Ill news for the youthful poetaster,—here
is the packet handed back to him, unopened.
Ill news, ah me! too, for the world at large.
The Doctor is too ill to read anything.

The disheartening message, we are told by
the sympathising commemorator of the incident,
is accepted by the stripling of eighteen,
in his utter despondency, as a merely
mechanical excuse. But, alas! the cause
was too true; and a few weeks after,
on that bed beside which the voice of Mr.
Burke faltered, and the tender spirit of
Bennet Langton was ever vigilant, the great
soul of Johnson quitted earth. At the
moment, however, when the young, eager face
of the Jew-poet turns from the door, clouded
by the first anguish of his sudden and
scarcely anticipated disappointment,—there,
breathing heavily and painfully in the
curtained room up-stairs, lies, still in life, the
Oracle of his Generation. Miss Burney is
waiting anxiously for news of him in the
quiet parlour, and the figure of Langton is
softly creaking down the staircase, to sadden
her with the last whispered bulletin.

STEP THE THIRD. A.D. 1739.

JOHNSON expired soon afterwards in that
same year, at the age of seventy-five, on
the thirteenth of December; and I am
naturally reminded of a notable incident
occurring five and forty years before the
date of the one last mentioned. I am in a
picturesque corner of a famous grotto,—a
small study or rather snuggery, very cosily
furnished. It is the first of August in the
year of grace seventeen hundred and thirty-
nine. A poor little pale-faced crooked man is
seated immediately before me, huddled up
in a dressing-gown, leaning over a table,
scribbling. A glance over his shoulder
shows me that what he has been writing is
just finished. It is a courtly letter from
Alexander Pope, addressed to my Lord
Gower, commending one Mr. Samuel Johnson,
who hath recently (his Lordship is
informed by his correspondent) penned an
ingenious poem on London: and for which
aforesaid bard of the capital, Mr. Pope
thinks my Lord might perhaps, without
much effort,—materially advancing the young
man's fortunes thereby,—obtain a degree, at
his Lordship's leisure, from one of the rival
universities. Generously thought of, O noble
heart in the stunted frame! but thought of,
as it happens, in this instance somewhat
ineffectually. However fruitlessly written,
it is pleasant to recal to one's remembrance
that kindly intercession on behalf of Samuel
Johnson, then thirty, and comparatively
obscure, spontaneously made by Alexander
Pope, then fifty-one, and in the full meridian
glory of his reputation. It imparts—the
memory of that genial act, an act worthy
of the literary brotherhood—an additional
pathos to the sorrowful death-scene five
years afterwards, when the great poet,
prematurely decrepit at the age of fifty-six, sat
silently, with his mind wrecked, propped up
with pillows, slowly dying! And when,
leaning over the back of his arm-chair,
weeping over the friend already taken from
him, though still alive, Henry, Lord Bolingbroke
sobbed out, through his tears, in broken
accents:

"O great God, what is man!"

Remembering which woeful death-scene
that was to be, I like to tarry a while over
the thought of that fraternal plea, but one
brief lustre earlier (five short years!), that
unsolicited good service, by which the
renowned author endeavoured, as it were
by stealth, to aid the unknown writer, then
struggling manfully to fame, through many
dismal misfortunes.

STEP THE FOURTH. A.D. 1700.

ANOTHER interval has sped by, an interval
of full forty years, when I lounge back at
a stride into Will's Coffee House and the year
of grace seventeen hundred, simultaneously.
As I am following our own diminutive
Alexander the Great into that far-famed haunt
of the wits and witlings, I am ashamed to
confess it, I observe that my little Guide upon
Town is positively but just in his teens, and
consequently in his outward man (or rather,
it should be said, boy) appears to be more
than ever a whipper-snapper. I should
be still more ashamed to confess it, that
his visiting Will's Coffee House in this
way is regarded by many as an incident,
to say the least of it, extremely
questionable, if not an occurrence, the record of
which must be pronounced (as some assert)
absolutely apocryphal—BUT—that I have
long since doggedly and deliberately made up
my mind to swallow henceforth, without any
further qualms of suspicion, every one of those
dear little dubious episodes that lend a charm
to our national annals, impart a zest to
biography, and suffuse a fascination over all
kinds of literary and historical reminiscences.

Don't tell me they are impossible. I reply
they are delightful, and, so replying, pin my
faith to them, one and all, with the most
implicit credulity. It may be that Sir Isaac
Newton never had a pet dog of any kind
whatever; yet, in spite of that newly
discovered and perfectly indisputable truth,
I cherish still, with the most obstinate
and unshakeable fidelity, my old schoolboy
belief in that world-famous anecdote about
the tiny spaniel Diamond and the ruined
manuscript calculations. It may be, again,
that the oak is never known to be in leaf at
the time of year when King Charles the
Second is so very erroneously supposed to
have hid himself among its branches after the
battle of Worcester. Possibly! I won't deny
it—yet hide himself among those green oak
boughs I am incorrigibly satisfied he did,
nevertheless. The particular tree he climbed
must have been, I will admit, a phenomenon