The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [620]
‘My conviction of your skill, and my belief of your friendship, determine me to intreat your opinion and advice.’ – ‘In this state I with great earnestness desire you to tell me what is to be done. Excision is doubtless necessary to the cure, and I know not any means of palliation. The operation is doubtless painful; but is it dangerous? The pain I hope to endure with decency; but I am loth to put life into much hazard.’ – ‘By representing the gout as an antagonist to the palsy, you have said enough to make it welcome. This is not strictly the first fit, but I hope it is as good as the first; for it is the second that ever confined me; and the first was ten years ago, much less fierce and fiery than this.’ – ‘Write, dear Sir, what you can, to inform or encourage me. The operation is not delayed by any fears or objections of mine.’
‘TO BENNET LANGTON, ESQ.
‘DEAR SIR, – You may very reasonably charge me with insensibility of your kindness, and that of Lady Rothes, since I have suffered so much time to pass without paying any acknowledgement. I now, at last, return my thanks; and why I did it not sooner I ought to tell you. I went into Wiltshire as soon as I well could, and was there much employed in palliating my own malady. Disease produces much selfishness. A man in pain is looking after ease; and lets most other things go as chance shall dispose of them. In the meantime I have lost a companion,a to whom I have had recourse for domestick amusement for thirty years, and whose variety of knowledge never was exhausted; and now return to a habitation vacant and desolate. I carry about a very troublesome and dangerous complaint, which admits no cure but by the chirurgical knife. Let me have your prayers. I am, &c.
‘London, Sept. 20, 1783.’ ‘SAM. JOHNSON.’
Happily the complaint abated without his being put to the torture of amputation. But we must surely admire the manly resolution which he discovered while it hung over him.
In a letter to the same gentleman he writes, ‘The gout has within these four days come upon me with a violence which I never experienced before. It made me helpless as an infant.’ And in another, having mentioned Mrs. Williams, he says, – ‘whose death following that of Levett, has now made my house a solitude. She left her little substance to a charity-school. She is, I hope, where there is neither darkness, nor want, nor sorrow.’
I wrote to him, begging to know the state of his health, and mentioned that Baxter’s Anacreon, ‘which is in the library at Auchinleck, was, I find, collated by my father in 1727, with the MS. belonging to the University of Leyden, and he has made a number of Notes upon it. Would you advise me to publish a new edition of it?’
His answer was dated September 30: –
‘You should not make your letters such rarities, when you know, or might know, the uniform state of my health. It is very long since I heard from you; and that I have not answered is a very insufficient reason for the silence of a friend. Your Anacreon is a very uncommon book; neither London nor Cambridge can supply a copy of that edition. Whether it should be reprinted, you cannot do better than consult Lord Hailes. – Besides my constant and radical disease, I have been for these ten days much harrassed with the gout; but that has now remitted. I hope God will yet grant me a little longer life, and make me less unfit to appear before him.’
He this autumn received a visit from the celebrated Mrs. Siddons. He gives this account of it in one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale: –
‘Mrs. Siddons, in her visit to me, behaved with great modesty and propriety, and left nothing behind her to be censured or despised. Neither praise nor money, the two