JOHNSON. 45 



these works he felt himself discharging a debt of gratitude 

 to the Government, but they certainly cannot in any 

 respect be charged with speaking a language which was 

 either dictated, or at all influenced, by the highly im- 

 portant favour he had received. 



In the middle of 1783, when in his seventy-fourth 

 year, he had the paralytic stroke, to which reference has 

 already been made. He was seized in the night, after 

 having felt himself the day before lighter and better than 

 usual, as is very common in such cases, probably from the 

 exhilarating effects of a quickened circulation. He felt a 

 confusion and indistinctness in his head " for half a 

 minute/' and having prayed that his faculties might be 

 preserved, he composed his supplication in Latin verse, 

 for the purpose of trying whether or not his mind re- 

 mained entire. " The lines," he says in his letter to 

 Mrs. Thrale two days after, " were not very good, but I 

 knew them not to be very good, and concluded myself to 

 be unimpaired in my faculties." He found, however, 

 that he had lost his speech, which did not return till the 

 second day, and was for some time imperfect and un- 

 steady. His recovery, however, from this alarming ail- 

 ment appears to have been complete, though it probably 

 increased the general weakness of the system, now be- 

 ginning to shew itself in several ways, and especially by 

 an increased difficulty of breathing, the effect of water 

 forming in the chest. For about a year, though he con- 

 tinued in a precarious, and occasionally a suffering state, 

 he yet could enjoy society much as usual in the intervals 

 of his indisposition, and went once or twice into the 

 country for a few days. His occupations continued the 

 same as before, and he attended with much interest, at a 



