Provision for old servants is still a frequent, even an outstanding, feature of wills, accompanied often by graceful expressions of gratitude. Perhaps it has always been so. The Rt. Hon. Humphry Morice, of the Privy Council, was writing a codicil by way of instruction to his executors, shortly before the year of Johnson’s death. He makes us feel vividly what Johnson must have owed to his faithful servant: “My diamond shoe and knee buckles I mean to include in my wearing apparel left to Richard Deale, also gold-headed canes, as his attention and fidelity increases every day, and sorry I am to say he is the only servant I ever had who seemed sensible of good treatment and did not behave ungratefully.” To the ordinary reader Dr. Johnson’s other bequests appear thoughtful too, though Hawkins considered them ill-proportioned and ill-calculated. To the Rev. Mr. Rogers, of Berkeley, near Frome, he gave £100, “requesting him to apply the same towards the maintenance of Elizabeth Herne, a lunatick”; to his god-children, “the son and daughter of Mauritius Lowe, painter, each of them £100 of my stock in the 3 per cent. consolidated annuities, to be applied and disposed of by and at the discretion of my executors, in the education or settlement in the world of them my said legatees”; and to “Mr. Sastres, the Italian master, the sum of £5, to be laid out in books of piety for his own use.” But uppermost in his mind, it would seem, was the debt of gratitude he owed, for his father’s sake, to Innys the bookseller; for him he remembered in his will made in the immediate apprehension of death, while most of his bequests occurred in the codicil executed on the following day. One of the strangest characteristics of man is that, in the face of death, he can without a qualm speak bitter words and cherish hard feelings, a characteristic which sometimes distinguishes or disfigures wills. Dr. Johnson’s will is free from any such taint. Yet he retained a certain roughness of language to the last. “Treat thy nurses and servants sweetly, and as it becomes an obliged and a necessitous person,” says Jeremy Taylor. Boswell speaks of Johnson’s “uncommon kindness to his servants.” But, asked one morning how he liked a new attendant who had sat up with him, Johnson replied with a touch of his old humorous self: “Not at all, Sir; the fellow’s an idiot; he is as awkward as a turnspit when first put into the wheel, and as sleepy as a dormouse.”