evil that had passed in the course of the night's entertainment, but on the resemblance it bore to a debauch. However, a few turns in the Temple, and a breakfast at a neighbouring coffee house enabled me to overcome it. (Page 285.)
Those who were best acquainted with them both [Johnson and his wife] wondered that Johnson could derive no comfort [on her death] from the usual resources, reflections on the conditions of mortality, the instability of human happiness, resignation to the divine will, and other topics x ; and the more, when they con sidered, that their marriage was not one of those which in considerate young people call love-matches, and that she was more than old enough to be his mother 2 ; that, as their union had not been productive of children, the medium of a new relation between them was wanting ; that her inattention to some, at least, of the duties of a wife, were [sic] evident in the person of her husband, whose negligence of dress seemed never to have received the least correction from her, and who, in the sordidness of his apparel, and the complexion of his linen, even shamed her 3 . For these reasons I have often been inclined to think, that if this fondness of Johnson for his wife was not dissembled, it was a lesson that he had learned by rote 4 , and that, when he practised it, he knew not where to stop till he became ridiculous. It is true, he has celebrated her person in the word formosce, which he caused to be inscribed on her grave stone 5 ; but could he, with that imperfection in his sight which made him say, in the words of Milton, he never saw
1 ' Those common - place topics has little room for useless regret.'
which have never dried a single Letters, ii. 210.
tear.' Gibbon's Misc. Works, i. 2 She was forty-six, he two months
400. short of twenty-six. Life, i. 95, n. 2.
Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale on 3 For her ' particular reverence for
the death of her husband : * I do cleanliness,' see ante, i. 247.
not exhort you to reason yourself into 4 Boswell ' cannot conceive ' why
tranquillity. We must first pray, and Hawkins should make this assertion,
then labour ; first implore the bless- ' unless it proceeded from a want of
ing of God, and [then employ] those similar feelings in his own breast.'
means which he puts into our hands. Life, i. 234.
Cultivated ground has few weeds ; a s ' Formosae, cultae, ingeniosae,
mind occupied by lawful business piae.' Ib. 1.241, a. 2. See ante, i. 248.
the
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