to such persons, if that heavenly physician, by his grace and mercy, (whose aid alone avails,) do not heal and help them. One day of such grief as theirs, is as an hundred years it is a plague of the sense, a convulsion of the soul, an epitome of hell; and if there be a hell upon earth it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart! No bodily torture is like unto it, all other griefs are swallowed up in this great Euripus. I say of the melancholy man, he is the cream and quintessence of human adversity. All other diseases are trifles to hypochondria; it is the pith and marrow of them all! A melancholy man is the true Prometheus, bound to Caucasus; the true Tityus, whose bowels are still devoured by a vulture."

CHAPTER XVII.

JOHNSON CONTINUED.

Our attention was some time ago called to the peculiarities of Johnson's malady, by an attack which we heard made on his feelings and infirmities by one of the greatest of our living poets: and one of those literary ephemera who flutter round the light of learning.

We heard it asserted that Johnson "was far behind the intelligence of his age; that his mind was so imbued with the legends of the nursery, and the fables of superstition, that his belief extended to the visionary phantoms of both." In short, that he had neither the heavenly armour of religion, which is hope and confidence in the goodness of the Deity—nor the earthly shield of honour, which is freedom of spirit and fearlessness of death.

The minor critic, with supercilious air, spoke of the ferocious powers of the great bear of learning, the unpresentable person of the "respectable Hottentot," who had knocked down his bookseller with one of his own folios. He inveighed against the coarseness of his manners, the tyranny of his conversation, and the uncouthness of his appearance: had the present been his day, he would hardly be tolerated in good society. An au thor so ignorant of the “lesser morals" as to be capable of thrusting his fingers into a sugar-basin, of rolling about his huge frame in company, to the great peril of every thing around him, would certainly not be endured

westward of Temple Bar; and none but Boswell could be mean enough to put up with his vulgar arrogance.

We listened with patience so long as the bard was disparaging his brother; but when the minnow of literature had the audacity to assail the Triton of erudition, to use an elegant Scotticism- —our corruption rose, and though the memory of the doctor had been reviled no less by the bard than the gentleman just spoken of, we could not help expressing an opinion in an audible voice, that it was something after all to be torn to pieces by a lion, but to be gnawed to death by a rat, was too loathsome a fate for the worst malefactor.

That an author of the doctor's outward man and uncompromising manners would cut a very sorry figure in Holland house, is very possible. If Foscolo got into irretrievable disgrace for standing on a chair in the library to reach a volume, how surely would the doctor, by some unhappy exploit, some sturdy opinion or unfortunate disposition of his members, bring the vengeance of offended patronage, and outraged delicacy, on his head!

Nevertheless, Johnson was not behind the intelligence of his age, though his manners were uncompromising, his energy of character oftentimes offensive, his person ungainly, though his "local habitation" had been even eastward of Temple Bar, and though his "name" has become associated in some minds with the idea of a recondite savage. There is something in the expression "uncouth appearance" which implies vulgarity, and therefore is it that one like Pope, with a distorted figure, or like Byron with a deformed foot, is less subject to disagreeable observations, than one so unfashionably made up" as the great lexicographer. The uncouthness of Johnson's appearance, however, was the effect of dis

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ease, and arose from no natural imperfection: "His countenance," Boswell tells us, was naturally well formed, till he unfortunately became afflicted with scrofula, which disfigured his features, and so injured his visual nerves, that he completely lost the sight of one of his eyes." Miss Seward says, that "when at the free school, he appeared a huge, over-grown, mis-shapen stripling, but still a stupendous stripling, who even at that early life maintained his opinions with sturdy and arrogant fierceness." But the picture is overcharged, and is probably painted in the colours of his subsequent character. At a very early age he was attacked with a nervous disorder which produced twitchings and convulsive motions of the limbs that continued during life, and which have been noticed and ridiculed as eccentric habits, and tricks of gesture, that he had accustomed himself to. Sir Joshua Reynolds says, "these tricks of Dr. Johnson proceeded from a habit which he had indulged himself in, of accompanying his thoughts with certain untoward actions, and those actions always appeared to me as if they were meant to reprobate some part of his past conduct." An odd way certainly of reprobating it; but there is no occasion to refer these motions to so mysterious an origin: the cause was unquestionably the disorder of his nervous system. The violence of his temper, and the gloom which overcast his religious feelings throughout his life, were no less evidently the effects of that morbid irritability which ultimately became a fixed and permanent hypochondria. "This malady," says his biographer, "was long lurking in his constitution, and to it may be ascribed many of his peculiarities in after life: they gathered such strength in his twentieth year as to afflict him dreadfully. Before he quitted Lichfield, he

was overwhelmed with his disorder, with perpetual fretfulness, and mental despondency, which made existence miserable. From this malady he never perfectly recovered."

So great was the dejection of his spirits about this period, that he described himself at times as being unable to distinguish the hour upon the town-clock. As he advanced in life this depression increased in intensity, and differed very little from the early symptoms of Cowper's malady: the only difference was in the quality of the minds which the disease had to prey upon; the different powers of resistance of a vigorous and a vacillating intellect. On one occasion Johnson was found by Dr. Adams in a deplorable condition, sighing, groaning, and talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room; and when questioned about his state, declaring "he would consent to have a limb amputated to recover his spirits."

The limits which separate melancholy from madness were brought to so narrow a compass, that had his malady advanced another step, it is lamentable to think that its mastery over the powerful mind of the sufferer would probably have been permanent and complete. The tortured instrument of reason was wound up to its highest pitch, and nothing was wanting to jangle the concord of its sweet sounds but another impulse of his disorder. His peace was wholly destroyed by doubts and terrors: he speaks of his past life as a barren waste of his time, with some disorders of body and disturbance of mind very near to madness. "His melancholy," says Murphy, "was a constitutional malady, derived, perhaps, from his father, who was at times overcast with a gloom that bordered on insanity." When to this is added, that