’I am, Sir, Your most humble servant,
‘SAM.  JOHNSON.’ 
’Nov. 30, 1774.

’Tell me your mind:  if you will cancel it I will write something to fill up the vacuum.  Please to direct to the borough.’

Mr. Strahan’s ‘new engagement’ was in the House of Commons at Westminster, to which he had been elected for the first time as member for Malmesbury.  The new Parliament had met on Nov. 29, the day before the date of Johnson’s letter (Parl.  Hist, xviii. 23).

The leaf that Johnson cancelled contained pages 47, 48 in the first edition of his Journey to the Western Islands.  It corresponds with pages 19-30 in vol. ix. of Johnson’s Works (ed. 1825), beginning with the words ‘could not enter,’ and ending ‘imperfect constitution.’  The excision is marked by a ridge of paper, which was left that the revised leaf might be attached to it.  Johnson describes how the lead which covered the Cathedrals of Elgin and Aberdeen had been stripped off by the order of the Scottish Council, and shipped to be sold in Holland.  He continues:—­’Let us not however make too much haste to despise our neighbours.  Our own cathedrals are mouldering by unregarded dilapidation.  It seems to be part of the despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments of sacred magnificence, and we are in danger of doing that deliberately, which the Scots did not do but in the unsettled state of an imperfect constitution.’

In the copy of the first edition in the Bodleian Library, which had belonged to Gough the antiquary, there is written in his hand, as a foot-note to ‘neighbours’:  ’There is now, as I have heard, a body of men not less decent or virtuous than the Scottish Council, longing to melt the lead of an English Cathedral.  What they shall melt, it were just that they should swallow.’  It can scarcely be doubted that this is the suppressed passage.  The English Cathedral to which Johnson refers was, I believe, Lichfield.  ‘The roof,’ says Harwood (History of Lichfield, p. 75), ‘was formerly covered with lead, but now with slate.’  Addenbroke, who had been Dean since 1745, was, we may assume, very old at the time when Johnson wrote.  I had at first thought it not unlikely that it was Dr. Thomas Newton, Dean of St. Paul’s and Bishop of Bristol, who was censured.  He was a Lichfield man, and was known to Johnson (see ante, iv. 285, n. 3).  He was, however, only seventy years old.  I am informed moreover by the Rev. W. Sparrow Simpson, the learned editor of Documents illustrating the History of St. Paul’s, that it is very improbable that at this time the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s entertained such a thought.

My friend Mr. C. E. Doble has kindly furnished me with the following curious parallel to Johnson’s suppressed wish about the molten lead.

’The chappell of our Lady [at Wells], late repayred by Stillington, a place of great reverence and antiquitie, was likewise defaced, and such was their thirst after lead (I would they had drunke it scalding) that they tooke the dead bodies of bishops out of their leaden coffins, and cast abroad the carkases skarce throughly putrified.’—­Harington’s Nuga Antiquae, ii. 147 (ed. 1804).