We dined with Dr. Butter, whose lady is daughter of my cousin Sir John Douglas, whose grandson is now presumptive heir of the noble family of Queensberry.  Johnson and he had a good deal of medical conversation.  Johnson said, he had somewhere or other given an account of Dr. Nichols’s discourse De Animia Medica.  He told us ’that whatever a man’s distemper was, Dr. Nichols would not attend him as a physician, if his mind was not at ease; for he believed that no medicines would have any influence.  He once attended a man in trade, upon whom he found none of the medicines he prescribed had any effect:  he asked the man’s wife privately whether his affairs were not in a bad way?  She said no.  He continued his attendance some time, still without success.  At length the man’s wife told him, she had discovered that her husband’s affairs were in a bad way.  When Goldsmith was dying, Dr. Turton said to him, “Your pulse is in greater disorder than it should be, from the degree of fever which you have:  is your mind at ease?” Goldsmith answered it was not.’

Dr. Johnson told us at tea, that when some of Dr. Dodd’s pious friends were trying to console him by saying that he was going to leave ’a wretched world,’ he had honesty enough not to join in the cant:—­’No, no, (said he,) it has been a very agreeable world to me.’  Johnson added, ’I respect Dodd for thus speaking the truth; for, to be sure, he had for several years enjoyed a life of great voluptuousness.

He told us, that Dodd’s city friends stood by him so, that a thousand pounds were ready to be given to the gaoler, if he would let him escape.  He added, that he knew a friend of Dodd’s, who walked about Newgate for some time on the evening before the day of his execution, with five hundred pounds in his pocket, ready to be paid to any of the turnkeys who could get him out:  but it was too late; for he was watched with much circumspection.  He said, Dodd’s friends had an image of him made of wax, which was to have been left in his place; and he believed it was carried into the prison.

Johnson disapproved of Dr. Dodd’s leaving the world persuaded that The Convict’s Address to his unhappy Brethren was of his own writing.  ’But, Sir, (said I,) you contributed to the deception; for when Mr. Seward expressed a doubt to you that it was not Dodd’s own, because it had a great deal more force of mind in it than any thing known to be his, you answered,—­“Why should you think so?  Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."’ Johnson.  Sir, as Dodd got it from me to pass as his own, while that could do him any good, there was an implied promise that I should not own it.  To own it, therefore, would have been telling a lie, with the addition of breach of promise, which was worse than simply telling a lie to make it be believed it was Dodd’s.  Besides, Sir, I did not directly tell a lie:  I left the matter uncertain.  Perhaps I thought that Seward would not believe it the less to be mine for what I said; but I would not put it in his power to say I had owned it.’