’Exercise cannot secure us from that dissolution to which we are decreed:  but while the soul and body continue united, it can make the association pleasing, and give probable hopes that they shall be disjoined by an easy separation.  It was a principle among the ancients, that acute diseases are from Heaven, and chronical from ourselves; the dart of death, indeed, falls from Heaven, but we poison it by our own misconduct:  to die is the fate of man; but to die with lingering anguish is generally his folly.’ [The Rambler, No. 85.] BOSWELL.

[474] The Correspondence may be seen at length in the Gent.  Mag. Feb. 1786.  BOSWELL.  Johnson, advising Dr. Taylor ’to take as much exercise as he can bear,’ says:-’I take the true definition of exercise to be labour without weariness.’ Notes and Queries, 6th S. v. 461.

[475] Here he met Hannah More.  ‘You cannot imagine,’ she writes (Memoirs, i. 261), ’with what delight he showed me every part of his own college.  Dr. Adams had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry.  We spent the day and evening at his house.  After dinner, Johnson begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one show it me but himself.  “This was my room; this Shenstone’s.”  Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who had been of his college, “In short,” said he, “we were a nest of singing-birds.”  When we came into the common-room, we spied a fine large print of Johnson, hung up that very morning, with this motto:—­And is not Johnson ours, himself a host? Under which stared you in the face—­From Miss More’s “Sensibility.”  This little incident amused us; but, alas!  Johnson looks very ill indeed—­spiritless and wan.  However, he made an effort to be cheerful.’  Miss Adams wrote on June 14, 1782:—­’On Wednesday we had here a delightful blue-stocking party.  Dr. and Mrs. Kennicott and Miss More, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Henderson, &c., dined here.  Poor Dr. Johnson is in very bad health, but he exerted himself as much as he could, and being very fond of Miss More, he talked a good deal, and every word he says is worth recording.  He took great delight in showing Miss More every part of Pembroke College, and his own rooms, &c., and told us many things about himself when here. ..  June 19, 1782.  We dined yesterday for the last time in the company with Dr. Johnson; he went away to-day.  A warm dispute arose; it was about cider or wine freezing, and all the spirit retreating to the center.’ Pemb.  Coll.  MSS.

[476] ’I never retired to rest without feeling the justness of the Spanish proverb, “Let him who sleeps too much borrow the pillow of a debtor."’ Johnson’s Works, iv. 14.

[477] See ante, i. 441.

[478] Which I celebrated in the Church of England chapel at Edinburgh, founded by Lord Chief Baron Smith, of respectable and pious memory.  BOSWELL.

[479] See ante, p. 80.

[480] The Reverend Mr. Temple, Vicar of St. Gluvias, Cornwall.  BOSWELL.  See ante, i. 436, and ii. 316.