PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION IN 1785.
These Posthumous Devotions of Dr. Johnson will be, no doubt, welcomed by the Public, with a distinction similar to that which has been already paid to his other Works.
During many years of his life, he statedly observed certain days[1] with a religious solemnity; on which, and other occasions, it was his custom to compose suitable Prayers and Meditations; committing them to writing for his own use, and, as he assured me, without any view to their publication. But being last summer on a visit to Oxford to the Reverend Dr. Adams[2], and that Gentleman urging him repeatedly to engage in some work of this kind, he then first conceived a design to revise these pious effusions, and bequeath them, with enlargements, to the use and benefit of others.
Infirmities, however, now growing fast upon him, he at length changed this design, and determined to give the Manuscripts, without revision, in charge to me, as I had long shared his intimacy, and was at this time his daily attendant. Accordingly, one morning, on my visiting him by desire at an early hour, he put these Papers into my hands, with instructions for committing them to the Press, and with a promise to prepare a sketch of his own life to accompany them. But the performance of this promise also was prevented, partly by his hasty destruction of some private memoirs, which he afterwards lamented, and partly by that incurable sickness, which soon ended in his dissolution. ····· That the authenticity of this Work may never be called in question, the original manuscript will be deposited in the library of Pembroke College in Oxford. . . . .
GEORGE STRAHAN.
ISLINGTON,
August 6, 1785.
