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193 23 R The Last Days And so Johnson returned to London, and Boswell returned to his home in Edinburgh. This was hardly the end of their relationship, nor did it mark the final time they would be together. They would meet in London on other occasions; Boswell always needed an infusion of the city’s exuberant life, and he wished to continue collecting material for his planned biography. After his father’s death in 1782 and his ascension as laird, he invited Johnson to return to Auchinleck, and Johnson unquestionably would have liked to do so—he would write later of Boswell, “I love to travel with him.” But Johnson’s health was slipping away. He told Boswell, with obvious feeling, “I should like to totter about your place, and live mostly on milk, and be taken care of by Mrs. Boswell. . . . If I were in distress, there is no man I would come to so soon as you. I should come to you and have a cottage in your park.” Bozzy was stirred. His writing shows us the powerful feelings between the two men for all their shared experiences: “I got up to part from him. He took me in his arms, and said with a solemn fervour, ‘god bless you for Jesus Christ’s sake.’ . . . I walked away from Dr. Johnson’s door with agitation and a kind of fearful apprehension of what might happen before I returned.” He wrote that in 1783, the year before Johnson’s death. Johnson suffered an assortment of maladies including worsening gout, asthma, dropsy (heart failure), and kidney stones. He kept a medical journal for a time in which he recorded his specific ailments and treatments. He knew he was failing—“God have mercy,” he wrote despairingly at one point. Mrs. Thrale had remarried, and Johnson’s spirits were low: “I could bear sickness better, if I were relieved from solitude.” In May 1784 Boswell found Johnson somewhat improved, and he accompanied Johnson to Oxford with Johnson’s lifelong friend William Adams, who shared anecdotes about the doctor. Those stories give us a sad picture of Johnson at the end, his 194 Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster melancholia overcoming him as he declared that he was “oppressed by the fear of death” and soon would join “the damned” in hell. When others sought to convince him otherwise Johnson declared that life was more miserable than happy: “I would not lead my life over again through an archangel should request it.” In June, hearing Johnson’s wistful desire to escape London’s cold winter for the Mediterranean warmth of Italy, Boswell and others hatched a plan to get him there. The centerpiece was a pitch to Lord Thurlow, the lord high chancellor, to speak to the king for an increase in Johnson’s royal pension to enable him to afford the trip. Boswell’s account of breaking the good news in his Life of Johnson sets the powerfully emotional scene quite affectingly : boswell: “I am very anxious about you, Sir, and particularly that you should go to Italy for the winter, which I believe is your own wish.” johnson: “It is, Sir.” boswell: “You have no objection, I presume, but the money it would require.” johnson: “Why no, Sir!” Upon which I gave him a particular account of what had been done, and read to him the Lord Chancellor’s letter.—He listened with much attention, and then warmly said, “This is taking prodigious pains about a man.”—O!, Sir (said I, with most sincere affection,) your friends would do every thing for you. He paused,—grew more and more agitated,—till tears started into his eyes, and he exclaimed with fervent emotion, “god bless you all.” I was so affected that I also shed tears. . . . We both remained for some time unable to speak.— He rose suddenly and quitted the room, quite melted in tenderness. The next day Boswell met with Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had helped put the Italy plan into motion, and they drove in Reynolds’s coach for a meal. After dining, Johnson invited Boswell in, but “I declined it from apprehension that my spirits would sink,” Boswell related. “We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the carriage. When he had got down upon the foot-pavement, he called out, ‘Fare you well!’ and without looking back sprung away with a kind of pathetic briskness (if I may use that expression), which...

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