Was ever the last fear put into such simple and poignant words as in the above letter?  It is like that other saying of Johnson’s, when all sorts of good reasons had been given why men should wish to be released from their troubles by death, “After all, it is a sad thing for a man to lie down and die.”  There is no more that can be said, and not the best reasons in the world for desiring to depart and have done with life can ever do away with that sadness.

Dr. Johnson supplies the clearest proof, if proof were needed, that no robustness of temperament, no genius of common sense, no array of rationality, no degree of courage, can save a man from the assaults of fear, and even of fear which the sufferer knows to be unreal.  Some of the most severe and angry things which Johnson ever said were said to Boswell and others who persisted in discussing the question of death.  Yet Johnson had no rational doubt of immortality, and believed with an almost childlike simplicity in the Christian faith.  He was not afraid of pain, or of the act of dying; it was of the unknown conditions beyond the grave that he was afraid.  Probably as a rule very robust people are so much occupied in living that they have little time to think of the future, while men and women who hold to life by a frail tenure are not much concerned at quitting a scene which is phantasmal and full of pain.  But in Johnson we have the two extremes brought together.  He was the most gregarious of men; he loved company so well that he would follow his friends to the very threshold, in the hope, as he once told Boswell, that they might perhaps return.  When he was alone and undistracted, his melancholy came back upon him like a cloud.  He tortured himself over the unprofitableness of his life, over his failure to achieve official prominence.  He does not seem to have brooded over the favourite subject for Englishmen to lose heart over, namely, his financial position.  It is a very significant fact in our English life that if at an inquest upon a suicide it can be established that a man has financial difficulties, a verdict of temporary insanity is instantly conceded.  Loss of property rather than loss of affection is the thing which the Englishman thinks is likely to derange a man.  But Johnson seems never to have been afraid of poverty, nor to have ever troubled about fame.  He was very angry once when it was laughingly suggested to him that if he had gone to the Bar he might have been Lord Chancellor; and I have no doubt, as I have said, that one of his uncomfortable reflections was that he did not seem to himself to be in a position of influence and authority.  But, apart from that, it is obvious that Johnson’s broodings took the form of lamenting his own sinfulness and moral worthlessness:  what the faults which troubled him were, it is hard to say.  He does not seem to have been repentant about the mortification he caused others by his witty bludgeoning—­indeed he considered himself