Conclusion of "The Vanity of Human Wishes"

Samuel Johnson

Back in the days when there weren’t any helpful drugs to clear away the obsessions of a troubled mind, a mountain of a man named Samuel Johnson, as his good friend Boswell once described it, kept them at bay like a gladiator in the arena, fending off the wild animals by the sheer force of his will. But there was more to it than Boswell understood, or p…