The mixture of amusement and anxiety in Boswell's conduct and the affectionate and good-humoured reconciliation are all extremely typical of the relations between these two friends. Johnson indeed had far too much sense of Boswell's good qualities and value ever to fall out with him seriously, and it would have been hard to do so. There was never one real misunderstanding between them up to the end. Their intercourse, consisting of the visits of Boswell to London and a number of letters on both sides, had but one break, from November 1769 to April 1771. Boswell had just been married, and omitted in 1770 to pay his usual visit to London; he tells us that there was no coldness on either side, no reason for not writing beyond the common one of procrastination. The correspondence of Boswell and Johnson is on the whole of an irregular nature; there is more than one interval, longer than we might expect, between two men who were such active friends as they, in an age when letter-writing was cultivated for its own sake. Arguing from this fact and considering that he was not present at Johnson's death-bed, Boswell has been accused of neglecting his friend at the end of his life. But from the state of mind which he described much earlier in the _London Magazine_, we can otherwise account for these lapses: To pay a visit or write a letter to a friend does not surely require much activity. Yet such small exertions have appeared so laborious to a Hypochondriack, that he has delayed from hour to hour, so that friendship has grown cold for want of having its heat continued, for which repeated renewals, however slight, are necessary; or, perhaps, till death has carried his friend beyond the reach of any token of his kindness, and the regrets which pained him in the course of his neglect are accumulated and press upon his mind with a weight of sorrow.[5] We may suppose that whenever Boswell for a short time failed in his careful attention it was through no lack of affection, but rather through a kind of indolence and want of purpose in the manner of it, which is far from being uncommon. The greatest event in this long friendship, and the time which has left us the fullest record, is the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in 1773. In Boswell's journal we see more nearly than elsewhere the relations between the two friends and the nature of their companionship. In the foreground is the extreme amiability of Boswell--it was by this that he was fitted to perform that most difficult office of friendship, to travel with Dr. Johnson. We may read his own account of himself at this time: