I asked him why he doated on a coach so? and received for answer, "That in the first place the company were shut in with him _there_, and could not escape, as out of a room. In the next place, he heard all that was said in a carriage, where it was my turn to be deaf," and very impatient was he at my occasional difficulty of hearing. On this account he wished to travel all over the world, for the very act of going forward was delightful to him, and he gave himself no concern about accidents, which he said never happened. Nor did the running away of the horses on the edge of a precipice between Vernon and St. Denis, in France, convince him to the contrary, "for nothing came of it," he said, "except that Mr. Thrale leaped out of the carriage into a chalk-pit, and then came up again looking _as white_!" When the truth was, all their lives were saved by the greatest Providence ever exerted in favour of three human creatures; and the part Mr. Thrale took from desperation was the likeliest thing in the world to produce broken limbs and death. Fear was indeed a sensation to which Mr. Johnson was an utter stranger, excepting when some sudden apprehensions seized him that he was going to die, and even then he kept all his wits about him to express the most humble and pathetic petitions to the Almighty. And when the first paralytic stroke took his speech from him, he instantly set about composing a prayer in Latin, at once to deprecate God's mercy, to satisfy himself that his mental powers remained unimpaired, and to keep them in exercise, that they might not perish by permitted stagnation. This was after we parted; but he wrote me an account of it, and I intend to publish that letter, with many more. When one day he had at my house taken tincture of antimony instead of emetic wine, for a vomit, he was himself the person to direct us what to do for him, and managed with as much coolness and deliberation as if he had been prescribing for an indifferent person. Though on another occasion, when he had lamented in the most piercing terms his approaching dissolution, and conjured me solemnly to tell him what I thought, while Sir Richard Jebb was perpetually on the road to Streatham, and Mr. Johnson seemed to think himself neglected if the physician left him for an hour only, I made him a steady, but as I thought a very gentle harangue, in which I confirmed all that the doctor had been saying; how no present danger could be expected, but that his age and continued ill- health must naturally accelerate the arrival of that hour which can be escaped by none. "And this," says Johnson, rising in great anger, "is the voice of female friendship, I suppose, when the hand of the hangman would be softer."