Visitors to St. Paul's Cathedral are sometimes astonished as they walk round the space under the arch to come upon a statue which would appear to be that of a retired armed man meditating upon a wasted life. They are still more astonished when they see under it an inscription indicating that it represents the English writer, Samuel Johnson. The statue is by Bacon, but it is not one of his best works. The figure is, as often in eighteenth-century sculpture, clothed only in a loose robe which leaves arms, legs and one shoulder bare. But the strangeness for us is not one of costume only. If we know anything of Johnson, we know that he was constantly ill all through his life and whether we know anything of him or not we are apt to think of a literary man as a delicate, weakly, nervous sort of person. Nothing can be further from that than the muscular statue. And in this matter the statue is perfectly right. And the fact which it reports is far from being unimportant. The body and the mind are closely interwoven in all of us, and certainly in Johnson's case the influence of the body was extremely obvious. His melancholy, his constantly repeated conviction of the general unhappiness of human life, was certainly the result of his constitutional infirmities. On the other hand, his courage, and his entire indifference to pain, were partly due to his great bodily strength. Perhaps the vein of rudeness, almost of fierceness, which sometimes showed itself in his conversation, was the natural temper of an invalid and suffering giant. That at any rate is what he was. He was the victim from childhood of a disease which resembled St Vitus's Dance. He never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs when he walked it was like the struggling walk of one in irons. All accounts agree that his strange gestures and contortions were painful for his friends to witness and attracted crowds of starers in the streets. But Reynolds says that he could sit still for his portrait to be taken, and that when his mind was engaged by a conversation the convulsions ceased. In any case, it is certain that neither this perpetual misery, nor his constant fear of losing his reason, nor his many grave attacks of illness, ever induced him to surrender the privileges that belonged to his physical strength. He justly thought no character so disagreeable as that of a chronic invalid, and was determined not m be one himself. He had known what it was to live on four pence a day and scorned the life of sofa cushions and tea into which well-attended old gentlemen so easily slip. Visitors to St Paul's Cathedral are surprised when they look at Johnson's statue because ______.