In the meantime he had paid the summer visit, which had now become almost an annual one to his daughter-in-law, at Lichfield, from whence he made an excursion to Dr. Taylor's, at Ashbourne, and to Chatsworth, still labouring under his asthma, but willing to believe that as Floyer, the celebrated physician of his native city, had been allowed to pant on till near ninety, so he might also yet pant on a little longer. Whilst he was on this journey, he translated an ode of Horace, and composed several prayers. As he passed through Birmingham and Oxford, he once more hailed his old schoolfellow Hector, and his fellow collegian, Adams. It is delightful to see early intimacies thus enduring through all the accidents of life, local attachments unsevered by time, and the old age and childhood of man bound together by these natural charities. The same willow tree which Johnson had known when a boy, was still his favourite, and still flourishing in the meadow, near Lichfield. Hector (whom I can remember several years after, a man of erect form, and grave deportment) still met him with the same, or perhaps more cordiality than in their first days; and the virtues of Adams, which he had seen opening in their early promise, had now grown up to full maturity. To London he returned, only to prove that death was not the terrible thing which he had fancied it. He arrived there on the 15th of November. In little more than a fortnight after, when Dr. Brocklesby (with whom three other eminent physicians, and a chirurgeon, were in the habit of attending him gratuitously) was paying him a morning visit, he said that he had been as a dying man all night, and then with much emphasis repeated the words of Macbeth: Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; Raze out the written troubles of the brain And, with _some_ sweet oblivious antidote, Cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart? To which Brocklesby promptly returned the answer, which is made by the doctor in that play, --Therein the patient Must minister unto himself. He now committed to the flames a large mass of papers, among which were two 4to. volumes, containing a particular account of his life, from his earliest recollections. His few remaining days were occasionally cheered by the presence of such men as have been collected about a death-bed in few ages and countries of the world--Langton, Reynolds, Windham, and Burke. Of these, none was more attentive to him than Mr. Langton, of whom he had been heard to say, I could almost wish "anima mea sit cum Langtono," and whom he now addressed in the tender words of Tibullus, Te teneam moriens deficiente manu.