Even POPE was enamoured of a “scornful lady;” and, as Johnson observed, “polluted his will with female resentment.”  JOHNSON himself, we are told by one who knew him, “had always a metaphysical passion for one princess or other,—­the rustic Lucy Porter, or the haughty Molly Aston, or the sublimated methodistic Hill Boothby; and, lastly, the more charming Mrs. Thrale.”  Even in his advanced age, at the height of his celebrity, we hear his cries of lonely wretchedness.  “I want every comfort; my life is very solitary and very cheerless.  Let me know that I have yet a friend—­let us be kind to one another.”  But the “kindness” of distant friends is like the polar sun—­too far removed to warm us.  Those who have eluded the individual tenderness of the female, are tortured by an aching void in their feelings.  The stoic AKENSIDE, in his “Odes,” has preserved the history of a life of genius in a series of his own feelings.  One entitled, “At Study,” closes with these memorable lines:—­

  Me though no peculiar fair
  Touches with a lover’s care;
    Though the pride of my desire
  Asks immortal friendship’s name,
  Asks the palm of honest fame
    And the old heroic lyre;
  Though the day have smoothly gone,
  Or to letter’d leisure known,
    Or in social duty spent;
  Yet at the eve my lonely breast
  Seeks in vain for perfect rest,
    Languishes for true content.

If ever a man of letters lived in a state of energy and excitement which might raise him above the atmosphere of social love, it was assuredly the enthusiast, THOMAS HOLLIS, who, solely devoted to literature and to republicanism, was occupied in furnishing Europe and America with editions of his favourite authors.  He would not marry, lest marriage should interrupt the labours of his platonic politics.  But his extraordinary memoirs, while they show an intrepid mind in a robust frame, bear witness to the self-tormentor who had trodden down the natural bonds of domestic life.  Hence the deep “dejection of his spirits;” those incessant cries, that he has “no one to advise, assist, or cherish those magnanimous pursuits in him.”  At length he retreated into the country, in utter hopelessness.  “I go not into the country for attentions to agriculture as such, nor attentions of interest of any kind, which I have ever despised as such; but as a used man, to pass the remainder of a life in tolerable sanity and quiet, after having given up the flower of it, voluntarily, day, week, month, year after year, successive to each other, to public service, and being no longer able to sustain, in body or mind, the labours that I have chosen to go through without falling speedily into the greatest disorders, and it might be imbecility itself.  This is not colouring, but the exact plain truth.”

  Poor moralist, and what art thou? 
  A solitary fly! 
  Thy joys no glittering female meets,
  No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets.