"Certainly, (said the Doctor;) but, (turning
to me,) how old is your pig?" I told him, three years old. "Then, (said
he,) the pig has no cause to complain; he would have been killed the
first year if he had not been EDUCATED, and protracted existence is a
good recompence for very considerable degrees of torture."'
As Johnson had now very faint hopes of recovery, and as Mrs. Thrale
was no longer devoted to him, it might have been supposed that he would
naturally have chosen to remain in the comfortable house of his beloved
wife's daughter, and end his life where he began it. But there was in
him an animated and lofty spirit, and however complicated diseases might
depress ordinary mortals, all who saw him, beheld and acknowledged the
invictum animum Catonis. Such was his intellectual ardour even at this
time, that he said to one friend, 'Sir, I look upon every day to be
lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance;' and to another, when
talking of his illness, 'I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.
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