[916] Epistles to Mr. Pope, ii. 165.

[917] See an account of him, in a sermon by the Reverend Mr. Agutter.  BOSWELL.  This sermon was published in 1788.  In Hannah More’s Memoirs (i. 217), Henderson is described as ’a mixture of great sense, which discovered uncommon parts and learning, with a tincture of nonsense of the most extravagant kind.  He believes in witches and apparitions, as well as in judicial astronomy.’  Mrs. Kennicott writes (ib. p. 220):—­’I think if Dr. Johnson had the shaking him about, he would shake out his nonsense, and set his sense a-working.  ’He never got out into the world, says Dr. Hall, the Master of Pembroke College, having died in College in 1788.

[918] This was the second Lord Lyttelton, commonly known as ’the wicked Lord Lyttelton.’  Fox described him to Rogers as ’a very bad man—­downright wicked.’  Rogers’s Table Talk, p. 95.  He died Nov. 27, 1779.  Horace Walpole (Letters, vii. 292) wrote to Mason on Dec. 11 of that year:—­’If you can send us any stories of ghosts out of the North, they will be very welcome.  Lord Lyttelton’s vision has revived the taste; though it seems a little odd that an apparition should despair of being able to get access to his Lordship’s bed in the shape of a young woman, without being forced to use the disguise of a robin-red-breast.’  In the Gent.  Mag. 1815, i. 597, and 1816, ii. 421, accounts are given of this vision.  In the latter account it is said that ’he saw a bird fluttering, and afterwards a woman appeared in white apparel, and said, “Prepare to die; you will not exist three days."’ Mrs. Piozzi also wrote a full account of it.  Hayward’s Piozzi, i. 332.

[919] See ante, ii. 150, and iii. 298, note 1.

[920] See ante, p. 278.

[921] ’If he who considers himself as suspended over the abyss of eternal perdition only by the thread of life, which must soon part by its own weakness, and which the wing of every minute may divide, can cast his eyes round him without shuddering with horror, or panting for security; what can he judge of himself, but that he is not yet awakened to sufficient conviction? &c.’ The Rambler, No. 110.  In a blank leaf in the book in which Johnson kept his diary of his journey in Wales is written in his own hand, ‘Faith in some proportion to Fear.’  Duppa’s Johnson’s Diary of a Journey &c., p. 157.  See ante, iii. 199.

[922] He wrote to Mrs. Thrale on March 20:—­’Write to me no more about dying with a grace; when you feel what I have felt in approaching eternity—­in fear of soon hearing the sentence of which there is no revocation, you will know the folly.’ Piozzi Letters, ii. 354.  Of him it might have been said in Cowper’s words:—­

     ‘Scripture is still a trumpet to his fears.’

The Task:  The Winter Morning Walk, 1. 611.  See ante, iii. 294.