trouble to investigate; a thorough Tory himself he was often unfair to men
of Whig principles; and for poetry of the delicately imaginative and
romantic sort his rather painfully practical mind had little appreciation.
Nevertheless he was in many respects well fitted for the work, and some of
the lives, such as those of Dryden, Pope, Addison and Swift, men in whom he
took a real interest, are of high merit.

Johnson's last years were rendered gloomy, partly by the loss of friends,
partly by ill-health and a deepening of his lifelong tendency to morbid
depression. He had an almost insane shrinking from death and with it a
pathetic apprehension of future punishment. His melancholy was perhaps the
greater because of the manly courage and contempt for sentimentality which
prevented him from complaining or discussing his distresses. His religious
faith, also, in spite of all intellectual doubts, was strong, and he died
calmly, in 1784. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Johnson's picturesque surface oddities have received undue attention,
thanks largely to his friend and biographer Boswell. Nearly every one
knows, for example, that he superstitiously made a practice of entering
doorways in a certain manner and would rather turn back and come in again
than fail in the observance; that he was careless, even slovenly, in dress
and person, and once remarked frankly that he had no passion for clean
linen; that he ate voraciously, with a half-animal eagerness; that in the
intervals of talking he 'would make odd sounds, a half whistle, or a
clucking like a hen's, and when he ended an argument would blow out his
breath like a whale.' More important were his dogmatism of opinion, his
intense prejudices, and the often seemingly brutal dictatorial violence
with which he enforced them. Yet these things too were really on the
surface. It is true that his nature was extremely conservative; that after
a brief period of youthful free thinking he was fanatically loyal to the