Thus there was established a close bond of relationship between the great English scholar and writer and myself.  Year by year, and almost month by month, my life has kept pace in this century with his life in the last century.  I had only to open my Boswell at any time, and I knew just what Johnson at my age, twenty or fifty or seventy, was thinking and doing; what were his feelings about life; what changes the years had wrought in his body, his mind, his feelings, his companionships, his reputation.  It was for me a kind of unison between two instruments, both playing that old familiar air, “Life,”—­one a bassoon, if you will, and the other an oaten pipe, if you care to find an image for it, but still keeping pace with each other until the players both grew old and gray.  At last the thinner thread of sound is heard by itself, and its deep accompaniment rolls out its thunder no more.

I feel lonely now that my great companion and friend of so many years has left me.  I felt more intimately acquainted with him than I do with many of my living friends.  I can hardly remember when I did not know him.  I can see him in his bushy wig, exactly like that of the Reverend Dr. Samuel Cooper (who died in December, 1783) as Copley painted him,—­he hangs there on my wall, over the revolving bookcase.  His ample coat, too, I see, with its broad flaps and many buttons and generous cuffs, and beneath it the long, still more copiously buttoned waistcoat, arching in front of the fine crescentic, almost semi-lunar Falstaffian prominence, involving no less than a dozen of the above-mentioned buttons, and the strong legs with their sturdy calves, fitting columns of support to the massive body and solid, capacious brain enthroned over it.  I can hear him with his heavy tread as he comes in to the Club, and a gap is widened to make room for his portly figure.  “A fine day,” says Sir Joshua.  “Sir,” he answers, “it seems propitious, but the atmosphere is humid and the skies are nebulous,” at which the great painter smiles, shifts his trumpet, and takes a pinch of snuff.

Dear old massive, deep-voiced dogmatist and hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some ghastly Club, between you and the bony, “mighty-mouthed,” harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth!  The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the shores of Lethe.  I wish I could find our “spiritualist’s” paper in the Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what I shall find when it is opened.

Yes, my life is a little less precious to me since I have lost that dear old friend; and when the funeral train moves to Westminster Abbey next Saturday, for I feel as if this were 1784, and not 1884,—­I seem to find myself following the hearse, one of the silent mourners.

Among the events which have rendered the past year memorable to me has been the demolition of that venerable and interesting old dwelling-house, precious for its intimate association with the earliest stages of the war of the Revolution, and sacred to me as my birthplace and the home of my boyhood.