These ten volumes ended Dr. Hill’s labours as an editor of Johnson’s Life and Personalia, but did not leave him free.  He had set his mind on an edition of the Lives of the Poets.  This, to the regret of all who knew him either personally or as a Johnsonian, he did not live to see through the press.  But it is soon to appear, and will be a storehouse of anecdote and a miracle of cross-references.  A poet who has been dead a century or two is amazing good company—­at least, he never fails to be so when Johnson tells us as much of his story as he can remember without undue research, with that irony of his, that vast composure, that humorous perception of the greatness and the littleness of human life, that make the brief records of a Spratt, a Walsh, and a Fenton so divinely entertaining.  It is an immense testimony to the healthiness of the Johnsonian atmosphere that Dr. Hill, who breathed it almost exclusively for a quarter of a century and upwards, showed no symptoms either of moral deterioration or physical exhaustion.  His appetite to the end was as keen as ever, nor was his temper obviously the worse.  The task never became a toil, not even a tease.  ‘You have but two subjects,’ said Johnson to Boswell:  ‘yourself and myself.  I am sick of both.’  Johnson hated to be talked about, or to have it noticed what he ate or what he had on.  For a hundred years now last past he has been more talked about and noticed than anybody else.  But Dr. Hill never grew sick of Dr. Johnson.

The Johnsonian Miscellanies[A] open with the Prayers and Meditations, first published by the Rev. Dr. Strahan in 1785.  Strahan was the Vicar of Islington, and into his hands at an early hour one morning Dr. Johnson, then approaching his last days, put the papers, ’with instructions for committing them to the press and with a promise to prepare a sketch of his own life to accompany them.’  This promise the doctor was not able to keep, and shortly after his death his reverend friend published the papers just as they were put into his hands.  One wonders he had the heart to do it, but the clerical mind is sometimes strangely insensitive to the privacy of thought.  But, as in the case of most indelicate acts, you cannot but be glad the thing was done.  The original manuscript is at Pembroke College, Oxford.  In these Prayers and Meditations we see an awful figure.  The solitary Johnson, perturbed, tortured, oppressed, in distress of body and of mind, full of alarms for the future both in this world and the next, teased by importunate and perplexing thoughts, harassed by morbid infirmities, vexed by idle yet constantly recurring scruples, with an inherited melancholy and a threatened sanity, is a gloomy and even a terrible picture, and forms a striking contrast to the social hero, the triumphant dialectician of Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Madame D’Arblay.  Yet it is relieved by its inherent humanity, its fellowship and feeling.  Dr. Johnson’s piety is delightfully full of human nature—­far too full to please the poet Cowper, who wrote of the Prayers and Meditations as follows: