it away to town.  Time, however, discovered that he translated from the French, a Rambler, which had been taken from the English, without acknowledgment.  Upon this discovery, Mr. Murphy thought it right to make his excuses to Dr. Johnson.  He went next day, and found him covered with soot, like a chimney-sweeper, in a little room, as if he had been acting Lungs, in the Alchemist, “making ether.”  This being told by Mr. Murphy, in company, “Come, come,” said Dr. Johnson, “the story is black enough; but it was a happy day that brought you first to my house.”  After this first visit, the author of this narrative, by degrees, grew intimate with Dr. Johnson.  The first striking sentence, that he heard from him, was in a few days after the publication of lord Bolingbroke’s posthumous works.  Mr. Garrick asked him, “If he had seen them.”  “Yes, I have seen them.”  “What do you think of them?” “Think of them!” He made a long pause, and then replied:  “Think of them!  A scoundrel, and a coward!  A scoundrel, who spent his life in charging a gun against christianity; and a coward, who was afraid of hearing the report of his own gun; but left half a crown to a hungry Scotchman to draw the trigger, after his death.”  His mind, at this time strained, and over-laboured by constant exertion, called for an interval of repose and indolence.  But indolence was the time of danger:  it was then that his spirits, not employed abroad, turned with inward hostility against himself.  His reflections on his own life and conduct were always severe; and, wishing to be immaculate, he destroyed his own peace by unnecessary scruples.  He tells us, that when he surveyed his past life, he discovered nothing but a barren waste of time, with some disorders of body, and disturbances of mind, very near to madness.  His life, he says, from his earliest years, was wasted in a morning bed; and his reigning sin was a general sluggishness, to which he was always inclined, and, in part of his life, almost compelled, by morbid melancholy, and weariness of mind.  This was his constitutional malady, derived, perhaps, from his father, who was, at times, overcast with a gloom that bordered on insanity.  When to this it is added, that Johnson, about the age of twenty, drew up a description of his infirmities, for Dr. Swinfen, at that time an eminent physician, in Staffordshire; and received an answer to his letter, importing, that the symptoms indicated a future privation of reason; who can wonder, that he was troubled with melancholy, and dejection of spirit?  An apprehension of the worst calamity that can befall human nature hung over him all the rest of his life, like the sword of the tyrant suspended over his guest.  In his sixtieth year he had a mind to write the history of his melancholy; but he desisted, not knowing whether it would not too much disturb him.  In a Latin poem, however, to which he has prefixed, as a title, [Greek:  GNOTHI SEAUTON], he has left a picture of himself, drawn with as much truth, and as firm a hand, as can be seen in the portraits of Hogarth, or sir Joshua Reynolds.  The learned reader will find the original poem in this volume; and it is hoped, that a translation, or rather imitation, of so curious a piece, will not be improper in this place.