had cause to regret her marriage.  She was reconciled to her daughters sufficiently to renew a friendly intercourse; but the elder ones set up a separate establishment.  Piozzi died not long afterwards.  She was still a vivacious old lady, who celebrated her 80th birthday by a ball, and is supposed at that ripe age to have made an offer of marriage to a young actor.  She died in May, 1821, leaving all that she could dispose of to a nephew of Piozzi’s, who had been naturalised in England.

Meanwhile Johnson was rapidly approaching the grave.  His old inmates, Levett and Miss Williams, had gone before him; Goldsmith and Garrick and Beauclerk had become memories of the past; and the gloom gathered thickly around him.  The old man clung to life with pathetic earnestness.  Though life had been often melancholy, he never affected to conceal the horror with which he regarded death.  He frequently declared that death must be dreadful to every reasonable man.  “Death, my dear, is very dreadful,” he says simply in a letter to Lucy Porter in the last year of his life.  Still later he shocked a pious friend by admitting that the fear oppressed him.  Dr. Adams tried the ordinary consolation of the divine goodness, and went so far as to suggest that hell might not imply much positive suffering.  Johnson’s religious views were of a different colour.  “I am afraid,” he said, “I may be one of those who shall be damned.”  “What do you mean by damned?” asked Adams.  Johnson replied passionately and loudly, “Sent to hell, sir, and punished everlastingly.”  Remonstrances only deepened his melancholy, and he silenced his friends by exclaiming in gloomy agitation, “I’ll have no more on’t!” Often in these last years he was heard muttering to himself the passionate complaint of Claudio, “Ah, but to die and go we know not whither!” At other times he was speaking of some lost friend, and saying, “Poor man—­and then he died!” The peculiar horror of death, which seems to indicate a tinge of insanity, was combined with utter fearlessness of pain.  He called to the surgeons to cut deeper when performing a painful operation, and shortly before his death inflicted such wounds upon himself in hopes of obtaining relief as, very erroneously, to suggest the idea of suicide.  Whilst his strength remained, he endeavoured to disperse melancholy by some of the old methods.  In the winter of 1783-4 he got together the few surviving members of the old Ivy Lane Club, which had flourished when he was composing the Dictionary; but the old place of meeting had vanished, most of the original members were dead, and the gathering can have been but melancholy.  He started another club at the Essex Head, whose members were to meet twice a week, with the modest fine of threepence for non-attendance.  It appears to have included a rather “strange mixture” of people, and thereby to have given some scandal to Sir John Hawkins and even to Reynolds.  They thought that his craving for society, increased by his loss of Streatham, was leading him to undignified concessions.