was Queen Anne, to whom, in compliance with a super-
stition just dying a natural death, he had been taken by
his mother to be touched for the king's evil. The touch
was ineffectual. Perhaps, as Boswell suggested, he ought to
have been presented to the genuine heirs of the Stuarts in
Rome. Disease and superstition had thus stood by his
cradle, and they never quitted him during life. The de-
mon of hypochondria was always lying in wait for him,
and could be exorcised for a time only by hard work or
social excitement. Of this we shall hear enough; but it
may be as well to sum up at once some of the physical
characteristics which marked him through life and greatly
influenced his career.

The disease had scarred and disfigured features other-
wise regular and always impressive. It had seriously
injured his eyes, entirely destroying, it seems, the sight of
one. He could not, it is said, distinguish a friend's face
half a yard off, and pictures were to him meaningless
patches, in which he could never see the resemblance to
their objects. The statement is perhaps exaggerated; for
he could see enough to condemn a portrait of himself.
He expressed some annoyance when Reynolds had painted
him with a pen held close to his eye; and protested that
he would not be handed down to posterity-as "blinking
Sam." It seems that habits of minute attention atoned in
some degree for this natural defect. Boswell tells us how
Johnson once corrected him as to the precise shape of a
mountain; and Mrs. Thrale says that he was a close and
exacting of ladies' dress, even to the accidental
position of a riband. He could even lay down æsthetical
canons upon such. matters. He reproved her for wearing
a dark. dress as unsuitable to a "little creature." "What,"
he asked, "have not all insects gay colours?" His insen-

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