That he was unusually depressed in
the spring of this year is shewn by his entry at Easter (_ante_, p.
487). From his visit to Dr. Percy in the summer of 1764 (_ante_, p. 486)
to the autumn of 1765, we have very little information about him. For
more than two years he did not write to Boswell (_post_, ii. 1). Dr.
Adams (_ante_, p. 483) 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 February, 1766, when he had
become an abstainer. Johnson certainly stayed at Streatham from before
Midsummer to October in 1766 (_post_, ii. 25, 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. 16, 17), 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.
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