[799] ’Dec. 16, 1783.  I spent the afternoon with Dr. Johnson, who indeed is very ill, and whom I could hardly tell how to leave.  He was very, very kind.  Oh! what a cruel, heavy loss will he be!  Dec. 30.  I went to Dr. Johnson, and spent the evening with him.  He was very indifferent indeed.  There were some very disagreeable people with him; and he once affected me very much by turning suddenly to me, and grasping my hand and saying:—­“The blister I have tried for my breath has betrayed some very bad tokens; but I will not terrify myself by talking of them.  Ah! priez Dieu pour moi."’ Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary, ii. 293, 5.  ’I snatch,’ he wrote a few weeks later, ’every lucid interval, and animate myself with such amusements as the time offers.’ Piozzi Letters, ii. 349.

[800] He had written to her on Nov. 10.  See Croker’s Boswell, p. 742.

[801] Hawkins (Life, 562) says that this November Johnson said to him:—­’What a man am I, who have got the better of three diseases, the palsy, the gout, and the asthma, and can now enjoy the conversation of my friends, without the interruptions of weakness or pain.’

[802] ’The street [on London Bridge], which, before the houses fell to decay, consisted of handsome lofty edifices, pretty regularly built, was 20 feet broad, and the houses on each side generally 26-1/2 feet deep.’  After 1746 no more leases were granted, and the houses were allowed to run to ruin.  In 1756-7 they were all taken down.  Dodsley’s London and its Environs, ed. 1761, iv. 136-143.

[803] In Lowndes’s Bibl.  Man. i. 328 is given a list of nearly fifty of these books.  Some of them were reprinted by Stace in 1810-13 in 6 vols. quarto.  Dr. Franklin, writing of the books that he bought in his boyhood says:—­’My first acquisition was Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.  I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s Historical Collections; they were small chapmen’s books, and cheap.  Forty volumes in all.’  Franklin’s Memoirs, i. 17.

[804] He wrote to Mrs. Thrale this same day:—­’Alas, I had no sleep last night, and sit now panting over my paper. Dabit Deus his quoque finem.’ [’This too the Gods shall end.’  MORRIS, Virgil, Aeneids_, 1.199.] Piozzi Letters, ii. 347.

[805] Boswell’s purpose in this Letter was to recommend the Scotch to address the King to express their satisfaction that the East India Company Bill had been rejected by the House of Lords. Ib. p. 39.  ’Let us,’ he writes, ’upon this awful occasion think only of property and constitution;’ p. 42.  ‘Let me add,’ he says in concluding, ’that a dismission of the Portland Administration will probably disappoint an object which I have most ardently at heart;’ p. 42.  He was thinking no doubt of his ’expectations from the interest of an eminent person then in power’ (ante, p. 223.)