On the publication of this work, he was gratified with the most liberal applause by his most distin guished contemporaries. Nor were their sentiments in its favour expressed to himself alone : Mr Burke, in a conversation with Sir James Mackintosh, decla red, that•Boswell's Life would do more honour to Johnson than all his works put together. Such an encomium from such a man will much more than counterbalance all the witling sneers with which dul ness, spleen, or malice, have assailed him. From this time till his death, we have nothing memorable to record. In 1795, he was suddenly seized with an ague. The confinement which this disorder occa sioned brought on a painful complaint to which he was subject, and he died at his house in London, on the 19th of June.
As a writer, his works must speak for him ; as a man, his character will be always remembered by those who knew him with affectionate regret. He has been described by others, and has even described himself, as being vain ; but his vanity was of that playful kind, and so remote from all wish to depress others, that no one, whose temper was not sour in deed, could possibly have been offended with it. I ie had his foibles ; who has them not ? His fondness for social conviviality sometimes led him into excess, but his principles were always untainted. In poli
tics, he was at once a steady royalist and an ardent friend of genuine liberty. In religion, he was from thorough conviction a member of the English church ; but intolerance, or enmity towards those who differed from him, would have been totally inconsistent with his mild disposition. " I can drink, I can laugh, I can converse," as he tells us, " in perfect good hu mour, with Whigs, with Republicans, with Dissent ers, with Independents, with Quakers, with Mora vians, with Jews. They can do me no harm : my mind is made up : my principles are fixed : But I would vote with Tories, and pray with a Dean and Chapter." Such was his good humour, that Mr Burke remarked, he had so much of it naturally that it was scarcely a virtue. His lively and fertile mind, and his rich fund of anecdote, made him an inimita• ble companion. The old, the young, the grave, and the gay, were all equally fascinated and borne away by the irresistible hilarity of his manner. His heart was harmless, and his benevolence active. Let us add to him that praise, without which all other praise must be wretchedly imperfect,—he lived and died a sincere and humble Christian. (F)