JOHNSON. 23 



arrested for a debt of eiglit pounds. Many who knew 

 him were willing to subscribe for his relief ; his wayward 

 temper induced him to choose this moment for writing a 

 satire on the place where his friends resided ; and he 

 expired, after six months' confinement, not without the 

 suspicion that a letter from Pope, taxing him, as he said, 

 unjustly, with great ingratitude, had brought on the fever 

 of which he died. Johnson was not a man whose friend- 

 ship for any person, however misplaced, or admiration of 

 his talents, however exaggerated beyond the truth, would 

 cease when he was laid low ; and he immediately set 

 about exhibiting both in that 'Life/ which has been the 

 object of so much admiration, and which certainly has all 

 the merits, with most of the defects that belong to his 

 style, both of thinking and of writing. The plain lan- 

 guage in which he accused Savage's mother, Lady Maccles- 

 field, after her divorce married to Colonel Brett, of 

 unnatural cruelty to her son, of scandalous licentiousness, 

 nay, of attempts to cause the death of the child whose only 

 fault towards her was his being the living evidence of an 

 adultery which she herself avowed, in order to annul her 

 first marriage, can hardly be supposed to have been 

 suffered, at a time when all libels were so severely dealt 

 with by the parties attacked and by the Courts ; but the 

 reason probably was, that one of the charges was 

 notoriously admitted by the person accused, and the 

 blacker imputation could not have been denied without 

 reviving the memory of the scandal in which the whole 

 had its origin.* 



* One passage in the 'Life' seems to dare and defy her. After 

 charging her with "endeavouring to destroy her son by a lie, in a 



