On April 20, 1778, the very day of which this letter bears the date, he recorded:—­

’After a good night, as I am forced to reckon, I rose seasonably....  In reviewing my time from Easter, 1777, I found a very melancholy and shameful blank.  So little has been done that days and months are without any trace.  My health has, indeed, been very much interrupted.  My nights have been commonly not only restless, but painful and fatiguing. ....Some relaxation of my breast has been procured, I think, by opium, which, though it never gives me sleep, frees my breast from spasms.’ —­Prayers and Meditations, p. 169.  See ante, iii. 317, n. 1.

For Johnson’s advice about bleeding, see ante, iii. 152; and for possible occasions for ‘suspected letters,’ ante, i. 472, n. 4; and ii. 202, n. 2.

Mr. Mason’s ’sneering observation in his “Memoirs of Mr. William Whitehead"’

(Vol. i, p. 31.)

I had long failed to find a copy of these Memoirs, though I had searched in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the London Library, and had applied to the University Library at Cambridge, and the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh.  By the kindness of Mr. R. H. Soden Smith and Mr. R. F. Sketchley, I have obtained the following extract from a copy in the Dyce and Forster Libraries, in the South Kensington Museum:—­

’Conscious, notwithstanding, that to avoid writing what is unnecessary is, in these days, no just plea for silence in a biographer, I have some apology to make for having strewed these pages so thinly with the tittle-tattle of anecdote.  I am, however, too proud to make this apology to any person but my bookseller, who will be the only real loser by the ’Those readers, who believe that I do not write immediately under his pay, and who may have gathered from what they have already read, that I am not so passionately enamoured of Dr. Johnson’s biographical manner, as to take that for my model, have only to throw these pages aside, and wait till they are new-written by some one of his numerous disciples, who may follow his master’s example; and should more anecdote than I furnish him with be wanting (as was the Doctor’s case in his life of Mr. Gray), may make amends for it by those acid eructations of vituperative criticism, which are generated by unconcocted taste and intellectual indigestion.’—­Poems by William Whitehead, York, 1788 (vol. iii, p. 128).

With this ‘sneering observation,’ which Boswell might surely have passed over in silence, the Memoirs close.

Michael Johnson as a bookseller.

(Vol. i, p. 36, n. 3.)

Mr. R. F. Sketchley kindly informs me that in the Dyce and Forster Libraries at the South Kensington Museum there is a book with the following title:—­

S.  Shaw’s ‘Grammatica Anglo—­Romana’, London, printed for Michael Johnson, bookseller:  and are to be sold at his shops in Litchfield and Uttoxiter in Stafford-shire; and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, 1687.