90 Extracts from
��with which he has been charged, and which kept at a distance many, who, to my knowledge, would have been glad of an , intimacy with him, he possessed the affections of pity and com passion in a most eminent degree. In a mixed company, of which I was one, the conversation turned on the pestilence which raged in London, in the year 1665, and gave occasion to Johnson to speak of Dr. Nathanael Hodges, who, in the height of that calamity, continued in the city, and was almost the only one of his profession that had the courage to oppose the endeavours of his art to the spreading of the contagion. It was the hard fate of this person, a short time after, to die a prisoner for debt, in Ludgate : Johnson related this circumstance to us, with the tears ready to start from his eyes ; and, with great energy said, c Such a man would not have been suffered to perish in these times V (Page 49.)
Johnson was never greedy of money, but without money could not be stimulated to write. I have been told by a clergyman of some eminence with whom he had been long acquainted, that, being to preach on a particular occasion, he applied, as others under a like necessity had frequently done, to Johnson for help. ' I will write a sermon for thee/ said Johnson, ' but thou must pay me for it 2 .' (Page 84.)
1 De Foe mentions him in a pas- thorised physician. . . . He became
sage, where, speaking of the quacks, poor, was imprisoned in Ludgate for
he says: 'their doors were more debt, and there died June 10, 1688.'
thronged than those of ... Dr. His book on the plague, which Dr.
Hodges, or any, though the most Quincy translated in 1720, ' shows
famous men of the time.' De Foe's him to have been an excellent ob-
Works, v. 25. On p. 192 he says : server both as to symptoms and the
' Great was the reproach thrown results of treatment.' DR. NORMAN
upon those physicians who left their MOORE in the Diet. Nat. Biog. xxvii.
patients during the sickness; and 60.
now they came to town again, nobody 2 ' No man but a blockhead ever
cared to employ them; they were wrote except for money. 3 Life, iii. 19.
called deserters, and frequently bills Strahan wrote to Hume on April 9,
were set up on their doors, and written, 1774: 'If your commendations of
Here is a doctor to be let ! ' Henry's History are well founded, is
' In recognition of Dr. Hodges's not his work an exception to your
services to the citizens during the own general rule, that no good book
plague, the authorities of the City was ever wrote for money ? ' Letters
granted him a stipend as their au- of Hume to Stratum, p. 285.
In
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