22 JOHNSON. 



chastity of his private life, has not been echoed by those 

 who knew him in London ; and Mr. Boswell has delicately, 

 but pointedly described those "indulgences as having 

 occasioned much distress to his virtuous mind" (I. 143). 

 When we are told that he would often roam the streets 

 with Savage after a debauch, which had exhausted their 

 means of finding a bed for the night, and which, when 

 the weather proved inclement, drove them to warm them- 

 selves by the smouldering ashes of a glass-house when 

 we reflect that this companion had not been reclaimed 

 from such courses by killing a man in a brawl arising 

 immediately out of a night thus spent when we consider 

 that one so poor must have sought the indulgences so 

 plainly indicated by his biographer, his all but adoring 

 biographer, in their more scrupulous form and when to 

 all this is added the recollection (foreign to Savage's 

 history) that Johnson was a married man, with whom 

 affection only had made a virtuous woman share the 

 poorest of lots surely we may be permitted to marvel 

 at the intolerance with which the defects of others were, 

 during the rest of his days, ever beheld by him, as if he 

 M-as making a compensation for his own conduct by want 

 of charity to his neighbours. But, above all, have we a 

 right to complain that the associate of Savage, the com- 

 panion of his debauches, should have presumed to insult 

 men of such pure minds as David Hume and Adam 

 Smith rudely refusing to bear them company but for an 

 instant, merely because he regarded the sceptical opinions 

 of the one with horror, and could not forgive the other 

 for being his friend. 



Savage died in prison at Bristol, miserably as he had 

 lived, July, 1748, in his forty-sixth year. He had been 



