up with him, they were often amply compensated by his rich flow of mind; but the resulting sacrifice of health and comfort in an establishment where this sitting up became habitual, was inevitably great.[1] Instead of being grateful, he always maintained that no one forbore his own gratification for the purpose of pleasing another, and “if one did sit up, it was probably to amuse oneself.”  Boswell excuses his wife for not coinciding in his enthusiasm, by admitting that his illustrious friend’s irregular hours and uncouth habits, such as turning the candles with their ends downwards when they did not burn bright enough, and letting the wax drop upon the carpet, could not but be displeasing to a lady.  He was generally last at breakfast, but one morning happened to be first and waited some time alone; when afterwards twitted by Mrs. Thrale with irregularity, he replied, “Madam, I do not like to come down to vacuity.”

[Footnote 1:  Dr. Burney states that in 1765 “he very frequently met Johnson at Streatham, where they had many long conversations, after sitting up as long as the fire and candles lasted, and much longer than the patience of the servants subsisted.”]

He was subject to dreadful fits of depression, caused or accompanied by compunction for venial or fancied sins, by the fear of death or madness—­(the only things he did fear), and by ingrained ineradicable disease.  When Boswell speaks of his “striving against evil,” “Ay,” she writes in the margin, “and against the King’s evil.”

If his early familiarity with all the miseries of destitution, aggravated by disease, had increased his natural roughness and irritability, on the other hand it had helped largely to bring out his sterling virtues,—­his discriminating charity, his genuine benevolence, his well-timed generosity, his large-hearted sympathy with real suffering.  But he required it to be material and positive, and scoffed at mere mental or sentimental woes.  “The sight of people who want food and raiment is so common in great cities, that a surly fellow like me has no compassion to spare for wounds given only to vanity or softness.”  He said it was enough to make a plain man sick to hear pity lavished on a family reduced by losses to exchange a fine house for a snug cottage; and when condolence was demanded for a lady of rank in mourning for a baby, he contrasted her with a washerwoman with half-a-dozen children dependent on her daily labour for their daily bread.[1]

[Footnote 1:  “It’s weel wi’ you gentles that can sit in the house wi’ handkerchers at your een when ye lose a friend; but the like o’ us maun to our wark again, if our hearts were beating as hard as any hammer.”—­The Antiquary.  For this very reason the “gentles” commonly suffer most.]