observe the Sabbath. Let it never be a day of business, nor wholly a day of dissipation V He concluded his solemn farewell with, ' Let my words have their due weight. They are the words of a dying man.' I never saw him more. In the last five or six days of his life but few even of his most intimate friends were admitted. Every hour that could be abstracted from his bodily pains and infirmities, was spent in prayer and the warmest ejaculations ; and in that pious, praiseworthy, and exemplary manner, he closed a life begun, continued, and ended in virtue 2 .
��BY THE REV. MR. PARKER.
[' The following anecdotes are told by Mr. Parker, from the relation of Mrs. Aston and her sister.' Croker's Boswell, ix. 249.]
Dr. Johnson's friendship for Mrs. Elizabeth Aston 3 commenced at the palace in Lichfield. the residence of Mr. Walmesley 4 : with Mrs. Gastrel he became acquainted in London, at the house of her brother-in-law, Mr. Hervey 5 . During the Doctor's annual visits to his daughter-in-law, Lucy Porter, he spent much of his time at Stow Hill 6 , where Mrs. Gastrel and Mrs. Elizabeth Aston resided. They were the daughters of Sir Thomas Aston 7 , of Aston Hall in Cheshire, of whom it is said, that being applied to for some account of his family, to illustrate the history of Cheshire, he replied, that ' the title and estate had descended from father to son for thirty generations, and that he believed they were neither much richer nor much poorer than they were at first.'
1 ' He said he would not have Sun- 4 Life, i. 81. He lived in the day kept with rigid severity and Bishop's palace, ' the scene of many gloom, but with a gravity and sim- happy days in Johnson's early life.' plicity of behaviour.' Life, ii. 72. See Ib. ii. 467.
ante, i. 17, 301. 5 Ante, \. 254 n.
2 * In all our works begun, con- 6 Life, ii. 470 ; Letters, i. 160. tinued, and ended in thee.' The 7 The family in the main line must Order of the Holy Communion, Book be extinct, for there is no Aston in of Common Prayer. the list of Baronets.
3 Life, i. 83 ; Letters, i. 160 n.
He
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