at Rochester, with Mr. Langton, and to appear again at the Literary Club; and at the end of August, to make a visit to Mr. Bowles, at Heale, near Salisbury, where he continued about three weeks. On his return to London, he was confined to the house by a fit of the gout, a disorder which had once attacked him, but with less violence, ten years before, and to which he was now reconciled, by being taught to consider it as an antagonist to the palsy. To this was added, a sarcocele, which, as it threatened to render excision necessary, caused him more uneasiness, though he looked forward to the operation with sufficient courage; but the complaint subsided of itself. When he was able to go about again, that society might be insured to him at least three days in the week, another club was founded at the Essex Head, in Essex street, where an old servant of Mr. Thrale's was the landlord. "Its principles (he said) were to be laid in frequency and frugality; and he drew up a set of rules, which he prefaced with two lines from a Sonnet of Milton. To-day resolve deep thoughts with me to drench, In mirth that after no repenting draws." The number was limited to twenty-four. Each member present engaged himself to spend at least sixpence; and, to pay a forfeit of three-pence if he did not attend. But even here, in the club-room, after his sixpence was duly laid down, and the arm chair taken, there was no security for him against the intrusion of those maladies which had so often assailed him. On the first night of meeting (13th of December, 1783) he was seized with a spasmodic asthma, and hardly made his way home to his own house, where the dropsy combined with asthma to hold him a prisoner for more than four months. An occurrence during his illness, which he mentioned to Boswell, deserves notice, from the insight which it gives into his peculiar frame of mind. "He had shut himself up, and employed a day in particular exercises of religion--fasting, humiliation, and prayer. On a sudden, he obtained extraordinary relief, for which he looked up to heaven with grateful devotion. He made no direct inference from the fact; but from his manner of telling it," adds Boswell, "I could perceive that it appeared to him as something more than an incident in the common course of events." Yet at this time, with all his aspirations after a state of greater perfectness, he was not able to bear the candour of Langton, who, when Johnson him desired to tell him sincerely wherein he had observed his life to be faulty, brought him a sheet of paper, on which were written many texts of Scripture, recommendatory of Christian meekness.