Prayers and Meditations.
��Grant this, O Lord, for Jesus
��the residue of my life in thy fear. Christ's sake. Amen '.
19.
March 28, 1753. I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty's death, with prayer and tears in the morning. In the evening I prayed for her conditionally, if it were lawful 2 .
20.
Apr. 3, 1753. I began the second vol. of my Dictionary, room being left in the first for Preface, Grammar, and History, none of them yet begun.
O God, who hast hitherto supported me, enable me to proceed in this labour, and in the whole task of my present state ; that when I shall render up, at the last day, an account of the talent
��1 Life, i. 251.
Bos well in his Hebrides (Life, v. 53) says that Johnson, on starting from Edinburgh, left behind in an open drawer in Boswell's house 'one volume of a pretty full and curious diary of his life of which I have a few fragments.' He also states (tb. iv. 405) : ' I owned to him, that having accidentally seen them [two quarto volumes of his Life} I had read a great deal in them.' It would seem that he had also transcribed a portion, for he says that the above entry he ' transcribed from that part of the diary which Johnson burnt a few days before his death.'
2 Life, \. 236.
Following the change of style he kept the 28th instead of the i7th.
For prayers for the dead and the doctrine of a middle state, see Life, i. 240; ii. 104, 162; v. 356. 'John Rolland (writes Ramsay of Ochter- tyre) showed me an excerpt from one of Boswell's settlements, in which he requests the prayers of all good Christians for his soul after its de parture which, he says, may benefit
��it, and cannot possibly do it harm.' Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eigh teenth Century, i. 175.
Hume, writing of the articles of faith decided by Convocation in 1536, says : ' The article with regard to purgatory contains the most curious jargon, ambiguity, and hesitation, arising from the mixture of opposite tenets. It was to this purpose : "Since according to due order of charity and the book of Maccabees and divers ancient authors it is a very good and charitable deed to pray for souls departed, and since such a practice has been maintained in the Church from the beginning ; all bishops and teachers should in struct the people not to be grieved for the continuance of the same. But since the place where departed souls are retained before they reach Para dise, as well as the nature of their pains, is left uncertain by Scripture, all such questions are to be sub mitted to God, to whose mercy it is meet and convenient to commend the deceased, trusting that he ac- cepteth our prayers for them.' Hist, of Eng. ed. 1773, iv. 167.
committed
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