Johnson composed his elegy ‘On the Death of Dr Robert Levett’ (1783) only a year before his own demise. It is one of his most piercing works, and holds a special place in his canon. Coming very late in his writing life, the elegy condenses many of the concerns of his periodical essays, fiction and verse. It is not simply a powerful act of compression, a final summation of a lifetime's wisdom: one or two familiar Johnsonian themes are delicately adjusted, and for once we hear him speak in a public voice of a domestic companion. Experience of old age has scarcely softened his central theme of the vanity of human wishes. We are told in no uncertain terms that we are ‘condemn'd to hope's delusive mine’, and the generality and weight of the line are wholly familiar to his readers. Even so, there is something in these stanzas that I feel only in a handful of his most private and heart-rending letters and prayers. It is as though all that is condensed in his petition ‘let my life be useful, and my death be happy’ (Yale, I, 66) is re-cast in the third person and in the past: Levett's life was useful, his death was happy. One could call this quality ‘emotion’ or ‘experience’, but it would be inadequate and misleading to rest there, and words like ‘directness’ and ‘personal’ are hardly sufficient in themselves.