[508] ’Jan. 4, 1783.  Dr. Johnson came so very late that we had all given him up; he was very ill, and only from an extreme of kindness did he come at all.  When I went up to him to tell how sorry I was to find him so unwell, “Ah,” he cried, taking my hand and kissing it, “who shall ail anything when Cecilia is so near?  Yet you do not think how poorly I am.”

All dinner time he hardly opened his mouth but to repeat to me:—­“Ah! you little know how ill I am.”  He was excessively kind to me in spite of all his pain.’  Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary, ii. 228. Cecilia was the name of her second novel (post, May 26, 1783).  On Jan. 10 he thus ended a letter to Mr. Nichols:—­’Now I will put you in a way of shewing me more kindness.  I have been confined by ilness (sic) a long time, and sickness and solitude make tedious evenings.  Come sometimes and see, Sir,

’Your humble servant,

‘SAM.  JOHNSON.’

MS. in the British Museum.

[509] ’Dr. Johnson found here [at Auchinleck] Baxter’s Anacreon, which he told me he had long inquired for in vain, and began to suspect there was no such book.’  Boswell’s Hebrides, Nov.2.  See post, under Sept. 29, 1783.

[510] ’The delight which men have in popularity, fame, honour, submission, and subjection of other men’s minds, wills, or affections, although these things may be desired for other ends, seemeth to be a thing in itself, without contemplation of consequence, grateful and agreeable to the nature of man.’  Bacon’s Nat.  Hist. Exper.  No. 1000.  See ante, ii. 178.

[511] In a letter to Dr. Taylor on Jan. 21 of this year, he attacked the scheme of equal representation.’  Pitt, on May 7, 1782, made his first reform motion.  Johnson thus ended his letter:—­’If the scheme were more reasonable, this is not a time for innovation.  I am afraid of a civil war.  The business of every wise man seems to be now to keep his ground.’ Notes and Queries, 6th S. v. 481.

[512] See ante, i. 429, post, 170, and Boswell’s Hebrides, Sept. 30.

[513] The year after this conversation the General Election of 1784 was held, which followed on the overthrow of the Coalition Ministry and the formation of the Pitt Ministry in December, 1783.  The ‘King’s friends’ were in a minority of one in the last great division in the old Parliament; in the motion on the Address in the new Parliament they had a majority of 168. Parl.  Hist. xxiv. 744, 843.  Miss Burney, writing in Nov. 1788, when the King was mad, says that one of his physicians ’moved me even to tears by telling me that none of their own lives would be safe if the King did not recover, so prodigiously high ran the tide of affection and loyalty.  All the physicians received threatening letters daily, to answer for the safety of their monarch with their lives!  Sir G. Baker had already been stopped in his carriage by the mob, to give an account of