Alfred Morrison's 'Collection of Autographs', vol. ii. p. 343.
'To Dr. TAYLOR. Dated London, April 20, 1778.'
'The quantity of blood taken from you appears to me not sufficient. Thrale was almost lost by the scrupulosity of his physicians, who never bled him copiously till they bled him in despair; he then bled till he fainted, and the stricture or obstruction immediately gave way and from that instant he grew better.
'I can now give you no advice but to keep yourself totally quiet and amused with some gentle exercise of the mind. If a suspected letter comes, throw it aside till your health is reestablished; keep easy and cheerful company about you, and never try to think but at those stated and solemn times when the thoughts are summoned to the cares of futurity, the only cares of a rational being.
'As to my own health I think it rather grows better; the convulsions which left me last year at Ashbourne have never returned, and I have by the mercy of God very comfortable nights. Let me know very often how you are till you are quite well.'
This letter, though it is dated 1778, must have been written in 1780. Thrale's first attack was in June, 1779, when he was in 'extreme danger' (ante, iii. 397, n. 2, 420). Johnson had the remission of the convulsions on June 18, 1779. He recorded on June 18, 1780:--
'In the morning of this day last year I perceived the remission of those convulsions in my breast which had distressed me for more than twenty years. I returned thanks at church for the mercy granted me, which has now continued a year.'--Prayers and Meditations, p. 183.
Three days later he wrote to Mrs. Thrale:--
'It was a twelvemonth last Sunday since the convulsions in my breast left me. I hope I was thankful when I recollected it; by removing that disorder a great improvement was made in the enjoyment of life.' --Piozzi Letters, ii. 163. (See ante, iii. 397, n. 1.)
He was at Ashbourne on June 18, 1779 (ante, iii. 453).
On April 20, 1778, the very day of which this letter bears the date, he recorded:--
'After a good night, as I am forced to reckon, I rose seasonably.... In reviewing my time from Easter, 1777, I found a very melancholy and shameful blank. So little has been done that days and months are without any trace. My health has, indeed, been very much interrupted. My nights have been commonly not only restless, but painful and fatiguing. ....Some relaxation of my breast has been procured, I think, by opium, which, though it never gives me sleep, frees my breast from spasms.' --Prayers and Meditations, p. 169. See ante, iii. 317, n. 1.
For Johnson's advice about bleeding, see ante, iii. 152; and for possible occasions for 'suspected letters,' ante, i. 472, n. 4; and ii. 202, n. 2.
Mr. Mason's 'sneering observation in his "Memoirs of Mr. William Whitehead"'
(Vol. i, p. 31.)
I had long failed to find a copy of these Memoirs, though I had searched in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and the London Library, and had applied to the University Library at Cambridge, and the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. By the kindness of Mr. R. H. Soden Smith and Mr. R. F. Sketchley, I have obtained the following extract from a copy in the Dyce and Forster Libraries, in the South Kensington Museum:--
'Conscious, notwithstanding, that to avoid writing what is unnecessary is, in these days, no just plea for silence in a biographer, I have some apology to make for having strewed these pages so thinly with the tittle-tattle of anecdote. I am, however, too proud to make this apology to any person but my bookseller, who will be the only real loser by the 'Those readers, who believe that I do not write immediately under his pay, and who may have gathered from what they have already read, that I am not so passionately enamoured of Dr. Johnson's biographical manner, as to take that for my model, have only to throw these pages aside, and wait till they are new-written by some one of his numerous disciples, who may follow his master's example; and should more anecdote than I furnish him with be wanting (as was the Doctor's case in his life of Mr. Gray), may make amends for it by those acid eructations of vituperative criticism, which are generated by unconcocted taste and intellectual indigestion.'--Poems by William Whitehead, York, 1788 (vol. iii, p. 128).
With this 'sneering observation,' which Boswell might surely have passed over in silence, the Memoirs close.
Michael Johnson as a bookseller.
(Vol. i, p. 36, n. 3.)
Mr. R. F. Sketchley kindly informs me that in the Dyce and Forster Libraries at the South Kensington Museum there is a book with the following title:--
S. Shaw's 'Grammatica Anglo--Romana', London, printed for Michael Johnson, bookseller: and are to be sold at his shops in Litchfield and Uttoxiter in Stafford-shire; and Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire, 1687.
Mr. C. E. Doble tells me that in the proposals issued in 1690 by Thomas Bennet, St. Paul's Churchyard, for printing Anthony a Wood's Athenae Oxonienses and Fasti Oxonienses, among 'the booksellers who take subscriptions, give receipts, and deliver books according to the proposals' is 'Mr.