[725] ’Aug. 13, 1783.  I am now broken with disease, without the alleviation of familiar friendship or domestic society.  I have no middle state between clamour and silence, between general conversation and self-tormenting solitude.  Levett is dead, and poor Williams is making haste to die.’ Piozzi Letters, ii.301.  ’Aug. 20.  This has been a day of great emotion; the office of the Communion of the Sick has been performed in poor Mrs. Williams’s chamber.’ Ib.  ’Sept. 22.  Poor Williams has, I hope, seen the end of her afflictions.  She acted with prudence and she bore with fortitude.  She has left me.

     “Thou thy weary [worldly] task hast done,
      Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.”

      [Cymbeline, act iv. sc. 2.]

Had she had good humour and prompt elocution, her universal curiosity and comprehensive knowledge would have made her the delight of all that knew her.’ Ib. p. 311.

[726] Johnson (Works, viii. 354) described in 1756 such a companion as he found in Mrs. Williams.  He quotes Pope’s Epitaph on Mrs. Corbet, and continues:—­’I have always considered this as the most valuable of all Pope’s epitaphs; the subject of it is a character not discriminated by any shining or eminent peculiarities; yet that which really makes, though not the splendour, the felicity of life, and that which every wise man will choose for his final and lasting companion in the languor of age, in the quiet of privacy, when he departs, weary and disgusted, from the ostentatious, the volatile and the vain.  Of such a character which the dull overlook, and the gay despise, it was fit that the value should be made known, and the dignity established.’  See ante, i.232.

[727] Pr. and Med. p. 226.  BOSWELL.

[728] I conjecture that Mr. Bowles is the friend.  The account follows close on the visit to his house, and contains a mention of Johnson’s attendance at a lecture at Salisbury.

[729] A writer in Notes and Queries, 1st S. xii. 149, says:—­’Mr. Bowles had married a descendant of Oliver Cromwell, viz.  Dinah, the fourth daughter of Sir Thomas Frankland, and highly valued himself upon this connection with the Protector.’  He adds that Mr. Bowles was an active Whig.

[730] Mr. Malone observes, ’This, however, was certainly a mistake, as appears from the Memoirs published by Mr. Noble.  Had Johnson been furnished with the materials which the industry of that gentleman has procured, and with others which, it it is believed, are yet preserved in manuscript, he would, without doubt, have produced a most valuable and curious history of Cromwell’s life.’  BOSWELL.

[731] See ante, ii.358, note 3.

[732] Short Notes for Civil Conversation.  Spedding’s Bacon, vii.109.