:

"Oh! my friend, the approach of death is very dreadful. I am afraid to
think on that which I know I cannot avoid. It is vain to look round and
round for that help which cannot be had. Yet we hope and hope, and
fancy that he who has lived to-day may live to-morrow. But let us learn
to derive our hope only from God.

"In the meantime, let us be kind to one another. I have no friend now
living but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth.--Do not
neglect, sir, yours affectionately, SAM. JOHNSON."

Was ever the last fear put into such simple and poignant words as in
the above letter? It is like that other saying of Johnson's, when all
sorts of good reasons had been given why men should wish to be released
from their troubles by death, "After all, it is a sad thing for a man
to lie down and die." There is no more that can be said, and not the
best reasons in the world for desiring to depart and have done with
life can ever do away with that sadness.

Dr. Johnson supplies the clearest proof, if proof were needed, that no
robustness of temperament, no genius of common sense, no array of
rationality, no degree of courage, can save a man from the assaults of
fear, and even of fear which the sufferer knows to be unreal. Some of
the most severe and angry things which Johnson ever said were said to
Boswell and others who persisted in discussing the question of death.
Yet Johnson had no rational doubt of immortality, and believed with an
almost childlike simplicity in the Christian faith. He was not afraid
of pain, or of the act of dying; it was of the unknown conditions
beyond the gr