Not very long after the institution of our club, Sir Joshua Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick.  ’I like it much, (said he), I think I shall be of you.’  When Sir Joshua mentioned this to Dr. Johnson, he was much displeased with the actor’s conceit.  ’He’ll be of us, (said Johnson) how does he know we will permit him?  The first Duke in England has no right to hold such language.’  However, when Garrick was regularly proposed some time afterwards, Johnson, though he had taken a momentary offence at his arrogance, warmly and kindly supported him, and he was accordingly elected, was a most agreeable member, and continued to attend our meetings to the time of his death.

It was Johnson’s custom to observe certain days with a pious abstraction; viz.  New-year’s-day, the day of his wife’s death, Good Friday, Easter-day, and his own birth-day.  He this year says:—­’I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving; having, from the earliest time almost that I can remember, been forming schemes of a better life.  I have done nothing.  The need of doing, therefore, is pressing, since the time of doing is short.  O god, grant me to resolve aright, and to keep my resolutions, for Jesus Christ’s sake.  Amen.’

About this time he was afflicted with a very severe return of the hypochondriack disorder, which was ever lurking about him.  He was so ill, as, notwithstanding his remarkable love of company, to be entirely averse to society, the most fatal symptom of that malady.  Dr. Adams told me, that as an old friend he was admitted to visit him, and that he found him in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room to room.  He then used this emphatical expression of the misery which he felt:  ’I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits.’

Talking to himself was, indeed, one of his singularities ever since I knew him.  I was certain that he was frequently uttering pious ejaculations; for fragments of the Lord’s Prayer have been distinctly overheard.  His friend Mr. Thomas Davies, of whom Churchill says,

‘That Davies hath a very pretty wife,’

when Dr. Johnson muttered ‘lead us not into temptation,’ used with waggish and gallant humour to whisper Mrs. Davies, ’You, my dear, are the cause of this.’

He had another particularity, of which none of his friends ever ventured to ask an explanation.  It appeared to me some superstitious habit, which he had contracted early, and from which he had never called upon his reason to disentangle him.  This was his anxious care to go out or in at a door or passage by a certain number of steps from a certain point, or at least so as that either his right or his left foot, (I am not certain which,) should constantly make the first actual movement when he came close to the door or passage.  Thus I conjecture:  for I have, upon innumerable occasions, observed him