undertook the care of his health, and had the honour and happiness of contributing to its restoration.'
It is not possible to reconcile the contradiction in dates between Johnson and Mrs. Piozzi, nor is it easy to fix the time of this illness. That before February 1766, he had had an illness so serious as to lead him altogether to abstain from wine is beyond a doubt. Boswell, on his return to England in that month, heard it from his own lips (post, ii. 9). That this illness must have attacked him after March 1. 1765, when he visited Cambridge, is also clear: for at that time he was still drinking wine (ante. Appendix Q). That he was unusually depressed in the spring of this year is shewn by his entry at Easter (ante. p. 564). From his visit to Dr. Percy in the summer of 1764 (ante, p. 562) to the autumn of 1765. we have very little information about him. For more than two years he did not write to Hoswell (post, ii. 1). Dr. Adams (ante, p. 559) describes the same kind of attack as Mrs. Piozzi. Its date is not given. Boswell, after quoting an entry made on Johnson's birthday, Sept. 18, 1764, says 'about this time he was afflicted' with the illness Dr. Adams describes. From Mrs. Piozzi, from Johnson's account to Boswell, and from Dr. Adams we learn of a serious illness. Was there more than one? If there was only one, then Boswell is wrong in placing it before March 1, 1765, when Johnson was still a wine-drinker, and Mrs. Piozzi is wrong in placing it after Februar)^ 1766, when he had become an abstainer. Johnson certainly stayed at Streatham from before Mid-summer to October in 1766 (post, ii. 28, and Pr. and Med. p. 71), and this fact lends support to Mrs. Piozzi's statement. But, on the other hand, his meetings with Boswell in February of that year, and his letters to Langton of March 9 and May 10 (post, ii. 18, 19 ). shew a not unhappy frame of mind. Boswell. in his Hebrides (Oct 16. 1773) speaks of Johnson's illness in 1766. If it was in 1766 that he was ill, it must have been after May 10 and before Midsummer-day, and this period is almost too brief for Mrs. Piozzi's account. It is a curious coincidence that Cowper was introduced to the Unwins in the same year in which Johnson, according to his own account, had his first knowledge of the Thrales. (Southey's Cowper, i, 171.)
THE END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
