Do not imagine I have relapsed;—­I only recover slower than I expected.  If my letter is shorter than usual, the cause of it is a dose of physick, which has weakened me so much to-day, that I am not able to write a long letter.  I will make up for it next post, and remain always ’Your most sincerely affectionate son, ‘J.  MACDONALD.’  He grew gradually worse; and on the night before his death he wrote as follows from Frescati:—­’MY DEAR MOTHER, ’Though I did not mean to deceive you in my last letter from Rome, yet certainly you would have very little reason to conclude of the very great and constant danger I have gone through ever since that time.  My life, which is still almost entirely desperate, did not at that time appear to me so, otherwise I should have represented, in its true colours, a fact which acquires very little horror by that means, and comes with redoubled force by deception.  There is no circumstance of danger and pain of which I have not had the experience, for a continued series of above a fortnight; during which time I have settled my affairs, after my death, with as much distinctness as the hurry and the nature of the thing could admit of.  In case of the worst, the Abbe Grant will be my executor in this part of the world, and Mr. Mackenzie in Scotland, where my object has been to make you and my younger brother as independent of the eldest as possible.’  BOSWELL.  Horace Walpole (Letters, vii. 291), in 1779, thus mentions this ’younger brother’:—­’Macdonald abused Lord North in very gross, yet too applicable, terms; and next day pleaded he had been drunk, recanted, and was all admiration and esteem for his Lordship’s talents and virtues.’

[462] See ante, iii. 85, and post, Oct. 28.

[463] Cheyne’s English Malady, ed. 1733, p. 229.

[464] ‘Weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.’ Hamlet, act i. sc. 2.  See ante, iii. 350, where Boswell is reproached by Johnson with ’bringing in gabble,’ when he makes this quotation.

[465] VARIOUS READINGS.  Line 2.  In the manuscript, Dr. Johnson, instead of rupibus obsita, had written imbribus uvida, and uvida nubibus, but struck them both out.  Lines 15 and 16.  Instead of these two lines, he had written, but afterwards struck out, the following:—­

     Parare posse, utcunque jactet
     Grandiloquus nimis alta Zeno.

BOSWELL.  In Johnson’s Works, i. 167, these lines are given with some variations, which perhaps are in part due to Mr. Langton, who, we are told (ante, Dec. 1784), edited some, if not indeed all, of Johnson’s Latin poems.

[466] Cowper wrote to S. Rose on May 20, 1789:—­’Browne was an entertaining companion when he had drunk his bottle, but not before; this proved a snare to him, and he would sometimes drink too much.’  Southey’s Cowper, vi. 237.  His De Animi Immortalitate was published in 1754.  He died in 1760, aged fifty-four.  See ante, ii. 339.