[189] ’A youthful passion for abstracted devotion should not be encouraged.’ Ante, ii. 10.  The hermit in Rasselas (ch. 21) says:—­’The life of a solitary man will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout.’  In Johnson’s Works (1787), xi. 203, we read that ’Johnson thought worse of the vices of retirement than of those of society.’  Southey (Life of Wesley, i. 39) writes:—­’Some time before John Wesley’s return to the University, he had travelled many miles to see what is called “a serious man.”  This person said to him, “Sir, you wish to serve God and go to heaven.  Remember, you cannot serve Him alone; you must therefore find companions or make them; the Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.”  Wesley never forgot these words.’

[190] [Erga neon, boulai de meson euchai de gerunton. Hesiodi Fragmenta, Lipsiae 1840, p. 371]

     Let youth in deeds, in counsel man engage;
     Prayer is the proper duty of old age.

BOSWELL.

[191] One ‘sorrowful scene’ Johnson was perhaps too late in the year to see.  Wesley, who visited St. Andrews on May 27, 1776, during the vacation, writes (Journal, iv. 75):—­’What is left of St. Leonard’s College is only a heap of ruins.  Two colleges remain.  One of them has a tolerable square; but all the windows are broke, like those of a brothel.  We were informed the students do this before they leave the college.’

[192] ’He was murdered by the ruffians of reformation, in the manner of which Knox has given what he himself calls a merry narrative.’  Johnson’s Works, ix. 3.  In May 1546 the Cardinal had Wishart the Reformer killed, and at the end of the same month he got killed himself.

[193] Johnson says (Works, ix. 5):—­’The doctor, by whom it was shown, hoped to irritate or subdue my English vanity by telling me that we had no such repository of books in England.’  He wrote to Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi Letters, i. 113):—­’For luminousness and elegance it may vie at least with the new edifice at Streatham.’  ‘The new edifice’ was, no doubt, the library of which he took the touching farewell. Ante, iv. 158.

[194] ’Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past, without looking forward to the future, an incessant wish that something were otherwise than it has been, a tormenting and harassing want of some enjoyment or possession which we have lost, and which no endeavours can possibly regain.’ The Rambler, No. 47.  He wrote to Mrs. Thrale on the death of her son:—­’Do not indulge your sorrow; try to drive it away by either pleasure or pain; for, opposed to what you are feeling, many pains will become pleasures.’ Piozzi Letters, i. 310.

[195] See ante, ii. 151.

[196] The Pembroke College grace was written by Camden.  It was as follows:—­’Gratias tibi agimus, Deus misericors, pro acceptis a tua bonitate alimentis; enixe comprecantes ut serenissimum nostrum Regem Georgium, totam regiam familiam, populumque tuum universum tuta in pace semper custodies.’