[463] This letter cannot belong to this year.  In it Johnson says of his health, ‘at least it is not worse.’  But 1782 found him in very bad health; he passed almost the whole of the year ’in a succession of disorders’ (post, p. 156).  What he says of friendship renders it almost certain that the letter was written while he had still Thrale; and him he lost in April, 1781.  Had it been written after June, 1779, but before Thrale’s death, the account given of health would have been even better than it is (ante, iii. 397).  It belongs perhaps to the year 1777 or 1778.

[464] ’To a man who has survived all the companions of his youth ... this full-peopled world is a dismal solitude.’ Rambler, No. 69.

[465] See ante, i. 63.

[466] They met on these days in the years 1772, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 81, and 3.

[467] The ministry had resigned on the 20th. Ante, p. 139, note 1.

[468] Thirty-two years earlier he wrote in The Rambler, No. 53:-’In the prospect of poverty there is nothing but gloom and melancholy; the mind and body suffer together; its miseries bring no alleviation; it is a state in which every virtue is obscured, and in which no conduct can avoid reproach.’  And again in No. 57:—­’The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying, that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing.’  See ante. 441.

[469] See ante, p. 128.

[470] Hannah More wrote in April of this year (Memoirs, i. 249):—­’Poor Johnson is in a bad state of health.  I fear his constitution is broken up.’ (Yet in one week he dined out four times. Piozzi Letters, ii. 237.) At one of these dinners, ‘I urged him,’ she continues (ib. p. 251) ’to take a little wine.  He replied, “I can’t drink a little, child; therefore, I never touch it.  Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.”  He was very good-humoured and gay.  One of the company happened to say a word about poetry, “Hush, hush,” said he, “it is dangerous to say a word of poetry before her; it is talking of the art of war before Hannibal."’

[471] This book was published in 1781, and, according to Lowndes, reached its seventh edition by 1787.  See ante, i. 214.

[472] The clergyman’s letter was dated May 4. Gent.  Mag. 1786, p. 93.  Johnson is explaining the reason of his delay in acknowledging it.

[473] What follows appeared in the Morning Chronicle of May 29, 1782:—­’A correspondent having mentioned, in the Morning Chronicle of December 12, the last clause of the following paragraph, as seeming to favour suicide; we are requested to print the whole passage, that its true meaning may appear, which is not to recommend suicide but exercise.