Prayers and Meditations.
��hopeless. Good resolutions must be made and kept x . I am almost seventy years old, and have no time to lose. The distressful restlessness of my nights, makes it difficult to settle the course of my days. Something however let me do.
��131.
EASTER DAY, Apr. 4, 1779.
I rose about half an hour after nine, transcribed the prayer written last night, and by neglecting to count time sat too long at Breakfast, so that I came to Church at the first lesson. I attended the litany pretty well, but in the pew could not hear the communion service, and missed the prayer for the Church militant. Before I went to the altar I prayed the occasional prayer. At the altar I commended my 0. 4>. 2 and
��1 More than twenty years earlier he had written : ' I believe most men may review all the lives that have passed within their observation without remembering one efficacious resolution, or being able to tell a single instance of a course of practice suddenly changed in consequence of a change of opinion, or an establish ment of determination.' Idler, No. 27. See ante, p. 31.
2 A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1785, p. 731, deciphered these letters as * davovras <pi\ovs, de ceased friends ' ; another ridiculously as * Thrale friends.' Ib. 1838, ii. 364. The following letter by Dr. Henry Jackson, published in the Athe naeum, June 1 8, 1887, gives, no doubt, the true explanation.
' Trinity College, Cambridge,
June 14, 1887.
'"Mr. Croker has favoured us," writes Macaulay in his essay on Croker's 'Boswell,' " with some Greek of his own. ' At the altar/ says Dr. Johnson, * I recommended my 6 0.' 'These letters,' says the editor, ' (which Dr. Strahan seems not to have understood) probably
��mean QV^TQI <f>i\oi, "departed friends." ' Johnson was not a first- rate Greek scholar; but he knew more Greek than most boys when they leave school ; and no school boy could venture to use the word dvijToi in the sense which Mr. Croker ascribes to it without imminent danger of a flogging."
' Macaulay's criticism of Croker's Greek is plainly just ; 6wjr6s never means anything except " mortal." But the great essayist had no other interpretation to offer. Accordingly a lively writer [Mr. Andrew Lang] in the Daily News of June 6th, admitting that "the Greek would be bad Greek," asks, " Would it not be good enough Greek shorthand for Dr. Johnson ?" May I attempt another solution of the mystery?
' From the time of his wife's death on Tuesday, March 17, O.S., 1752, Johnson was in the habit of keeping Easter Day with special solemnity. In particular he "commended" in his prayers his wife, his father, his brother, his mother, and in some cases others, e.g. "Bathurst" and " Boothby." See Easter Day, 1759, again
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