His asthma tormented him day and night.Dropsical symptoms made their appearance.While sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen years of his life had married an Italian fiddler; that all London was crying shame upon her; and that the newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions to the Ephesian matron, and the two pictures in Hamlet.He vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence.He never uttered her name.Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung into the fire.She meanwhile fled from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, hastened across Mount Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated had ceased to exist.
He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily affliction, clung vehemently to life.The feeling described in that fine but gloomy paper which closes the series of his Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as his last hour drew near.He fancied that he should be able to draw his breath more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have set out for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense of the journey.That expense, indeed, he had the means of defraying; for he had laid up about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labours which had made the fortune of several publishers.But he was unwilling to break in upon this hoard; and he seems to have wished even to keep its existence a secret.Some of his friends hoped that the government might be induced to increase his pension to six hundred pounds a year: but this hope was disappointed; and he resolved to stand one English winter more.That winter was his last.His legs grew weaker; his breath grew shorter; the fatal water gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, courageous against pain, but timid against death, urged his surgeons to make deeper and deeper.Though the tender care which had mitigated his sufferings during months of sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not left desolate.The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, and refused to accept fees from him.
Burke parted from him with deep emotion.Windham sate much in the sick room, arranged the pillows, and sent his own servant to watch a night by the bed.Frances Burney, whom the old man had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at the door;while Langton, whose piety eminently qualified him to be an adviser and comforter at such a time, received the last pressure of his friend's hand within.When at length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson's mind.His temper became unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to think with terror of death, and of that which lies beyond death; and he spoke much of the mercy of God, and of the propitiation of Christ.In this serene frame of mind he died on the 13th of December 1784.He was laid, a week later, in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had been the historian,--Cowley and Denham, Dryden and Congreve, Gay, Prior, and Addison.
Since his death the popularity of his works--the Lives of the Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human Wishes, excepted--has greatly diminished.His Dictionary has been altered by editors till it can scarcely be called his.An allusion to his Rambler or his Idler is not readily apprehended in literary circles.The fame even of Rasselas has grown somewhat dim.But, though the celebrity of the writings may have declined, the celebrity of the writer, strange to say, is as great as ever.Boswell's book has done for him more than the best of his own books could do.The memory of other authors is kept alive by their works.But the memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive.The old philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans.No human being who has been more than seventy years in the grave is so well known to us.And it is but just to say that our intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man....