’I then kissed her.  She told me, that to part was the greatest pain that she had ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet again in a better place.  I expressed, with swelled eyes, and great emotion of tenderness, the same hopes.  We kissed, and parted.  I humbly hope to meet again, and to part no more.’

1768:  AETAT. 59]—­It appears from his notes of the state of his mind, that he suffered great perturbation and distraction in 1768.  Nothing of his writing was given to the publick this year, except the Prologue to his friend Goldsmith’s comedy of The Good-natured Man.  The first lines of this Prologue are strongly characteristical of the dismal gloom of his mind; which in his case, as in the case of all who are distressed with the same malady of imagination, transfers to others its own feelings.  Who could suppose it was to introduce a comedy, when Mr. Bensley solemnly began,

     ’Press’d with the load of life, the weary mind
     Surveys the general toil of human kind.’

But this dark ground might make Goldsmith’s humour shine the more.

In the spring of this year, having published my Account of Corsica, with the Journal of a Tour to that Island, I returned to London, very desirous to see Dr. Johnson, and hear him upon the subject.  I found he was at Oxford, with his friend Mr. Chambers, who was now Vinerian Professor, and lived in New Inn Hall.  Having had no letter from him since that in which he criticised the Latinity of my Thesis, and having been told by somebody that he was offended at my having put into my Book an extract of his letter to me at Paris, I was impatient to be with him, and therefore followed him to Oxford, where I was entertained by Mr. Chambers, with a civility which I shall ever gratefully remember.  I found that Dr. Johnson had sent a letter to me to Scotland, and that I had nothing to complain of but his being more indifferent to my anxiety than I wished him to be.  Instead of giving, with the circumstances of time and place, such fragments of his conversation as I preserved during this visit to Oxford, I shall throw them together in continuation.

Talking of some of the modern plays, he said False Delicacy was totally void of character.  He praised Goldsmith’s Good-natured Man; said, it was the best comedy that had appeared since The Provoked Husband, and that there had not been of late any such character exhibited on the stage as that of Croaker.  I observed it was the Suspirius of his Rambler.  He said, Goldsmith had owned he had borrowed it from thence.  ’Sir, (continued he,) there is all the difference in the world between characters of nature and characters of manners; and there is the difference between the characters of Fielding and those of Richardson.  Characters of manners are very entertaining; but they are to be understood by a more superficial observer than characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart.’