oping forward on the perpetual listen; Mr. Levett, sour and
silent; Frank, the black servant, proud of the silver salvers--and you
have the group as in a picture.

In Bolt Court we find Johnson now returning from pleasant dinners with
Wilkes and Garrick, Malone and Dr. Burney; now sitting alone over his
Greek Testament, or praying with his black servant, Frank. We like to
picture him on that Good Friday morning (1783), when he and Boswell,
returning from service at St. Clement's, rested on the stone seat at the
garden-door in Bolt Court, talking about gardens and country
hospitality.

Then, finally, we come to almost the last scene of all, when the sick
man addressed to his kind physician, Brocklesby, that pathetic passage
of Shakespeare's,--

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;
Raze out the written troubles of the brain;
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?"

Round Johnson's dying bed gathered many wise and good men. To Burke he
said, "I must be in a wretched state indeed, when your company would not
be a delight to me." To another friend he remarked solemnly, but in his
old grand manner, "Sir, you cannot conceive with what acceleration I
advance towards death." Nor did his old vehemence and humour by any
means forsake him, for he described a man who sat up to watch him "as an
idiot, sir; awkward as a turnspit when first put into the wheel, and
sleepy as a dormouse." His remaining hours were spent in fervent prayer.
The last words he uttered were those of benediction upon the daughter
of a friend who came to ask his blessing.

Some years before Dr. Johnson's death, when the poet Rogers was a young
clerk of literary proclivities at his father's bank, he one day stole
surreptitiously to Bolt Court, to daringly show some of his fledgeling
poems to the great Polyphemus of literature. He and young Maltby, an
ancestor of the late Bishop of Durham, crept blushingly through the
quiet court, and on arriving at the sacred door on the west side,
ascended the steps and knocked at the door; but the awful echo of that
knocker struck terror to the young _debutants'_ hearts, and before Frank
Barber, the Doctor's old negro footman, could appear, the two lads, like
street-boys who had perpetrated a mischievous runaway knock, took to
their heels and darted back into noisy Fleet Str