Thus even so simple a document as Johnson’s will occasioned searchings of heart, a result that some strive heroically or pathetically to avoid. “I again desire that all things may be composed with peace honour and honesty,” wrote Dorothy Eve, of Canterbury, in 1691. A merchant, James Clegg, whose will was proved the same year as Johnson’s, declared that he made his testament “to explain my last will for the distribution of what shall result to be my property and to me belonging at the time of my decease, in such manner that I hope not to embroil those persons who will have the pleasure of surviving me.” Wills that stir the passions and sting the memory are indeed of frequent occurrence. Wills that satisfy every friend must surely be few. To what an extent the remembrance of friends may be carried is illustrated by a will made a few years after Johnson’s death. While Johnson bequeathed books to less than a score of friends, Martha Shorte, in a list which must long have engaged her thoughts, bequeaths mementoes to more than a hundred beneficiaries. “The small trifle,” she says in one place, “is only to denote that all my kind neighbours lived in my memory.” In some cases it may be surmised, or at least the suspicion will cross the mind, that her friends were not unaware of her testamentary tendencies. To one, for instance, she gives “two mahogany stools that she used to like,” to another, “an old inlaid Chinese cabinet that she always admired,” to another the “yew-tree card-table which she admired.” But there is a danger in lavish remembrance: for if one be omitted where many are comprised, the sting is so much the more sharp. Johnson left the residue of his estate to his negro servant, Francis Barber. Even this raised dissent. Sir John Hawkins, says Boswell, seemed not a little angry at this bequest, and muttered a caveat against ostentatious bounty to negroes. Barber had once been a slave, but had received the gift of liberty under his master’s will. The latter years of his liberty Johnson hoped to provide for. Simpson Strachan, the merchant whose will was buried for fear of the enemy, may illustrate the case of Barber. “My will and my intention is that my negro man ... in virtue of his faithful services be made free of all slavery whatever, and I do hereby order and ordain and request my executors to pay all the expenses attending his freedom from my estate, and that they give him the sum of £330 currency to his own use and behoof as a reward for his fidelity and attachment to me.” Most would agree with Boswell that a faithful servant, in lieu of near relations, is peculiarly entitled to enjoy “A little gold that’s sure each week, That comes not from his living kind, But from a dead man in his grave, Who cannot change his mind.” Nor was it his master’s fault if Barber made so ill a use of his money as Hawkins affirms.