ave that he was afraid. Probably as a rule very robust
people are so much occupied in living that they have little time to
think of the future, while men and women who hold to life by a frail
tenure are not much concerned at quitting a scene which is phantasmal
and full of pain. But in Johnson we have the two extremes brought
together. He was the most gregarious of men; he loved company so well
that he would follow his friends to the very threshold, in the hope, as
he once told Boswell, that they might perhaps return. When he was alone
and undistracted, his melancholy came back upon him like a cloud. He
tortured himself over the unprofitableness of his life, over his
failure to achieve official prominence. He does not seem to have
brooded over the favourite subject for Englishmen to lose heart over,
namely, his financial position. It is a very significant fact in our
English life that if at an inquest upon a suicide it can be established
that a man has financial difficulties, a verdict of temporary insanity
is instantly conceded. Loss of property rather than loss of affection
is the thing which the Englishman thinks is likely to derange a man.
But Johnson seems never to have been afraid of poverty, nor to have
ever troubled about fame. He was very angry once when it was laughingly
suggested to him that if he had gone to the Bar he might have been Lord
Chancellor; and I have no doubt, as I have said, that one of his
uncomfortable reflections was that he did not seem to himself to be in
a position of influence and authority. But, apart from that, it is
obvious that Johnson's broodings took the form of lamenting his own
sinfulness and moral worthlessness: what the faults which troubled him
were, it is hard to say. He does not seem to have been repentant about
the mortification he caused others by his witty bludgeoning--indeed he
considered himself a polite man! But I believe, from many slight
indications, that Johnson was distressed by the consciousness of
sensual impulses, though he held them in severe restraint. His habit of
ejaculatory prayer was, I think, directed against this tendency. The
agitation with which he once said that corruption had entered into his
heart by means of a dream seems to me a proof of this. He took a
tolerant view of the lapses of others, and of course the standard of
the age was lax in this respect. But I have little doubt myself that
here Johnson found himself often confronted with a sensuous te