“Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, And sign your will before you sup from home.” He may have put it off from sheer indolence, but it is not unlikely he felt something of the common superstition against making a will, unreasonable though it may be and unwise. When Charles Lamb wished to make his first will he wrote: “I want to make my will, and to leave my property in trust for my sister. _N.B._ I am not going _therefore_ to die.” But Lamb had not Johnson’s peculiar dread of death. The superstition is not yet defunct; its rise and origin would be difficult to trace. “It is received,” says a writer in the sixteenth century, “for an opinion amongst the ruder and more ignorant people, that if a man should chance to be so wise as to make his will in his good health when ... he might ask counsel of the learned, that then surely he should not live long after.” It is curious that it should sometimes be a case for jocularity if a man make his will betimes. Possibly this light-heartedness is assumed as a cloak to hide from ourselves the gravity of our inevitable end. If this be so, it is not surprising to find Dr. Johnson convulsed with hilarity when his friend Langton made his will. But the story is an extraordinary one. “He now laughed immoderately, without any reason that we could perceive,” says Boswell, “ ... called him the testator; and added, ‘I dare say he thinks he has done a mighty thing. He won’t stay till he gets home to his seat in the country, to produce this wonderful deed: he’ll call up the landlord of the first inn on the road; and, after a suitable preface upon mortality and the uncertainty of life, will tell him he should not delay making his will.... He believes he has made this will; but he did not make it; you, Chambers, made it for him. I trust you have had more conscience than to make him say, ‘being of sound understanding’; ‘ha, ha, ha! I hope he has left me a legacy. I’d have his will turned into verse, like a ballad.’ ... Johnson could not stop his merriment, but continued it all the way till he got without the Temple-gate. He then burst into such a fit of laughter, that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion; and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts at the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud, that in the silence of the night his voice seemed to resound from Temple-bar to Fleet-ditch.”