He was evidently very fond of eating; himself, he boasted of his delicate tastes in food; and when he ate “the veins of his forehead stood out and a strong perspiration was visible.” This appears to have much disgusted Macaulay, but most of us have seen similar prowess in perfectly worthy men. Presumably when Boswell said “the veins of his forehead” he meant the superficial temporal arteries, for if they had really been the soft and thin-walled veins, Johnson, bestrewn with bladders, would have looked indeed noteworthy. But there came a time when they stood out once too often, and probably they never shrank back again to the normal size, but became thickened. Thus his blood-pressure rose under the strain of arteriosclerosis and in the course of years the inevitable results of gluttony overtook him. Drink, guzzle, and syphilis are the three deadly sins, and they are deadly in proportion to the effect that they cause upon the arteries. And in the term “arteries” one includes heart and kidneys. The heart is simply a large expansion of an artery, and the kidneys are merely a network of arterioles and capillaries; if one part goes all the rest follow, and thus it is that the term “cardiovascular disease” is generally used to describe the results of high blood-pressure. It is of course possible that Johnson’s glooms may have been due to intestinal auto-intoxication; but melancholia is a constant companion of an unduly sensitive nervous system. Warnings came in 1782 with breathlessness and pain in the chest; the heart was evidently beginning to rebel, but the first real alarming warning came on the night of June 17th, 1783, when he awoke in the middle of the night and found that he could not speak. Trying to write, he found that “my hand made wrong letters,” that is to say he had not only aphasia, but “agraphia” or loss of power to write. Possibly if anybody had happened to think of it he might have been able to communicate with the outer world by means of children’s block letters. But nobody did; and when his servant came in the morning he could not comprehend why the old gentleman expected him to read something that he had written instead of speaking in answer to his own chatter.