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SAMUEL JOHNSON.
(SEPTEMBER, 1831.)
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, by James Boswell, Esq.
A new Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes.
By JOHN WILSON CROKEB, LL.D., F.R.S. 5 vols. 8vo.
London: 1831.
TiIS work has greatly disappointed us. Whatever faults we may have been prepared to find in
it, we fully expected that it would be a valuable
addition to English literature; that it would contain many curious facts and many judicious remarks; that the style of the notes would be neat,
clear, and precise; and that the typographical
execution would be, as in new editions of classical
works it ought to be, almost faultless. We are
sorry to be obliged to say that the merits of Mr.
Croker's performance are on a par with those
of a certain leg of mutton on which Dr. Johnson
dined, while travelling from London to Oxford,
and which he, with characteristic energy, pronounced to be "as bad as bad could be, ill fed,
ill killed, ill kept, and ill dressed." This edition
is ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill
printed..717747




8


SAMUEL JOHNSON.


Nothing in the work has astonished us so
much as the ignorance or carelessness of Mr.
Croker with respect to facts and dates. Many
of his blunders are such as we should be surprised to hear any well-educated gentleman commit even in conversation. The notes absolutely
swarm with misstatements into which the editor never would have fallen if he had taken the
slightest pains to investigate the truth of his assertions, or if he had even been well acquainted
with the book on which he undertook to comment. We will give a few instances.
Mr. Croker tells us in a note that Derrick, who
was master of the ceremonies at Bath, died very
poor in 1760.* We read on; and, a few pages
later, we find Dr. Johnson and Boswell talking of
this same Derrick as still living and reigning, as
having retrieved his character, as possessing so
much power over his subjects at Bath that his
opposition might be fatal to Sheridan's lectures
on oratory.  And all this is in 1763. The fact
is that Derrick died in 1769.
In one note we read that Sir Herbert Croft,
the author of that pompous and foolish account
of Young which appears among the " Lives of
the Poets," died in 1805.: Another note in the
same volume states that this same Sir Herbert
Croft died at Paris, after residing abroad for fifteen years, on the 27th of April, 1816.~
Vol. i., p. 394.            Vol. i., p. 404.
t Vol. iv., p. 321.        ~ Vol. iv., p. 428.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


9


Mr. Croker informs us that Sir William Forbes
of Pitsligo, the author of the "Life of Beattie,"
died in 1816.* A Sir William Forbes undoubtedly died in that year, but not the Sir William
Forbes in question, whose death took place in
1806.  It is notorious, indeed, that the biographer of Beattie lived just long enough to complete the history of his friend. Eight or nine
years before the date which Mr. Croker has assigned for Sir William's death, Sir Walter Scott
lamented that event in the introduction to the
fourth canto of "Marmion."   Every school-girl
knows the lines:
"Scarce had lamented Forbes paid
The tribute to his Minstrel's shade;
The tale of friendship scarce was told,
Ere the narrator's heart was cold;
Far may we search before we find
A heart so manly and so kind I"
In one place we are told that Allan Ramsay,
the painter, was born in 1709, and died in 1784;t
in another, that he died in 1784, in the seventyfirst year of his age.4
In one place Mr. Croker says that at the commencement of the intimacy between Dr. Johnson
and Mrs. Thrale, in 1765, the lady was twenty-five
years old.~  In other places he says that Mrs.
Thrale's thirty-fifth year coincided with Johnson's seventieth.1  Johnson was born in 1709.
Vol. ii., p. 262. t Vol. iv., p. 10. t Vol. v., p. 281.
~ VoL i., p. 510.  L Vol. iv., pp. 271, 322.




10           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
If, therefore, Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth year coincided with Johnson's seventieth, she could have
been only twenty-one years old in 1765.  This
is not all. Mr. Croker, in another place, assigns
the year 1777 as the date of the complimentary
lines which Johnson made on Mrs. Thrale's thirty-fifth birthday.* If this date be correct, Mrs.
Thrale must have been born in 1742, and could
have been only twenty-three when her acquaintance with Johnson commenced. Mr. Croker therefore gives us three different statements as to her
age. Two of the three must be incorrect. We
will not decide between them; we will only say
that the reasons which Mr. Croker gives for thinking that Mrs. Thrale was exactly thirty-five years
old when Johnson was seventy appear to us utterly frivolous.
Again, Mr. Croker informs his readers that
" Lord Mansfield survived Johnson full ten
years."t  Lord Mansfield survived Dr. Johnson
just eight years and a quarter.
Johnson found in the library of a French lady,
whom he visited during his short visit to Paris,
some works which he regarded with great disdain. " I looked," says he, "into the books in the
lady's closet, and, in contempt, showed them to Mr.
Thrale. 'Prince Titi,' 'Bibliotheque des Fees,'
and other books."t  "The ' History of Prince
Titi,' " observes Mr. Croker, " was said to be the
autobiography of Frederic, Prince of Wales, but
* Vol. iii., p. 463. t Vol. ii., p. 151. t Vol. iii., p. 271.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


11


was probably written by Ralph, his secretary."
A more absurd note never was penned. The history of Prince Titi to which Mr. Croker refers,
whether written by Prince Frederic or by Ralph,
was certainly never published. If Mr. Croker
had taken the trouble to read with attention that
very passage in Park's "Royal and Noble Authors," which he cites as his authority, he would
have seen that the manuscript was given up to
the Government. Even if this memoir had been
printed, it is not very likely to find its way into
a French lady's bookcase. And would any man
in his senses speak contemptuously of a French
lady for having in her possession an English
work so curious and interesting as a " Life of
Prince Frederic," whether written by himself or
by a confidential secretary, must have been?
The history at which Johnson laughed was a
very proper companion to the "Bibliotheque des
Fees," a fairy tale about good Prince Titi and
naughty Prince Violent. Mr. Croker may find
it in the " Magasin des Enfans," the first French
book which the little girls of England read to
their governesses.
Mr. Croker states that Mr. Henry Bate, who
afterward assumed the name of Dudley, was proprietor of the iorning Herald, and fought a duel
with George Robinson Stoney, in consequence of
some attacks on Lady Strathmore which appeared in that paper.* Now, Mr. Bate was then con* Vol. v., p. 196.




12          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
nected, not with the Morning Herald, but with
the Morning Post; and the dispute took place
before the Aforning Herald was in existence.
The duel was fought in January, 1777.  The
Chronicle of the "Annual Register" for that
year contains an account of the transaction, and
distinctly states that Mr. Bate was editor of the
Morning Post. The Morning Herald, as any person may see by looking at any number of it, was
not established till some years after this affair.
For this blunder there is, we must acknowledge,
some excuse; for it certainly seems almost incredible to a person living in our time that any
human being should ever have stooped to fight
with a writer in the lforning Post.
"James de Duglas," says Mr. Croker, "was requested by King Robert Bruce, in his last hours,
to repair with his heart to Jerusalem, and humbly to deposit it at the sepulchre of our Lord,
which he did in 1329."* Now, it is well known
that he did no such thing, and for a very sufficient reason, because he was killed by the way.
Nor was it in 1329 that he set out.  Robert
Bruce died in 1329, and the expedition of Douglas took place in the following year, "Quand le
printems vint et la saison," says Froissart; in
June, 1330, says Lord Hailes, whom Mr. Croker
cites as the authority for his statement.
Mr. Croker tells us that the great Marquess of
Montrose was beheaded at Edinburgh in 1650.t


* Vol. iv., p. 29.


t Vol. ii., p. 52G.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


13


There is not a forward boy at any school in England who does not know that the marquess was
hanged. The account of the execution is one of
the finest passages in Lord Clarendon's " History."  We can scarcely suppose that Mr. Croker
has never read that passage; and yet we can
scarcely suppose that any person who has ever
perused so noble and pathetic a story can have
utterly forgotten all its most striking circumstances.
"Lord Townshend," says Mr. Croker, "was
not Secretary of State till 1720."*  Can Mr.
Croker possibly be ignorant that Lord Townshend was made Secretary of State at the accession of George I. in 1714, that he continued to
be Secretary of State till he was displaced by
the intrigues of Sunderland and Stanhope at the
close of 1716, and that he returned to the office
of Secretary of State, not in 1720, but in 1721?
Mr. Croker, indeed, is generally unfortunate in
his statements respecting the Townshend family.
He tells us that Charles Townshend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was " nephew of the Prime
Minister, and son of a peer who was Secretary
of State, and leader of the House of Lords."t
Charles Townshend was not nephew, but grandnephew, of the Duke of Newcastle; not son, but
grandson, of the Lord Townshend who was Secretary of State and leader of the House of Lords.
" General Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga,"
* Vo. lL,. 52  t ol.iii. p.308


* Vol. iii., p. 52.


t Vol. iii., p. 368.




14          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
says Mr. Croker, "in March, 1778."*  General
Burgoyne surrendered on the 17th of October,
1777.
" Nothing," says Mr. Croker, " can be more unfounded than the assertion that Byng fell a martyr to political party. By a strange coincidence
of circumstances, it happened that there was a
total change of administration between his condemnation and his death: so that one party presided at his trial, and another at his execution:
there can be no stronger proof that he was not a
political martyr."t  Now, what will our readers
think of this writer, when we assure them that
this statement, so confidently made, respecting
events so notorious, is absolutely untrue? One
and the same administration was in office when
the court-martial on Byng commenced its sittings, through the whole trial, at the condemnation, and at the execution. In the month of November, 1756, the Duke of Newcastle and Lord
Hardwicke resigned; the Duke of Devonshire
became First Lord of the Treasury, and Mr. Pitt
Secretary of State. This administration lasted
till the month of April, 1757.  Byng's courtmartial began to sit on the 28th of December,
1756. He was shot on the 14th of March, 1757.
There is something at once diverting and provoking in the cool and authoritative manner in
which Mr. Croker makes these random assertions.
We do not suspect him of intentionally falsifying


* Vol. iv., p. 222.


t Vol. i., p. 298.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.             15
history. But of this high literary misdemeanor
we do without hesitation accuse him, that he has
no adequate sense of the obligation which a
writer who professes to relate facts owes to the
public. We accuse him of a negligence and an
ignorance analogous to that crassa negligentia,
and that crassa ignorantia, on which the law animadverts in magistrates and surgeons, even when
malice and corruption are not imputed. We accuse him of having undertaken a work which, if
not performed with strict accuracy, must be very
much worse than useless, and of having performed it as if the difference between an accurate and an inaccurate statement was not worth
the trouble of looking into the most common book
of reference.
But we must proceed. These volumes contain mistakes more gross, if possible, than any
that we have yet mentioned. Boswell has recorded some observations made by Johnson on
the changes which had taken place in Gibbon's
religious opinions. That Gibbon, when a lad at
Oxford, turned Catholic is well known. "It is
said," cried Johnson, laughing, " that he has been
a Mahommedan."   "This sarcasm," says the editor, "probably alludes to the tenderness with
which Gibbon's malevolence to Christianity induced him to treat Mahommedanism in his history." Now, the sarcasm was uttered in 1776;
and that part of the " History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire" which relates to
Mahommedanism was not published till 1788,




16           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
twelve years after the date of this conversation,
and near four years after the death of Johnson.*
"It was in the year 1761," says Mr. Croker,
"that Goldsmith published his 'Vicar of Wakefield.' This leads the editor to observe a more
serious inaccuracy of Mrs. Piozzi than Mr. Boswell notices, when he says Johnson left her table
to go and sell the 'Vicar of Wakefield' for Goldsmith. Now, Dr. Johnson was not acquainted with
* A defense of this blunder was attempted. That
the celebrated chapters in which Gibbon has traced
the progress of Mahommedanism were not written
in 1776 could not be denied. But it was confidently
asserted that his partiality to Mahommedanism appeared in his first volume. This assertion is untrue.
No passage which can by any art be construed into
the faintest indication of the faintest partiality for
Mahommedanism has ever been quoted or ever will
be quoted from the first volume of the "History of
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
To what, then, it has been asked, could Johnson
allude? Possibly to some anecdote or some conversation of which all trace is lost. One conjecture may
be offered, though with diffidence. Gibbon tells us
in his memoirs, that at Oxford he took a fancy for
studying Arabic, and was prevented from doing so
by the remonstrances of his tutor. Soon after this,
the young man fell in with Bossuet's controversial
writings, and was speedily converted by them to the
Roman Catholic faith. The apostasy of a gentleman
commoner would of course be for a time the chief
subject of conversation in the common room of Magdalene. His whim about Arabic learning would naturally be mentioned, and would give occasion to
some jokes about the probability of his turning Mussulman. If such jokes were made, Johnson, who frequently visited Oxford, was very likely to hear of
them.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


17


the Thrales till 1765, four years after the book
had been published."* Mr. Croker, in reprehending the fancied inaccuracy of Mrs. Thrale, has himself shown a degree of inaccuracy, or, to speak
more properly, a degree of ignorance, hardly credible. In the first place, Johnson became acquainted with the Thrales, not in 1765, but in 1764, and
during the last weeks of 1764 dined with them
every Thursday, as is written in Mrs. Piozzi's anecdotes. In the second place, Goldsmith published the " Vicar of Wakefield," not in 1761, but in
1766. Mrs. Thrale does not pretend to remember the precise date of the summons which called
Johnson from her table to the help of his friend.
She says only that it was near the beginning of
her acquaintance with Johnson, and certainly not
later than 1766. Her accuracy is therefore completely vindicated. It was probably after one of
her Thursday dinners in 1764 that the celebrated
scene of the landlady, the sheriff's officer, and the
bottle of madeira took place.j
The very page which contains this monstrous
blunder contains another blunder, if possible, more
monstrous still. Sir Joseph Mawbey, a foolish
member of Parliament, at whose speeches and
whose pigstyes the wits of Brookes's were, fifty
years ago, in the habit of laughing most unmercifully, stated, on the.authority of Garrick, that
* Vol. v., p. 409.
t This paragraph has been altered; and a slight
inaccuracy, immaterial to the argument, has been removed.
2




18          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
Johnson, while sitting in a coffee-house at Oxford, about the time of his doctor's degree, used
some contemptuous expressions respecting Home's
play and Macpherson's " Ossian." " Many men,"
he said, "many women, and many children, might
have written 'Douglas."' Mr. Croker conceives that
he has detected an inaccuracy, and glories over
poor Sir Joseph in a most characteristic manner.
" I have quoted this anecdote solely with the vieq
of showing to how little credit hearsay anecdotes
are in general entitled. Here is a story published by Sir Joseph Mawbey, a member of the House
of Commons, and a person every way worthy of
credit, who says he had it from Garrick. Now
mark: Johnson's visit to Oxford, about the time
of his doctor's degree, was in 1754, the first time
he had been there since he left the university.
But "Douglas " was not acted till 1756, and " Ossian" not published till 1760. All, therefore, that
is new in Sir Joseph Mawbey's story is false."*
Assuredly we need not go far to find ample proof
that a member of the House of Commons may
commit a very gross error. Now mark, say we,
in the language of Mr. Croker. The fact is, that
Johnson took his master's degree in 1754,t and
his doctor's degree in 1775.t In the spring of
1776,~ he paid a visit to Oxford, and at this visit
a conversation respecting the works of Home and
Macpherson might have taken place, and, in all
* Vol. v., p. 409.        t Vol. i., p. 262.
t Vol. iii., p. 205.      ~ Vol. iii., p. 326.




SAMIUEL JOHNSON.            19
probability, did take place. The only real objection to the story Mr. Croker has missed. Boswell states, apparently on the best authority, that
as early at least as the year 1763, Johnson, in
conversation with Blair, used the same expressions respecting "Ossian " which Sir Joseph represents him as having used respecting "Douglas."* Sir Joseph, or Garrick, confounded, we
suspect, the two stories. But their error is venial
compared with that of Mr. Croker.
We will not multiply instances of this scandalous inaccuracy. It is clear that a writer who,
even when warned by the text on which he is
commenting, falls into such mistakes as these, is
entitled to no confidence whatever. Mr. Croker
has committed an error of five years with respect
to the publication of Goldsmith's novel, an error
of twelve years with respect to the publication of
part of Gibbon's "History," an error of twentyone years with respect to an event in Johnson's
life so important as the taking of the doctoral degree. Two of these three errors he has committed while ostentatiously displaying his own accuracy, and correcting what he represents as the
loose assertions of others. How can his readers
take on trust his statements concerning the births,
marriages, divorces, and deaths of a crowd of people whose names are scarcely known to this generation? It is not likely that a person who is
ignorant of what almost everybody knows can
* Vol. i., p. 405.




20          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
know that of which almost everybody is ignorant.
We did not open this book with any wish to find
blemishes in it. We have made no curious researches. The work itself, and a very common
knowledge of literary and political history, have
enabled us to detect the mistakes which we have
pointed out, and many other mistakes of the same
kind. We must say, and we say it with regret,
that we do not consider the authority of Mr. Croker, unsupported by other evidence, as sufficient
to justify any writer who may follow him in relating a single anecdote, or in assigning a date to
a single event.
Mr. Croker shows almost as much ignorance
and heedlessness in his criticisms as in his statements concerning facts. Dr. Johnson said, very
reasonably as it appears to us, that some of the
satires of Juvenal are too gross for imitation.
Mr. Croker, who, by-the-way, is angry with Johnson for defending Prior's tales against the charge
of indecency, resents this aspersion on Juvenal,
and indeed refuses to believe that the doctor can
have said anything so absurd.  "He probably
said-some passages of them-for there are none
of Juvenal's satires to which the same objection
may be made as to one of Horace's, that it is altogether gross and licentious."*  Surely Mr. Croker can never have read the second and ninth
satires of Juvenal.
Indeed, the decisions of this editor on points of
*Vol.., p. 167.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


21


classical learning, though pronounced in a very
authoritative tone, are generally such that, if a
school-boy under our care were to utter them,
our soul assuredly should not spare for his crying. It is no disgrace to a gentleman who has
been engaged during near thirty years in political life that he has forgotten his Greek and Latin.
But he becomes justly ridiculous if, when no longer able to construe a plain sentence, he affects
to sit in judgment on the most delicate questions
of style and metre. From one blunder-a blunder which no good scholar would have made-Mr.
Croker was saved, as he informs us, by Sir Robert Peel, who quoted a passage exactly in point
from Horace. We heartily wish that Sir Robert,
whose classical attainments are well known, had
been more frequently consulted. Unhappily he
was not always at his friend's elbow; and we
have therefore a rich abundance of the strangest
errors. Boswell has preserved a poor epigram
by Johnson, inscribed "Ad Lauram parituram."
Mr. Croker censures the poet for applying the
word puella to a lady in Laura's situation, and
for talking of the beauty of Lucina. " Lucina,"
he says, "was never famed for her beauty."* If
Sir Robert Peel had seen this note, he probably
would have again refuted Mr. Croker's criticisms
by an appeal to Horace. In the secular ode, Lucina is used as one of the names of Diana, and
the beauty of Diana is extolled by all the most
* Vol. i., p. 133.




22           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
orthodox doctors of the ancient mythology, from
Homer, in his "Odyssey," to Claudian, in his
"Rape of Proserpine."  In another ode, Horace
describes Diana as the goddess who assists the
" laborantes utero puellas." But we are ashamed
to detain our readers with this fourth-form learning.
Boswell found, in his tour to the Hebrides, an
inscription written by a Scotch minister. It runs
thus: "Joannes Macleod, etc., gentis sue Philarchus, etc., Florae Macdonald matrimoniali vinculo conjugatus turrem hanc Beganodunensem
proaevorum habitaculum longe vetustissimum,
diu penitus labefactatam, anno  erae vulgaris
MrDCLXXXVI. instauravit."  "The minister," says
Mr. Croker, "seems to have been no contemptible Latinist. Is not Philarchus a very happy
term to express the paternal and kindly authority of the head of a clan?"* The composition of
this eminent Latinist, short as it is, contains several words that are just as much Coptic as Latin,
to say nothing of the incorrect structure of the
sentence. The word Philarchus, even if it were
a happy term expressing a paternal and kindly
authority, would prove nothing for the minister's
Latin, whatever it might prove for his Greek.
But it is clear that the word Philarchus means,
not a man who rules by love, but a man who
loves rule.  The Attic writers of the best age
used the word iLX)apXoC in the sense which we
* Vol. ii., p. 458.




SAMHUEL JOHNSON.        2


23


assign to it. Would Mr. Croker translate OLX Oaooa man who acquires wisdom by means of
love, or Otoicspa4C, a man who makes money by
means of love? In fact, it requires no Bentley
or Casaubon to perceive that Philarchus is merely a false spelling for Phylarchus, the chief of a
tribe.
Mr. Croker has favored us with some Greek of
his own. "At the altar,"1 says Dr. Joh-nson, "I
recommended my 0 O,." "These letters," says the
editor, "1(which Dr. i3trahan seems not to have
understood), probably mean Ovqro1 OL ~XoL, departedfriend8.")* Johnson was not a first-rate Greek
scholar; but he knew more Greek than most boys
when they leave school; and no school-boy could
venture to use the word OvsjroLin the sense which
Mr. Croker ascribes to it without imminent danger of a flogging
Mr. Croker has also given us a specimen of
his skill in translating Latin. Johnson wrote a
note in which be consulted his friend, Dr. Lawrence, on the propriety of losing some blood.
* Vol. iv., p. 251. An attempt was made to vindicate this blunder by quoting a grossly corrupt passage
from the IK94Ts4evof Euripides:
fi&Ot Kat' a'u-raaoY.roa'TWY, E'rt Xerpa fla~toua,
Tr~KYWV TC av'aTIWVY Ko/Miaa &pjarThe true reading, as every scholar knows, is, -r~cmwv
TeOVCCWTCOi Kot~icaa &/Aa. Indeed without this emendation it would niot be easy to construe the words,
even if_3aTrd could bear the mueaning, which Mr. Croker assigns to it.




24


SAMUEL JOHNSON.


The note contains these words: "Si per te licet,
imperatur nuncio Holderum ad me deducere."
Johnson should rather have written " imperatum
est." But the meaning of the words is perfectly
clear. " If you say yes, the messenger has orders
to bring Holder to me." Mr. Croker translates
the words as follows: "If you consent, pray tell
the messenger to bring Holder to me."* If Mr.
Croker is resolved to write on points of classical
learning, we would advise him to begin by giving
an hour every morning to our old friend Corderius.
Indeed, we cannot open any volume of this
work in any place, and turn it over for two minutes
in any direction, without lighting on a blunder.
Johnson, in his " Life of Tickell," stated that the
poem entitled "The Royal Progress," which appears in the last volume of The Spectator, was
written on the accession of George the First. The
word "arrival" was afterward substituted for
"accession."  "The reader will observe," says
Mr. Croker, " that the Whig term accession, which
might imply legality, was altered into a statement
of the simple fact of King George's arrival."t
Now, Johnson, though a bigoted Tory, was not
quite such a fool as Mr. Croker here represents
him to be. In the " Life of Granville, Lord Lansdowne," which stands a very few pages from the
"Life of Tickell," mention is made of the accession of Anne, and of the accession of George the


* Vol. v., p. 17.


t Vol. iv., p. 425.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


25


First. The word arrival was used in thi "Life
of Tickell" for the simplest of all reasons. It
was used because the subject of the poem called
"The Royal Progress" was the arrival of the
king, and not his accession, which took place near
two months before his arrival.
The editor's want of perspicacity is indeed very
amusing. He is perpetually telling us that he
cannot understand something in the text which
is as plain as language can make it. " Mattaire,"
said Dr. Johnson, "wrote Latin verses from time
to time, and published a set in his old age, which
he called 'Senilia,' in which he shows so little
learning or taste in writing as to make Carteret
a dactyl."* Hereupon we have this note: " The
editor does not understand this objection, nor the
following observation." The following observation, which Mr. Croker cannot understand, is simply this: "In matters of genealogy," says Johnson, " it is necessary to give the bare names as
they are. But in poetry and in prose of any
elegance in the writing, they require to have inflection given to them." If Mr. Croker had told
Johnson that this was unintelligible, the doctor
would probably have replied, as he replied on another occasion, " I have found you a reason, sir;
I am not bound to find you an understanding."
Everybody who knows anything of Latinity knows
that, in genealogical tables, Joannes Baro de Carteret, or Vice-comes de Carteret, may be tolerated,
* Vol. iv., p. 335.




26           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
but that in compositions which pretend to elegance, Carteretus, or some other form which ad-,
mits of inflection, ought to be used.
All our readers have doubtless seen the two
distichs of Sir William Jones, respecting the division of the time of a lawyer. One of the distichs is translated from some old Latin lines; the
other is original. The former runs thus:
"Six hours to sleep, to law's grave study six,
Four spend in prayer, the rest on nature fix."
"Rather," says Sir William Jones,
" Six hours to law, to soothing slumbers seven,
Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven."
The second couplet puzzles Mr. Croker strangely. "Sir William," says he, "has shortened his
day to twenty-three hours, and the general advice of 'all to heaven' destroys the peculiar appropriation of a certain period to religious exercises."* Now, we did not think that it was in
human dulness to miss the meaning of the lines
so completely. Sir William distributes twentythree hours among various employments. One
hour is thus left for devotion. The reader expects that the verse will end with "and one to
heaven." The whole point of the lines consists
in the unexpected substitution of "all" for " one."
The conceit is wretched enough; but it is perfectly intelligible, and never, we will venture to
say, perplexed man, woman, or child before.


* Vol. v., p. 233.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


27


Poor Tom Davies, after failing in business,
tried to live by his pen. Johnson called him " an
author generated by the corruption of a bookseller." This is a very obvious, and even a commonplace, allusion to the famous doogma of the
old physiologists. Dryden made a similar allusion to that dogma before Johnson was born.
Mr. Croker, however, is unable to understand
what the doctor meant. " The expression," he
says, " seems not quite clear." And he proceeds
to talk about the generation of insects, about
bursting into gaudier life, and Heaven knows
what.*
There is a still stranger instance of the editor's
talent for finding out difficulty in what is perfectly plain. "No man," said Johnson, "can now
be made a bishop for his learning and piety."
"From this too just observation," says Boswell,
"there are some eminent exceptions." Mr. Croker is puzzled by Boswell's very natural and
simple language. "That a general observation
should be pronounced too just, by the very person who admits that it is not universally just, is
not a little odd."t
A very large proportion of the two thousand
five hundred notes which the editor boasts of
having added to those of Boswell and Malone,
consists of the flattest and poorest reflectionsreflections such as the least intelligent reader is
quite competent to make for himself, and such


* Vol. iv., p. 323.


t Vol. iii., p. 228.




28           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
as no intelligent reader would think it worth
while to utter aloud. They remind us of nothing
so much as of those profound and interesting
annotations which are pencilled by sempstresses
and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins
of novels borrowed from circulating libraries:
"How beautiful!" "Cursed prosy!" "I don't
like Sir Reginald Malcolm at all;" " I think Pelham is a sad dandy." Mr. Croker is perpetually
stopping us in our progress through the most delightful narrative in the language, to observe that
really Dr. Johnson was very rude; that he talked
more for victory than for truth; that his taste for
port-wine with capillaire in it was very odd; that
Boswell was impertinent; that it was foolish in
Mrs. Thrale to marry the music-master; and so
forth.
We cannot speak more favorably of the manner in which the notes are written than of the
matter of which they consist. We find in every
page words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest rules of grammar.
We have the vulgarism of "mutual friend" for
" common friend." We have " fallacy " used as
synonymous with "falsehood." We have many
such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that
which follows: "Lord Erskine was fond of this
anecdote; he told it to the editor the first time
that he had the honor of being in his company."
Lastly, we have a plentiful supply of sentences
resembling those which we subjoin. " Markland,
who, with Jortin and Thirlby, Johnson calls three




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


29


contemporaries of great eminence."* "Warbur.
ton himself did not feel, as Mr. Boswell was disposed to think he did, kindly or gratefully of
Johnson."f  "It was him that Horace Walpole
called a man who never made a bad figure but
as an author."t One or two of these solecisms
should perhaps be attributed to the printer, who
has certainly done his best to fill both the text
and the notes with all sorts of blunders. In
truth, he and the editor have between them made
the book so bad, that we do not well see how it
could have been worse.
When we turn from the commentary of Mr.
Croker to the work of our old friend Boswell, we
find it not only worse printed than in any other
edition with which we are acquainted, but mangled in the most wanton manner. Much that
Boswell inserted in his narrative is, without the
shadow of a reason, degraded to the appendix.
The editor has also taken upon himself to alter
or omit passages which he considers as indecorous. This prudery is quite unintelligible to us.
There is nothing immoral in Boswell's book,
nothing which tends to inflame the passions. He
sometimes uses plain words. But if this be a
taint which requires expurgation, it would be desirable to begin by expurgating the morning and
evening lessons. The delicate office which Mr.
Croker has undertaken he has performed in the
most capricious manner. One strong, old-fash* Vol. iv., p. 377.  t Vol. iv., p. 415.  + Vol. ii., p. 461.




30        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


ioned English word, familiar to all who read
their Bibles, is changed for a softer synonyme in
some passages, and suffered to stand unaltered
in others. In one place a faint allusion made by
Johnson to an indelicate subject-an allusion so
faint that, till Mr. Croker's note pointed it out to
us, we had never noticed it, and of which we are
quite sure that the meaning would never be discovered by any of those for whose sake books
are expurgated-is altogether omitted. In another place, a coarse and stupid jest of Dr. Taylor
on the same subject, expressed in the broadest
language-almost the only passage, as far as we
remember, in all Boswell's book, which we should
have been inclined to leave out-is suffered to
remain.
We complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions. We have half of
Mrs. Thrale's book, scraps of Mr. Tyers, scraps
of Mr. Murphy, scraps of Mr. Cradock, long prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and connecting observations by Mr. Croker himself, inserted into the
midst of Boswell's text.  To this practice we
most decidedly object. An editor might as well
publish Thucydides, with extracts from Diodorus interspersed, or incorporate the "Lives" of
Suetonius with the "History and Annals" of
Tacitus. Mr. Croker tells us, indeed, that he has
done only what Boswell wished to do, and was
prevented from doing by the law of copyright.
We doubt this greatly. Boswell has studiously
abstained from availing himself of the informa



SAMUEL JOIHNSON.


31


tion given by his rivals, on many occasions on
which he might have cited them without subjecting himself to the charge of piracy. Mr. Croker
has himself, on one occasion, remarked very justly that Boswell was unwilling to owe any obligation to Hawkins. But, be this as it may, if Boswell had quoted from Sir John and from Mrs.
Thrale, he would have been guided by his own
taste and judgment in selecting his quotations.
On what Boswell quoted he would have commented with perfect freedom; and the borrowed
passages, so selected, and accompanied by such
comments, would have become original.  They
would have dovetailed into the work. No hitch,
no crease, would have been discernible. The
whole would appear one and indivisible,
" Ut per laeve severos
Effnuidat juuctura ugues."
This is not the case with Mr. Croker's insertions. They are not chosen as Boswell would
have chosen them. They are not introduced as
Boswell would have introduced them. They differ
from the quotations scattered through the original "Life of Johnson " as a withered bow stuck
in the ground differs from a tree skilfully transplanted with all its life about it.
Not only do these anecdotes disfigure Boswell's
book; they are themselves disfigured by being
inserted in his book. The charm of Mrs. Thrale's
little volume is utterly destroyed. The feminine
quickness of observation, the feminine softness




32           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
of heart, the colloquial incorrectness and vivacity
of style, the little amusing airs of a half-learned
lady, the delightful garrulity, the " dear Dr. Johnson," the " it was so comical," all disappear in Mr.
Croker's quotations. The lady ceases to speak
in the first person; and her anecdotes, in the
process of transfusion, become as flat as champagne in decanters, or Herodotus in Beloe's version. Sir John Hawkins, it is true, loses nothing; and for the best of reasons. Sir John had
nothing to lose.
The course which Mr. Croker ought to have
taken is quite clear. He should have reprinted
Boswell's narrative precisely as Boswell wrote
it; and in the notes or the appendix he should
have placed any anecdotes which he might have
thought it advisable to quote from other writers.
This would have been a much more convenient
course for the reader, who has now constantly to
keep his eye on the margin in order to see whether he is perusing Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Murphy
Hawkins, Tyers, Cradock, or Mr. Croker.  We
greatly doubt whether even the "Tour to the
Hebrides" ought to have been inserted in the
midst of the "Life."  There is one marked distinction between the two works. Most of the
"Tour" was seen by Johnson in manuscript.
It does not appear that he ever saw any part of
the " Life."
We love, we own, to read the great productions
of the human mind as they were written. We
have this feeling even about scientific treatises;




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


33


though we know that the sciences are always in
a state of progression, and that the alterations
made by a modern editor in an old book on any
branch of natural or political philosophy are likely to be improvements. Some errors have been
detected by writers of this generation in the speculations of Adam Smith. A short cut has been
made to much knowledge at which Sir Isaac
Newton arrived through arduous and circuitous
paths. Yet we still look with peculiar veneration on the "Wealth of Nations" and on the
"Principia," and should regret to see either of
those great works garbled even by the ablest
hands. But in works which owe much of their
interest to the character and situation of the
writers, the case is infinitely stronger.  What
man of taste and feeling can endure rifacimenti, harmonies, abridgments, expurgated editions?
Who ever reads a stage-copy of a play when he
can procure the original? Who ever cut open
Mrs. Siddons's "Milton?" Who ever got through
ten pages of Mr. Gilpin's translation of John Bunyan's "Pilgrim" into modern English?  Who
would lose, in the confusion of a Diatessaron, the
peculiar charm which belongs to the narrative of
the disciple whom Jesus loved? The feeling of
a reader who has become intimate with any great
original work is that which Adam expressed toward his bride:
"Should God create another Eve, and I
Another rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from ray heart."
3




34           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
No substitute, however exquisitely formed, will
fill the void left by the original. The second
beauty may be equal or superior to the first; but
still it is not she.
The reasons which Mr. Croker has given for
incorporating passages from Sir John Hawkins
and Mrs. Thrale with the narrative of Boswell
would vindicate the adulteration of half the classical works in the language. If Pepys's " Diary "
and Mrs. Hutchinson's " Memoirs " had been published a hundred years ago, no human being can
doubt that Mr. Hume would have made great use
of those books in his " History of England." But
would it, on that account, be judicious in a writer
of our times to publish an edition of Hume's " History of England," in which large extracts from
Pepys and Mrs. EIutchinson should be incorporated with the original text? Surely not. Hume's
" History," be its faults what they may, is now
one great entire work, the production of one vigorous mind, working on such materials as were
within its reach.  Additions made by another
hand may supply a particular deficiency, but would
grievously injure the general effect. With Boswell's book the case is stronger. There is scarcely, in the whole compass of literature, a book
which bears interpolation so ill. We know no
production of the human mind which has so much
of what may be called the race, so much of the
peculiar flavor of the soil from which it sprung.
The work could never have been written if the
writer had not been precisely what he was. His




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


35


character is displayed in every page, and this display of character gives a delightful interest to
many passages which have no other interest.
The " Life of Johnson " is assuredly a great, a
very great work. Homer is not more decidedly
the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more
decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is
not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them.
Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men
that ever lived have written biography. Boswell
was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and
he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to
give any credit to his own account, or to the
united testimony of all who knew him, a man of
the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only
chance of immortality by not having been alive
when "The Dunciad" was written. Beauclerk
used his name as a proverbial expression for a
bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole
of that brilliant society which has owed to him
the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and
begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He
was always earning some ridiculous nickname,
and then " binding it as a crown unto him," not




36


SAMUEL JOHNSON.


merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited
himself at the Shakspeare Jubilee to all the crowd
which filled Stratford -on -Avon, with a placard
round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica
Boswell. In his "Tour" he proclaimed to all
the world that at Edinburgh he was known by
the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and
impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a
sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet
stooping to be a tale-bearer, an eavesdropper, a
common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know everybody who was talked about,
that, Tory and High-churchman as he was, he
manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish
distinctions, that when he had been to court, he
drove to the office where his book was printing
without changing his clothes, and summoned all
the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and
sword; such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Everything which another
man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang
himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. What silly
things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked;
how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing; how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he
read the Prayer-book and took a hair of the dog
that had bitten him; how he went to see men




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


37


hanged, and came away maudlin; how he added
five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his
babies because she was not scared at Johnson's
ugly face; how he was frightened out of his wits
at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they
would have quieted a child; how tipsy he was at
Lady Cork's one evening, and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies; how impertinent he
was to the Duchess of Argyle, and with what
stately contempt she put down his impertinence;
how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his
impudent obtrusiveness; how his father and the
very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at
his fooleries: all these things he proclaimed to
all the world, as if they had been subjects for
pride and ostentatious rejoicing.  All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his
vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his
castles in the air, he displayed with a cool selfcomplacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he
was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history
of mankind.   He has used many people ill;
but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.
That such a man should have written one of
the best books in the world is strange enough.
But this is not all.  Many persons who have
conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and
whose conversation has indicated no superior
powers of mind, have left us valuable works.
Goldsmith was very justly described by one of




38          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by
another as a being
"Who wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll."
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton.
His blunders would not come in amiss among
the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained
literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses.
Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses.
If he had not been a great fool, he would never
have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment
of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the
toad - eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he
never could have produced so excellent a book.
He was a slave proud of his servitude; a Paul
Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues; an unsafe companion, who
never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence; a
man without delicacy, without shame, without
sense enough to know when he was hurting the
feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he
has, in an important department of literature,
immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus,
Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to
eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely
none.  There is not in all his books a single
remark of his own on literature, politics, relig



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


39


ion, or society, which is not either commonplace
or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of
landed estates, may serve as examples. To say
that these passages are sophistical would be to
pay them an extravagant compliment.   They
have no pretense to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations
made by himself in the course of conversation.
Of those observations we do not remember one
which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy
of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or
twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those
things which are generally considered as making
a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him.
He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a
man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous;
but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a
coxcomb, they have made him immortal.
Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are most utterly worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of
the character of the writer. Bad in themselves,
they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of
Justice Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius,
or the misplaced consonants of Fluellen. Of all
confessors, Boswell is the most candid. Other
men who have pretended to lay open their own
heart3-Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron




40           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
-have evidently written with a constant view to
effect, and are to be then most distrusted when
they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely any man who would not rather accuse himself
of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous
passions than proclaim all his little vanities and
wild fancies. It would be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those of Caesar
Borgia or Danton than one who would publish a
day-dream like those of Alnaschar and Malvolio.
Those weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most secret places of the mind,
not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of
love, were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell paraded before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirits prevented
him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous. His book resembles nothing so much as
the conversation of the inmates of the Palace of
Truth.
His fame is great; and it will, we have no
doubt, be lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar
kind, and indeed marvellously resembles infamy.
We remember no other case in which the world
has made so great a distinction between a book
and its author. In general, the book and the
author are considered as one.  To admire the
book is to admire the author. The case of Boswell is an exception-we think the only exception-to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be interesting, instructive, eminently




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


41


original; yet it has brought him nothing but
contempt. All the world reads it; all the world
delights in it; yet we do not remember ever to
have read or ever to have heard any expression
of respect and admiration for the man to whom
we owe so much instruction and amusement.
While edition after edition of his book was
coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was
ashamed of it, and hated to hear it mentioned.
This feeling was natural and reasonable.  Sir
Alexander saw that in proportion to the celebrity
of the work was the degradation of the author.
The very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's
books have forgotten their allegiance, and, like
those Puritan casuists who took arms by the authority of the king against his person, have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings.
Mr. Croker, for example, has published two thousand five hundred notes on the life of Johnson,
and yet scarcely ever mentions the biographer
whose performance he has taken such pains to
illustrate without some expression of contempt.
An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not.
Yet the malignity of the most malignant satirist
could scarcely cut deeper than his thoughtless
loquacity. Having himself no sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it for granted that
all others were equally callous.  lie was not
ashamed to exhibit himself to the whole world
as a common spy, a common tattler, a humble
companion without the excuse of poverty, and
to tell a hundred stories of his own pertness and




42        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


folly, and of the insults which his pertness and
folly brought upon him. It was natural that he
should show little discretion in cases in which
the feelings or the honor of others might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such
stories respecting persons whom he professed to
love and revere. He would infallibly have made
his hero as contemptible as he has made himself, had not his hero really possessed some moral and intellectual qualities of a very high order.
The best proof that Johnson was really an extraordinary man is, that his character, instead of
being degraded, has, on the whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all his vices and
weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than
they ever were exposed by Churchill or by Kenrick.
Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of
his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent
fortune, is better known to us than any other
man in history. Everything about him, his coat,
his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St.Vitus's-dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye,
the outward signs which too clearly marked his
approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite
for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching
the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice
of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


43


sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits
of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr.
Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge
and the negro Frank-all are as familiar to us
as the objects by which we have been surrounded
from childhood. But we have no minute information respecting those years of Johnson's life
during which his character and his manners became immutably fixed. We know him, not as he
was known to the men of his own generation, but
as he was known to men whose father he might
have been. That celebrated club of which he
was the most distinguished member contained
few persons who could remember a time when his
fame was not fully established and his habits
completely formed. He had made himself a name
in literature while Reynolds and the Wartons
were still boys. He was about twenty years older than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton,
about thirty years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk,
and Langton, and about forty years older than
Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and Windham.
Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from
whom we derive most of our knowledge respecting him, never saw him till long after he was fifty
years old, till most of his great works had become
classical, and till the pension bestowed on him
by the crown had placed him above poverty. Of
those eminent men who were his most intimate
associates toward the close of his life, the only
one, as far as we remember, who knew him during the first ten or twelve years of his residence




44        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


in the capital, was David Garrick; and it does
not appear that during those years David Garrick
saw much of his fellow-townsman.
Johnson came up to London precisely at the
time when the condition of a man of letters was
most miserable and degraded. It was a dark
night between two sunny days. The age of patronage had passed away. The age of general
curiosity and intelligence had not arrived. The
number of readers is at present so great that a
popular author may subsist in comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the reigns
of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the
First, even such men as Congreve and Addison
would scarcely have been able to live like gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the
deficiency of the natural demand for literature
was, at the close of the seventeenth and at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, more than
made up by artificial encouragement, by a vast
system of bounties and premiums. There was,
perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of
literary merit were so splendid, at which men
who could write well found such easy admittance
into the most distinguished society, and to the
highest honors of the State. The chiefs of both
the great parties into which the kingdom was divided patronized literature with emulous munificence. Congreve,when he had scarcely attained
his majority, was rewarded for his first comedy
with places which made him independent for life.
Smith, though his " Hippolytus" and "Phaedra"




SAMUEL JOINSON.


45


failed, would have been consoled with tlree hundred a year but for his own folly. Rowe was
not only poet-laureate, but also land-surveyor of
the customs in the port of London, clerk of the
council to the Prince of Wales, and secretary
of the Presentations to the Lord Chancellor.
Hughes was secretary to the Commissions of the
Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of the Board of Trade.
Newton was Master of the Mint. Stepney and
Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity and importance. Gay, who commenced life as
apprentice to a silk-mercer, became a secretary
of legation at five-and-twenty. It was to a poem
on the Death of Charles the Second, and to the
" City and Country Mouse," that Montague owed
his introduction into public life, his earldom, his
Garter, and his Auditorship of the Exchequer.
Swift, but for the unconquerable prejudice of the
queen, would have been a bishop. Oxford, with
his white staff in his hand, passed through the
crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that
ingenious writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was
a commissioner of stamps and a Member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was a commissioner of the customs, and auditor of the imprest.
Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of
Ireland. Addison was Secretary of State.
This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it seems, by the magnificent Dorset, almost
the only noble versifier in the court of Charles




46        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


the Second who possessed talents for composition which were independent of the aid of a coronet. Montague owed his elevation to the favor
of Dorset, and imitated through the whole course
of his life the liberality to which he was himself
so greatly indebted. The Tory leaders, Harley
and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs
of the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement
of letters. But soon after the accession of the
house of Hanover a change took place. The supreme power passed to a man who cared little
for poetry or eloquence. The importance of the
Iouse of Commons was constantly on the increase. The Government was under the necessity of bartering for parliamentary support much
of that patronage which had been employed in
fostering literary merit; and Walpole was by no
means inclined to divert any part of the fund
of corruption to purposes which he considered
as idle. He had eminent talents for government
and for debate; but he had paid little attention
to books, and felt little respect for authors. One
of the coarse jokes of his friend, Sir Charles
IHandbury Williams, was far more pleasing to him
than Thomson's " Seasons " or Richardson's " Pamela."  He had observed that some of the distinguished writers whom the favor of Halifax
had turned into statesmen had been mere encumbrances to their party, dawdlers in office, and
mutes in Parliament. During the whole course
of his administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended a single man of genius. The best writCD  '~  "b'""




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


47


ers of the age gave all their support to the opposition, and contributed to excite that discontent
which, after plunging the nation into a foolish
and unjust war, overthrew the minister to make
room for men less able and equally immoral.
The opposition could reward its eulogists with
little more than promises and caresses. St.
James's would give nothing; Leicester House
had nothing to give.
Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced
his literary career, a writer had little to hope from
the patronage of powerful individuals. The patronage of the public did not yet furnish the means
of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid by
booksellers to authors were so low, that a man
of considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more than provide for the day
which was passing over him. The lean kine had
eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered
ears had devoured the good ears. The season of
rich harvests was over, and the period of famine
had begun. All that is squalid and miserable
might now be summed up in the word Poet. That
word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow,
familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and
perfectly qualified to decide on the comparative
merits of the Common Side in the King's Bench
Prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even
the poorest pitied him; and they well might pity
him. For if their condition was equally abject,
their aspirings were not equally high, nor their
sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a gar



48        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


ret up four pair of stairs; to dine in a cellar
among footmen out of place; to translate ten
hours a day for the wages of a ditcher; to be
hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary
and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to
St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields
to the alleys behind St. Martin's Church; to sleep
on a bulk in June, and amidst the ashes of a
glass-house in December; to die in a hospital, and
to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of
more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty
years earlier, would have been admitted to the
sittings of the Kit Cat or the Scriblerus Club,
would have sat in Parliament, and would have
been intrusted with embassies to the High Allies: who, if he had lived in our time, would have
found encouragement scarcely less munificent in
Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row.
As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so
every walk of life has its peculiar temptations.
The literary character, assuredly, has always had
its share of faults, vanity, jealousy, morbid sensibility. To these faults were now superadded the
faults which are commonly found in men whose
livelihood is precarious, and whose principles are
exposed to the trial of severe distress. All the
vices of the gambler and of the beggar were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the
wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely
less ruinous than the blanks. If good fortune
came, it came in such a manner that it was almost certain to be abused. After months of




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


49


starvation and despair, a full third night or a
well-received dedication filled the pocket of the
lean, ragged, unwashed poet with guineas. He
hastened to enjoy those luxuries with the images
of which his mind had been haunted while he
was sleeping amidst the cinders and eating potatoes at the Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week
of taverns soon qualified him for another year
of night- cellars. Such was the life of Savage,
of Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes
blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in bed because their coats had gone
to pieces, or wearing paper cravats because their
linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking champagne and tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes
standing at the window of an eating-house in
Porridge Island, to snuff up the scent of what
they could not afford to taste; they knew luxury;
they knew beggary; but they never knew comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a regular and frugal life with the same
aversion which an old gypsy or a Mohawk hunter
feels for a stationary abode and for the restraints
and securities of civilized communities.  They
were as untamable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom, as the wild ass. They could no
more be broken in to the offices of social man
than the unicorn could be trained to serve and
abide by the crib. It was well if they did not,
like beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands
which ministered to their necessities. To assist
them was impossible; and the most benevolent
4




O0           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
of mankind at length became weary of giving relief which was dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon as it had been received. If a sum
was bestowed on the wretched adventurer, such
as, properly husbanded, might have supplied him
for six months, it was instantly spent in strange
freaks of sensuality, and, before forty-eight hours
had elapsed, the poet was again pestering all his
acquaintance for twopence to get a plate of shin
of beef at a subterraneous cook-shop. If his
friends gave him an asylum in their houses, those
houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and
taverns. All order was destroyed; all business
was suspended. The most good-natured host began to repent of his eagerness to serve a man of
genius in distress, when he heard his guest roaring for fresh punch at five o'clock in the morning.
A few eminent writers were more fortunate.
Pope had been raised above poverty by the active patronage which, in his youth, both the great
political parties had extended to his Homer.
Young had received the only pension ever bestowed, fo the best of our recollection, by Sir
Robert Walpole, as the reward of mere literary
merit. One or two of the many poets who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson
in particular, and Mallet, obtained, after much
severe suffering, the means of subsistence from
their political friends. Richardson, like a man
of sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him,
which his novels, admirable as they are, would
scarcely have done. But nothing could be more




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


51


deplorable than the state even of the ablest men,
who at that time depended for subsistence on
their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding, and
Thomson were certainly four of the most distinguished persons that England produced during
the eighteenth century. It is well known that
they were all four arrested for debt.
Into calamities and difficulties such as these
Johnson plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From
that time till he was three or four and fifty, we
have little information respecting him; little, we
mean, compared with the full and accurate information which we possess respecting his proceedings and habits toward the close of his life. He
emerged at length from cock-lofts and sixpenny
ordinaries into the society of the polished and the
opulent. His fame was established. A pension
sufficient for his wants had been conferred on
him; and he came forth to astonish a generation
with which he had almost as little in common as
with Frenchmen or Spaniards.
In his early years he had occasionally seen the
great; but he had seen them as a beggar. He
now came among them as a companion. The
demand for amusement and instruction had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually
increasing. The price of literary labor had risen;
and those rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth to associate were, for the
most part, persons widely different from those
who had walked about with him all night in the
streets for want of a lodging. Burke, Robert



52           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
son, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam
Smith, Beattie, Sir William Jones, Goldsmith, and
Churchill, were the most distinguished writers of
what may be called the second generation of the
Johnsonian age. Of these men Churchill was the
only one in whom we can trace the stronger lineaments of that character which, when Johnson
first came up to Iondon, was common among authors.  Of the rest, scarcely any had felt the
pressure of severe poverty. Almost all had been
early admitted into the most respectable society
on an equal footing. They were men of quite a
different species from the dependents of Curll
and Osborne.
Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of a past age, the last survivor of the genuine race of Grub Street hacks, the last of that
generation of authors whose abject misery and
whose dissolute manners had furnished inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of Pope.
From nature he had received an uncouth figure,
a diseased constitution, and an irritable temper.
The manner in which the earlier years of his
manhood had been passed had given to his demeanor, and even to his moral character, some
peculiarities appalling to the civilized beings who
were the companions of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours; the slovenliness
of his person; his fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness; his
strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity; his active benevolence, contrasted with the




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


53


constant rudeness and the occasional ferocity of
his manners in society-made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the last
twenty years of his life, a complete original. An
original he was, undoubtedly, in some respects.
But if we possessed full information concerning
those who shared his early hardships, we should
probably find that what we call his singularities
of manner were, for the most part, failings which
he had in common with the class to which he belonged. He ate at Streatham Park as he had
been used to eat behind the screen at St. John's
Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged
clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man
should eat, who, during a great part of his life,
had passed the morning in doubt whether he
should have food for the afternoon. The habits
of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure
with moderation. He could fast; but, when he
did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished
wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead, and
the perspiration running down his cheeks. He
scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it,
he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These
were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same
moral disease which raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The
roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected from a man whose
temper, not naturally gentle, had been long tried
by the bitterest calamities; by the want of meat,




54          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
of fire, and 'of clothes; by the importunity of
creditors; by the insolence of booksellers; by
the derision of fools; by the insincerity of patrons; by that bread which is the bitterest of all
food; by those stairs which are the most toilsome of all paths; by that deferred hope which
makes the heart sick. Through all these things
the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It
was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he
should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that,
though his heart was undoubtedly generous and
humane, his demeanor in society should be harsh
and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief. But for the suffering which a harsh word
inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity, for
it was a kind of suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets.
He turned his house into a place of refuge for a
crowd of wretched old creatures who could find
no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness
and ingratitude weary out his benevolence. But
the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion
even for the pangs of wounded affection.  He
had seen and felt so much of sharp misery that
he was not affected by paltry vexations: and he
seemed to think that everybody ought to be as
much hardened to those vexations as himself.
lie was angry with Boswell for complaining of a
#




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


55


headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about
the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen.
These were, in his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because "The Good-natured Man"
had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though
his own health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary losses, unless
they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary,
moved him very little. People whose hearts had
been softened by prosperity might weep, he said,
for such events; but all that could be expected
of a plain man was not to laugh. He was not
much moved even by the spectacle of Lady Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her
lord. Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children,
would not have sobbed herself to death.
A person who troubled himself so little about
small or sentimental grievances was not likely to
be very attentive to the feelings of others in the
ordinary intercourse of society.  He could not
understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could
make any man really unhappy. "My dear doctor," said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it
do to a man to call him Holofernes?" "Pooh,
ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, " who is the
worse for being talked of uncharitably?" Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in
small things. Johnson was impolite, not because




56        SAMUEL JOIINSON.


he wanted benevolence, but because small things
appeared smaller to him than to people who had
never known what it was to live for fourpencehalfpenny a day.
The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect
was the union of great powers with low prejudices. If we judged of him by the best parts of
his mind, we should place him almost as high
as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell; if
by the worst parts of his mind, we should place
him even below Boswell himself. Where he was
not under the influence of some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating
a subject, he was a wary and acute reasoner, a
little too much inclined to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument
or by exaggerated statements of fact.  But if,
while he was beating down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish prejudices,
such as would excite laughter in a well-managed
nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if
by enchantment. His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish
littleness. Those who had lately been admiring
its amplitude and its force were now as much
astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when
he saw the Genius, whose stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract him



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


57


self to the dimensions of his small prison, and
lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon.
Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity the evidence for all stories which
were merely odd. But when they were not only
odd but miraculous, his severity relaxed. He began to be credulous precisely at the point where
the most credulous people begin to be sceptical.
It is curious to observe, both in his writings and
in his conversation, the contrast between the disdainful manner in which he rejects unauthenticated anecdotes, even when they are consistent
with the general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he mentions the wildest
stories relating to the invisible world. A man
who told him of a water-spout or a meteoric
stone generally had the lie direct given him for
his pains. A man who told him of a prediction
or a dream wonderfully accomplished was sure
of a courteous hearing. "Johnson," observed
Hoogarth, "like King David, says, in his haste,
that all men are liars." " His incredulity," says
Mrs. Thrale, " amounted almost to disease." She
tells us how he browbeat a gentleman who gave
him an account of a hurricane in the West Indies, and a poor Quaker who related some strange
circumstance about the red-hot balls fired at the
siege of Gibraltar. "It is not so. It cannot be
true. Don't tell that story again.  You cannot
think how poor a figure you make in telling it."
He once said, half jestingly we suppose, that for




58          SAMUEL JOHXSON.
six months he refused to credit the fact of the
earthquake at Lisbon, and that he still believed
the extent of the calamity to be greatly exaggerated. Yet he related with a grave face how old
Mr. Cave, of St. John's Gate, saw a ghost, and
how this ghost was something of a shadowy being.  He went himself on a ghost-hunt to Cock
Lane, and was angry with John Wesley for not
following up another scent of the same kind with
proper spirit and perseverance. He rejects the
Celtic genealogies and poems without the least
hesitation; yet he declares himself willing to
believe the stories of the second-sight.  If he
had examined the claims of the Highland seers
with half the severity with which he sifted the
evidence for the genuineness of "Fingal," he
would, we suspect, have come away from Scotland with a mind fully made up. In his " Lives
of the Poets," we find that he is unwilling to
give credit to the accounts of Lord Roscommon's
early proficiency in his studies; but he tells
with great solemnity an absurd romance about
some intelligence preternaturally impressed on
the mind of that nobleman. He avows himself
to be in great doubt about the truth of the story,
and ends by warning his readers not wholly to
slight such impressions.
Many of his sentiments on religious subjects
are worthy of a liberal and enlarged mind. He
could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own. When he
spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


59


like a person who had really obtained an insight
into the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a noble scheme of government, tending to promote
the happiness and to elevate the moral nature
of man. The horror which the sectaries felt for
cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, mince-pies,
and dancing bears, excited his contempt. To the
arguments urged by some very worthy people
against showy dress he replied with admirable
sense and spirit, "Let us not be found, when
our Master calls us, stripping the lace off our
waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our
souls and tongues. Alas! sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find
his way thither the sooner in a gray one." Yet
he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as
unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and
carried his zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths altogether inconsistent
with reason or with Christian charity. He has
gravely noted down in his diary that he once
committed the sin of drinking coffee on GoodFriday. In Scotland, he thought it his duty to
pass several months without joining in public
worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk
had not been ordained by bishops. His mode of
estimating the piety of his neighbors was somewhat singular. " Campbell," said he, " is a good
man, a pious man. I am afraid he has not been
in the inside of a church for many years; but
he never passes a church without pulling off his




60          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
hat: this shows he has good principles." Spain
and Sicily must surely contain many pious robbers and well - principled assassins.  Johnson
could easily see that a Roundhead who named
all his children after Solomon's singers, and talked in the House of Commons about seeking the
Lord, might be an unprincipled villain whose
religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt.
But a man who took off his hat when he passed
a church episcopally consecrated must be a good
man, a pious man, a man of good principles.
Johnson could easily see that those persons who
looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful,
deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God
and of the ends of revelation. But with what
a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating
the redemption of mankind with sugarless tea
and butterless buns!
Nobody spoke more contemptuously of the
cant of patriotism. Nobody saw more clearly
the error of those who regarded liberty, not as
a means, but as an end, and who proposed to
themselves, as the object of their pursuit, the
prosperity of the State as distinct from the prosperity of the individuals who compose the State.
His calm and settled opinion seems to have been
that forms of government have little or no influence on the happiness of society. This opinion,
erroneous as it is, ought at least to have preserved him from all intemperance on political
questions.  It did not, however, preserve him




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


61


from the lowest, fiercest, and most absurd extravagances of party spirit, from rants which, in
everything but the diction, resembled those of
Squire Western.  He was, as a politician, half
ice and half fire. On the side of his intellect he
was a mere Pococurante, far too apathetic about
public affairs, far too sceptical as to the good or
evil tendency of any form of polity.  His passions, on the contrary, were violent even to slaying against all who leaned to Whiggish principles. The well-known lines which he inserted
in Goldsmith's "Traveller" express what seems
to have been his deliberate judgment:
"How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure I"
He had previously put expressions very similar
into the mouth of Rasselas. It is amusing to
contrast these passages with the torrents of raving abuse which he poured forth against the Long
Parliament and the American Congress. In one
of the conversations reported by Boswell this inconsistency displays itself in the most ludicrous
manner.
" Sir Adam Ferguson," says Boswell, " suggested that luxury corrupts a people, and destroys
the spirit of liberty. JOHNSON: 'Sir, that is all
visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live
under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of
an individual. Sir, the danger of the abuse of
power is nothing to a private man. What French



62          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
man is prevented passing his life as he pleases?'
SIR ADAM: 'But, sir, in the British constitution
it is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in
the people, so as to preserve a balance against
the crown.' JOHNSON: ' Sir, I perceive you are
a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of
the power of the crown? The crown has not
power enough."'
One of the old philosophers, Lord Bacon tells
us, used to say that life and death were just the
same to him.  "Why, then," said an objector,
"do you not kill yourself?"  The philosopher
answered, "Because it is just the same." If the
difference between two forms of government be
not worth half a guinea, it is not easy to see how
Whiggism can be viler than Toryism, or how the
crown can have too little power. If the happiness of individuals is not affected by political
abuses, zeal for liberty is doubtless ridiculous.
But zeal for monarchy must be equally so. No
person could have been more quick-sighted than
Johnson to such a contradiction as this in the
logic of an antagonist.
The judgments which Johnson passed on books
were, in his own time, regarded with superstitious
veneration, and, in our time, are generally treated
with indiscriminate contempt. They are the judgments of a strong but enslaved understanding.
The mind of the critic was hedged round by an
uninterrupted fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his narrow limits, he displayed
a vigor and an activity which ought to have




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


63


enabled him to clear the barrier that confined
him.
How it chanced that a man who reasoned on
his premises so ably, should assume his premises
so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature. The same inconsistency may be
observed in the schoolmen of the Middle Ages.
Those writers show so much acuteness and force
of mind in arguing on their wretched data, that a
modern reader is perpetually at a loss to comprehend how such minds came by such data. Not
a flaw in the superstructure of the theory which
they are rearing escapes their vigilance.  Yet
they are blind to the obvious unsoundness of the
foundation. It is the same with some eminent
lawyers. Their legal arguments are intellectual
prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies
and the most refined distinctions. The principles of their arbitrary science being once admitted, the statute-book and the reports being once
assumed as the foundations of reasoning, these
men must be allowed to be perfect masters of
logic. But if a question arises as to the postulates on which their whole system rests, if they
are called upon to vindicate the fundamental
maxims of that system which they have passed
their lives in studying, these very men often talk
the language of savages or of children. Those
who have listened to a man of this class in his
own court, and who have witnessed the skill with
which he analyzes and digests a vast mass of evidence, or reconciles a crowd of precedents which




64          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
at first sight seem contradictory, scarcely know
him again when, a few hours later, they hear him
speaking on the other side of Westminster Hall
in his capacity of legislator. They can scarcely
believe that the paltry quirks which are faintly
heard through a storm of coughing, and which do
not impose on the plainest country gentleman,
can proceed from the same sharp and vigorous
intellect which had excited their admiration under the same roof, and on the same day.
Johnson decided literary questions like a lawyer, not like a legislator. lie never examined
foundations where a point was already ruled.
Iis whole code of criticism rested on pure assumption, for which he sometimes quoted a precedent or an authority, but rarely troubled himself
to give a reason drawn from the nature of things.
IHe took it for granted that the kind of poetry
which flourished in his own time, which he had
been accustomed to hear praised from his childhood, and which he had himself written with success, was the best kind of poetry. In his biographical work he has repeatedly laid it down as
an undeniable proposition that during the latter
part of the seventeenth century, and the earlier
part of the eighteenth, English poetry had been
in a constant progress of improvement. Waller,
Denham, Dryden, and Pope, had been, according
to him, the great reformers. He judged of all
works of the imagination by the standard established among his own contemporaries. Though
he allowed Homer to have been a greater man




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


65


than Virgil, he seems to have thought the "lEneid" a greater poem than the "Iliad." Indeed, he
well might have thought so; for he preferred
Pope's "Iliad " to Homer's. He pronounced that,
after Hoole's translation of Tasso, Fairfax's would
hardly be reprinted. He could see no merit in
our fine old English ballads, and always spoke
with the most provoking contempt of Percy's
fondness for them. Of the great original works
of imagination which appeared during his time,
Richardson's novels alone excited his admiration.
He could see little or no merit in " Tom Jones,"
in " Gulliver's Travels," or in " Tristram Shandy."  To Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" he
vouchsafed only a line of cold commendationof commendation much colder than what he has
bestowed on the "Creation" of that portentous
bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray was, in his
dialect, a barren rascal; Churchill was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt for the trash
of Macpherson was indeed just; but it was, we
suspect, just by chance. He despised the "Fingal" for the very reason which led many men of
genius to admire it. He despised it, not because
it was essentially commonplace, but because it
had a superficial air of originality.
He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions fashioned on his own principles. But
when a deeper philosophy was required, when he
undertook to pronounce judgment on the works
of those great minds which "yield homage only
to eternal laws," his failure was ignominious. He
5




66           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
criticised Pope's "Epitaphs" excellently.  But
his observations on Shakspeare's plays and Milton's poems seem to us, for the most part, as
wretched as if they had been written by Rymer
himself, whom we take to have been the worst
critic that ever lived.
Some of Johnson's whims on literary subjects
can be compared only to that strange nervous
feeling which made him uneasy if he had not
touched every post between the Mitre tavern and
his own lodgings. His preference of Latin epitaphs to English epitaphs is an instance. An
English epitaph, he said, would disgrace Smollett.
Iie declared that he would not pollute the walls
of Westminster Abbey with an English epitaph
on Goldsmith. What reason there can be for
celebrating a British writer in Latin, which there
was not for covering the Roman arches of triumph with Greek inscriptions, or for commemorating the deeds of the heroes of Thermopyle in
Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to
imagine.
On men and manners, at least on the men and
manners of a particular place and a particular
age, Johnson had certainly looked with a most
observant and discriminating eye. His remarks
on the education of children, on marriage, on the
economy of families, on the rules of society, are
always striking, and generally sound.  In his
writings, indeed, the knowledge of life which he
possessed in an eminent degree is very imperfectly exhibited. Like those unfortunate chiefs of




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


67


the Middle Ages who were suffocated by their
own chain-mail and cloth of gold, his maxims
perish under that load of words which was designed for their defense and their ornament. But
it is clear, from the remains of his conversation,
that he had more of that homely wisdom which
nothing but experience and observation can give
than any writer since the time of Swift. If he
had been content to write as he talked, he might
have left books on the practical art of living superior to the " Directions to Servants."
Yet even his remarks on society, like his remarks on literature, indicate a mind at least as
remarkable for narrowness as for strength. He
was no master of the great science of human
nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but
the species Londoner. Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant with all the forms of life and
all the shades of moral and intellectual character which were to be seen from Islington to the
Thames, and from Hyde Park Corner to Mile-end
Green. But his philosophy stopped at the first
turnpike-gate. Of the rural life of England he
knew nothing; and he took it for granted that
everybody who lived in the country was either
stupid or miserable. " Country gentlemen," said
he, " must be unhappy; for they have not enough
to keep their lives in motion;" as if all those peculiar habits and associations which made Fleet
Street and Charing Cross the finest views in the
world to himself had been essential parts of human nature. Of remote countries and past times




68          SAMUEL JOIINSON.
he talked with wild and ignorant presumption.
"The Athenians of the age of Demosthenes," he
said to Mrs. Thrale, "were a people of brutes, a
barbarous people." In conversation with Sir
Adam Ferguson he used similar language. " The
boasted Athenians," he said, "were barbarians.
The mass of every people must be barbarous
where there is no printing."  The fact was this:
le saw that a Londoner who could not read was
a very stupid and brutal fellow; he saw that
great refinement of taste and activity of intellect
were rarely found in a Londoner who had not
read much; and, because it was by means of
books that people acquired almost all their knowledgfe in the society with which he was acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of the strongest and
clearest evidence, that the human mind can be
cultivated by means of books alone. An Athenian citizen might possess very few volumes;
and the largest library to which he had access
might be much less valuable than Johnson's bookcase in Bolt Court. But the Athenian might
pass every morning in conversation with Socrates,
and might hear Pericles speak four or five times
every month. He saw the plays of Sophocles
and Aristophanes: he walked amidst the friezes
of Phidias and the paintings of Zeuxis: he knew
by heart the choruses of zEschylus: he heard the
rhapsodist at the corner of the street reciting the
"Shield of Achilles " or the "Death of Argus:"
lie was a legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance, revenue, and war: he was a sol



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


69


dier, trained under a liberal and generous discipline: he was a judge, compelled every day to
weigh the effect of opposite arguments. These
things were in themselves an education-an education eminently fitted, not, indeed, to form exact
or profound thinkers, but to give quickness to the
perceptions, delicacy to the taste, fluency to the
expression, and politeness to the manners. All
this was overlooked. An Athenian who did not
improve his mind by reading was, in Johnson's
opinion, much such a person as a Cockney who
made his mark, much such a person as black
Frank before he went to school, and far inferior
to a parish clerk or a printer's devil.
Johnson's friends have allowed that he carried
to a ridiculous extreme his unjust contempt for
foreigners. He pronounced the French to be a
very silly people, much behind us, stupid, ignorant creatures. And this judgment he formed after having been at Paris about a month, during
which he would not talk French, for fear of giving the natives an advantage over him in conversation. He pronounced them also to be an indelicate people, because a French footman touched the sugar with his fingers. That ingenious
and amusing traveller, M. Simond, has defended
his countrymen very successfully against Johnson's accusation, and has pointed out some English practices which, to an impartial spectator,
would seem at least as inconsistent with physical
cleanliness and social decorum as those which
Johnson so bitterly reprehended. To the sage,




70          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
as Boswell loves to call him, it never occurred to
doubt that there must be something eternally and
immutably good in the usages to which he had
been accustomed. In fact, Johnson's remarks on
society beyond the bills of mortality are generally of much the same kind with those of honest
Tom Dawson, the English footman in Dr. Moore's
"Zeluco."  " Suppose the King of France has no
sons, but only a daughter, then, when the king
dies, this here daughter, according to that there
law, cannot be made queen, but the next near relative, provided he is a man, is made king, and
not the last king's daughter, which, to be sure, is
very unjust. The French foot-guards are dressed
in blue, and all the marching regiments in white,
which has a very foolish appearance for soldiers;
and as for blue regimentals, it is only fit for the
blue horse or the artillery."
Johnson's visit to the Hebrides introduced him
to a state of society completely new to him; and
a salutary suspicion of his own deficiencies seems
on that occasion to have crossed his mind for
the first time. He confessed, in the last paragraph of his "Journey," that his thoughts on
national manners were the thoughts of one who
had seen but little, of one who had passed his
time almost wholly in cities. This feeling, however, soon passed away. It is remarkable that to
the last he entertained a fixed contempt for all
those modes of life and those studies which tend
to emancipate the mind from the prejudices of a
particular age or a particular nation. Of foreign




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


71'


travel and of history he spoke with the fierce and
boisterous contempt of ignorance. " What does
a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk the
better for travelling? What did Lord Charlemont learn in his travels, except that there was
a snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?" History was, in his opinion, to use the fine expression of Lord Plunkett, an old almanac: historians
could, as he conceived, claim no higher dignity
than that of almanac-makers; and his favorite
historians were those who, like Lord Hailes, aspired to no higher dignity. He always spoke
with contempt of Robertson. Hume he would
not even read. He affronted one of his friends
for talking to him about Catiline's conspiracy,
and declared that he never desired to hear of the
Punic war again as long as he lived.
Assuredly one fact which does not directly affect our own interests, considered in itself, is no
better worth knowing than another fact. The
fact that there is a snake in a pyramid, or the
fact that Hannibal crossed the Alps, are in themselves as unprofitable to us as the fact that there
is a green blind in a particular house in Threadneedle Street, or the fact that a Mr. Smith comes
into the City every morning on the top of one of
the Blackwall stages. But it is certain that those
who will not crack the shell of history will never.get at the kernel. Johnson, with hasty arrogance, pronounced the kernel worthless, because
lie saw no value in the shell. The real use of
travelling to distant countries, and of studying




72          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
the annals of past times, is to preserve men from
the contraction of mind which those can hardly
escape whose whole communion is with one generation and one neighborhood, who arrive at conclusions by means of an induction not sufficiently
copious, and who therefore constantly confound
exceptions with rules, and accidents with essential properties. In short, the real use of travelling and of studying history is to keep men from
being what Tom Dawson was in fiction, and Samuel Johnson in reality.
Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed,
appears far greater in Boswell's books than in
his own. His conversation appears to have been
quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked, he
clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in
his hand to write for the public, his style became
systematically vicious. All his books are written
in a learned language; in a language which nobody
hears from his mother or his nurse; in a language
in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains,
or makes love; in a language in which nobody
ever thinks. It is clear that Johnson himself
did not think in the dialect in which he wrote.
The expressions which came first to his tongue
were simple, energetic, and picturesque. When
he wrote for publication, he did his sentences
out of English into Johnsonese. IIis letters from
the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of
that work of which the "Journey to the IIebri



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


73


des" is the translation; and it is amusing to
compare the two versions.  "When we were
taken up-stairs," says he, in one of his letters,
" a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which
one of us was to lie." This incident is recorded
in the " Journey " as follows: " Out of one of the
beds on which we were to repose, started up, at
our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the
forge."  Sometimes Johnson translated aloud.
"' The Rehearsal,'" he said, very unjustly, " has
not wit enough to keep it sweet;" then, after a
pause, "it has not vitality enough to preserve it
from putrefaction."
Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes
even agreeable, when the manner, though vicious,
is natural. Few readers, for example, would be
willing to part with the mannerism of Milton or
of Burke. But a mannerism which does not sit
easy on the mannerist, which has been adopted
on principle, and which can be sustained only by
constant effort, is always offensive. And such is
the mannerism of Johnson.
The characteristic faults of his style are so familiar to all our readers, and have been so often
burlesqued, that it is almost superfluous to point
them out. It is well known that he made less
use than any other eminent writer of those strong
plain words, Anglo-Saxon or Norman-French, of
which the roots lie in the inmost depths of our
language; and that he felt a vicious partiality
for terms which, long after our own speech had
been fixed, were borrowed from the Greek and




74           SAMUEL JOHNSON.
Latin, and which therefore, even when lawfully
naturalized, must be considered as born aliens,
not entitled to rank with the king's English.
His constant practice of padding out a sentence
with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the
bust of an exquisite; his antithetical forms of
expression, constantly employed even where there
is no opposition in the ideas expressed; his big
words wasted on little things; his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and
easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and
sweetness to the expression of our great old
writers-all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the
subject.
Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very
justly, " If you were to write a fable about little
fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes
talk like whales." No man surely ever had so
little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed
legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy
virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the
same pompous and unbending style. His speech,
like Sir Piercy Shafton's euphuistic eloquence,
bewrayed him under every disguise. Euphelia
and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet,
or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia.  The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the countryhouse of her relations in such terms as these:
"I was surprised, after the civilities of my first




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


75


reception, to find, instead of the leisure and tranquillity which a rural life always promises, and, if
well conducted, might always afford, a confused
wildness of care, and a tumultuous hurry of diligence, by which every face was clouded, and every motion agitated."  The gentle Tranquilla informs us that she "had not passed the earlier
part of life without the flattery of courtship and
the joys of triumph; but had danced the round
of gayety amidst the murmurs of envy and the
gratulations of applause, had been attended from
pleasure to pleasure by the great, the sprightly,
and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited
by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gayety of
wit, and the timidity of love." Surely Sir John
Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with
a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with
honest Sir Hugh Evans, "I like not when a
'oman has a great peard: I spy a great peard
under her muffler."*
We had something more to say. But our article is already too long; and we must close it.
We would fain part in good humor from the
hero, from the biographer, and even from the editor, who, ill as he has performed his task, has
at least this claim to our gratitude, that he has
induced us to read Boswell's book again. As we
close it, the club-room is before us, and the table
* It is proper to observe that this passage bears a
very close resemblance to a passage in The Rambler
(No. 20). The resemblance may possibly be the effect
of unconscious plagiarism.




76          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the
lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those
heads which live forever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the
tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of
Beauclerk, and the beaming smile of Garrick,
Gibbon tapping his snuffbox, and Sir Joshua
with his trumpet in his car. In the foreground
is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as
the figures of those among whom we have been
brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy
face seamed with the scars of disease, the brown
coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig
with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the
nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the
eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches;
we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir?" and the
"What then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the
"You don't see your way through the question,
sir!"
What a singular destiny has been that of this
remarkable man! To be regarded in his own
age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To
receive from his contemporaries that full homage
which men of genius have in general received
only from posterity! To be more intimately
known to posterity than other men are known to
their contemporaries! That kind of fame which
is commonly the most transient is, in his case,
the most durable. The reputation of those writings which he probably expected to be immortal




SAMUEL JOHNSON.            77
is every day fading; while those peculiarities of
manner and that careless table-talk, the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with
him, are likely to be remembered as long as the
English language is spoken in any quarter of the
globe.




I
I




SAMUEL JOHNSON.
SAMUEL JOHNSON, one of the most eminent English writers of the eighteenth century, was the
son of Michael Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that century, a magistrate of Lichfield,
and a bookseller of great note in the Midland
Counties. Michael's abilities and attainments
seem to have been considerable. He was so
well acquainted with the contents of the volumes
which he exposed to sale, that the country rectors
of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought him
an oracle on points of learning. Between him
and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous
Churchman, and, though he qualified himself for
municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a Jacobite in
heart. At his house-a house which is still pointed out to every traveller who visits LichfieldSamuel was born on the 18th of September, 1709.
In the child the physical, intellectual, and moral
peculiarities which afterward distinguished the
man were plainly discernible; great muscular




80        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


strength, accompanied by much awkwardness
and many infirmities; great quickness of parts,
with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy
and irritable temper. He had inherited from his
ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond
the power of medicine to remove. Iis parents
were weak enough to believe that the royal touch
was a specific for this malady. In his tiird year
he was taken up to London, inspected by the
court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains,
and stroked and presented with a piece of gold
by Queen Anne. One of his earliest recollections
was that of a stately lady in a diamond stomacher
and a long black hood. IHer hand was applied
in vain. The boy's features, which were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by
his malady. Ils cheeks were deeply scarred.
I-e lost for a time the sight of one eye, and he
saw but very imperfectly with the other. But
the force of his mind overcame every impediment.
Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with
such ease and rapidity that at every school to
which he was sent he was soon the best scholar.
From sixteen to eighteen he resided at home, and
was left to his own devices. He learned much
at this time, though his studies were without guidance and without plan. IIe ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books,
read what was interesting, and passed over what
was dull. An ordinary lad would have acquired
little or no useful knowledge in such a way; but




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


81


much that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. He read little Greek; for his
proficiency in that language was not such that he
could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic
poetry and eloquence. But he had left school a
good Latinist, and he soon acquired, in the large
and miscellaneous library of which he now had
the command, an extensive knowledge of Latin
literature. That Augustan delicacy of taste,
which is the boast of the great public schools of
England, he never possessed. But he was early
familiar with some classical writers, who were
quite unknown to the best scholars in the sixth
form at Eton. He was peculiarly attracted by
the works of the great restorers of learning.
Once, while searching for some apples, he found
a huge folio volume of Petrarch's works. The
name excited his curiosity, and he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the diction
and versification of his own Latin compositions
show that he had paid at least as much attention
to modern copies from the antique as to the
original models.
While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was much better qualified to pore upon books, and to talk about them,
than to trade in them. His business declined;
his debts increased; it was with difficulty that
the daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It was out of his power to support his
son at either university; but a wealthy neighbor
6(




82           SAMUEL JOINSOX.
offered assistance, and, in reliance on promises
which proved to be of very little value, Samuel
was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When
the young scholar presented himself to the rulers
of that society, they were amazed not more by
his ungainly figure and eccentric manners than
by the quantity of extensive and curious information which he had picked up during many months
of desultory, but not unprofitable, study. On the
first day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and one of the most
learned among them declared that he had never
known a freshman of equal attainments.
At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three
years. He was poor, even to raggedness; and
his appearance excited a mirth and a pity which
were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit.
He was driven from the quadrangle of Christ
Church by the sneering looks which the members
of that aristocratical society cast at the holes in
his shoes. Some charitable person placed a new
pair at his door, but he spurned them away in a
fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No opulent gentleman
commoner, panting for one- and - twenty, could
have treated the academical authorities with more
gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a
gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a
circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered
gown and dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave
him an undisputed ascendency. In every mutiny




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


83


against the discipline of the college he was the
ringleader. Much was pardoned, however, to a
youth so highly distinguished by abilities and acquirements. He had early made himself known
by turning Pope's "Messiah" into Latin verse.
The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly
Virgilian, but the translation found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope himself.
The time drew near at which Johnson would,
in the ordinary course of things, have become a
Bachelor of Arts, but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of support on which
he had relied had not been kept. His family
could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford
tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he
could pay. In the autumn of 1731 he was under
the necessity of quitting the university without a
degree. In the following winter his father died.
The old man left but a pittance, and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the
support of his widow. The. property to which
Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than
twenty pounds.
His life, during the thirty years which followed,
was one hard struggle with poverty. The misery
of that struggle needed no aggravation, but was
aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound body
and an unsound mind. Before the young man
left the university, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a singularly cruel form.  He had
become an incurable hypochondriac. He said
long after that he had been mad all his life, or...,...




84          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often been
thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons,
and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his
gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and
sometimes terrified people who (lid not know him.
At a dinner-table he would, in a fit of absence,
stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe. lie
would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would
conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than
see the hateful place. lie would set his heart on
touching every post in the streets through which
he walked. If by any chance he missed a post,
he would go back a hundred yards and repair
the omission.  Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid and his
imagination morbidly active.  At one time he
would stand poring on the town-clock without being able to tell the hour. At another, he would
distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles
off, calling him by his name. But this was not
the worst. A deep melancholy took possession
of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views
of human nature and of human destiny. Such
wretchedness as he endured has driven many
men to shoot themselves or drown themselves;
but he was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life, but he was afraid of
death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound
which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In
c t**




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


85


religion he found but little comfort during his
long and frequent fits of dejection, for his religion partook of his own character. The light from
heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct
line, or with its own pure splendor. The rays had
to struggle through a disturbing medium; they
reached him refracted, dulled, and discolored by
the thick gloom which had settled on his soul;
and, though they might be sufficiently clear to
guide him, were too dim to cheer him.
With such infirmities of body and of mind, this
celebrated man was left, at two-and-twenty, to
fight his way through the world. He remained
during about five years in the Midland Counties.
At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home,
he had inherited some friends and acquired others. He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a
gay officer of noble family, who happened to be
quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of
the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of
distinguished parts, learning, and knowledge of
the world, did himself honor by patronizing the
young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid garb moved many
of the petty aristocracy of the neighborhood to
laughter or to disgust.  At Lichfield, however,
Johnson could find no way of earning a livelihood.
He became usher of a grammar-school in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in
the house of a country gentleman; but a life of
dependence was insupportable to his haughty
spirit.  He repaired to Birmingham, and there




86        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In
that town he printed a translation, little noticed
at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book
about Abyssinia. lie then put forth proposals
for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of moderm
Latin verse; but subscriptions did not come in,
and the volume never appeared.
While leading this vagrant and miserable life,
Johnson fell in love.  The object of his passion was Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had
children as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse
woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in
gaudy colors, and fond of exhibiting provincial
airs and graces which were not exactly those of
the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, whose eyesight
was too weak to distinguish ceruse from natural
bloom, and who had seldom or never been in
the same room with a woman of real fashion,
his Titty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That
his admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for she was as poor as himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honor,
the addresses of a suitor who might have been
her son. The marriage, however, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved happier than might
have been expected. The lover continued to be
under the illusions of the wedding-day till the
lady died in her sixty - fourth year.  On her




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


87


monument he placed an inscription, extolling the
charms of her person and of her manners; and
when, long after her decease, he had occasion to
mention her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half
ludicrous, half pathetic, " Pretty creature!"
His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more strenuously than he had hitherto done.  He took a house in the neighborhood of his native town, and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away, and
only three pupils came to his academy. Indeed,
his appearance was so strange, and his temper
so violent, that his school- room must have resembled an ogre's den.  Nor was the tawdry
painted grandmother whom he called his Titty
well qualified to make provision for the comfort
of young gentlemen.  David Garrick, who was
one of the pupils, used, many years later, to
throw the best company of London into convulsions of laughter by mimicking the endearments
of this extraordinary pair.
At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year
of his age, determined to seek his fortune in the
capital as a literary adventurer.  He set out
with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy of
"Irene" in manuscript, and two or three letters
of introduction from his friend Walmesley.
Never since literature became a calling in England had it been a less gainful calling than at
the time when Johnson took up his residence in
London. In the preceding generation a writer
of eminent merit was sure to be munificently re



88          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
warded by the Government. The least that he
could expect was a pension or a sinecure place;
and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he
might hope to be a Member of Parliament, a
lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secretary
of state. It would be easy, on the other hand,
to name several writers of the nineteenth century of whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from the booksellers. But
Johnson entered on his vocation in the most
dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity.  Literature had
ceased to flourish under the patronage of the
great, and had not begun to flourish under the
patronage of the public. One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was
then considered as a handsome fortune, and lived
on a footing of equality with nobles and ministers of State. But this was a solitary exception.
Even an author whose reputation was established, and whose works were popular-such an author as Thomson, whose " Seasons " were in every library, such an author as Fielding, whose
"Pasquin " had had a greater run than any drama
since " The Beggar's Opera "-was sometimes glad
to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means
of dining on tripe at a cook-shop underground,
where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy
meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It
is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations
and privations must have awaited the novice who
had still to earn a name. One of the publishers




SAMUEL JOIINSON.           89
to whom Johnson applied for employment measured with a scornful eye that athletic though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, " You had better get
a porter's knot, and carry trunks." Nor was the
advice bad, for a porter was likely to be as plentifully fed, and as comfortably lodged, as a poet.
Some time appears to have elapsed before
Johnson was able to form any literary connection from which he could expect more than bread
for the day which was passing over him.  He
never forgot the generosity with which Hervey,
who was now residing in London, relieved his
wants during this time of trial. "Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher many years later,
" was a vicious man; but he was very kind to
me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him."
At Hervey's table Johnson sometimes enjoyed
feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. But in general he dined, and thought that
he dined well, on sixpennyworth of meat and a
pennyworth of bread at an ale-house near Drury
Lane.
The effect of the privations and sufferings
which he endured at this time was discernible to
the last in his temper and his deportment. His
* manners had never been courtly; they now became almost savage. Being frequently under the
necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts,
he became a confirmed sloven. Being often very
hungry when he sat down to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness.
Even to the end of his life, and even at the ta



90          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
bles of the great, the sight of food affected him
as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His
taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and alarode beef-shops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have
near him a hare that had been kept too long, or
a meat-pie made with rancid butter, he gorged
himself with such violence that his veins swelled,
and the moisture broke out on his forehead. The
affronts which his poverty emboldened stupid and
low-minded men to offer to him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him
rude even to ferocity. Unhappily, the insolence
which, while it was defensive, was pardonable,
and in some sense respectable, accompanied him
into societies where he was treated with courtesy
and kindness. He was repeatedly provoked into
striking those who had taken liberties with him.
All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to
abstain from talking about their beatings, except
Osborne, the most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he had
been knocked down by the huge fellow whom he
had hired to puff the Harleian Library.
About a year after Johnson. had begun to reside in London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from Cave, an enterprising and intelligent bookseller, who was proprietor
and editor of The Gentlemaz's Magyazine. That
journal, just entering on the ninth year of its long
existence, was the only periodical work in the
kingdom which then had what would now be




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


91


called a large circulation.  It was, indeed, the
chief source of parliamentary intelligence. It
was not then safe, even during a recess, to publish an account of the proceedings of either House
without some disguise. Cave, however, ventured
to entertain his readers with what he called " Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput."
France was Blefuscu; London was Mildendo;
pounds were sprligs; the Duke of Newcastle was
the Nardac Secretary of State; Lord Hardwicke
was the Hurgo Hickrad; and William Pulteney
was Wingul Pulnub. To write the speeches was,
during several years, the business of Johnson.
He was generally furnished with notes, meagre
indeed, and inaccurate, of what had been said;
but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence both for the ministry and for the opposition. He was himself a Tory, not from rational
conviction-for his serious opinion was that one
form of government was just as good or as bad
as another-but from mere passion, such as inflamed the Capulets against the Montagues, or
the Blues of the Roman circus against the Greens.
In his infancy he had heard so much talk about
the villanies of the Whigs, and the dangers of
the Church, that he had become a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak. Before he
was three, he had insisted on being taken to hear
Sacheverel preach at Lichfield cathedral, and had
listened to the sermon with as much respect, and
probably with as much intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in the congregation. The work




92        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


which had been begun in the nursery had been
completed by the university. Oxford, when Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical place
in England, and Pembroke was one of the most
Jacobitical colleges in Oxford. The prejudices
which he brought up to London were scarcely
less absurd than those of his own Tom Tempest.
Charles the Second and James the Second were
two of the best kings that ever reigned. Lauda poor creature who never did, said, or wrote anything indicating more than the ordinary capacity of an old womain-was a prodigy of parts and
learning, over whose tomb Art and Genius still
continued to weep. Hampden deserved no more
honorable name than that of "the zealot of rebellion."  Even the ship-money, condemned not
less decidedly by Falkland and Clarendon than
by the bitterest Roundheads, Johnson would not
pronounce to have been an unconstitutional impost. Under a government the mildest that had
ever been known in the world-under a government which allowed to the people an unprecedented liberty of speech and action-he fancied
that he was a slave; he assailed the ministry
with obloquy which refuted itself, and regretted
the lost freedom and happiness of those golden
days in which a writer who had taken but onetenth part of the license allowed to him would
have been pilloried, mangled with the shears,
whipped at the cart's-tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to die. Ie hated dissenters and
stock-jobbers, the excise and the army, septen



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


93


nial parliaments and Continental connections.
He long had an aversion to the Scotch-an aversion of which he could not remember the commencement, but which, he owned, had probably
originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of
the nation during the Great Rebellion. It is easy
to guess in what manner debates on great party
questions were likely to be reported by a man
whose judgment was so much disordered by party spirit. A show of fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the magazine; but Johnson long afterward owned that, though he had
saved appearances, he had taken care that the
Whig dogs should not have the best of it; and,
in fact, every passage which has lived-every passage which bears the marks of his higher faculties-is put into the mouth of some member of
the opposition.
A few weeks after Johnson had entered on
these obscure labors, he published a work which
at once placed him high among the writers of his
age. It is probable that what he had suffered
during his first year in London had often reminded him of some parts of that noble poem in
which Juvenal had described the misery and
degradation of a needy man of letters, lodged
among the pigeons' nests in the tottering garrets
which overhung the streets of Rome. Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's satires and epistles had recently appeared, were in every hand,
and were by many readers thought superior to
the originals. What Pope had done for Horace,




94          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
Johnson aspired to do for Juvenal. The enterprise was bold, and yet judicious. For between
Johnson and Juvenal there was much in common-much more, certainly, than between Pope
and Horace.
Johnson's "London" appeared, without his
name, in May, 1738. He received only ten guineas for this stately and vigorous poem; but the
sale was rapid and the success complete. A second edition was required within a week. Those
small critics who are always desirous to lower
established reputations ran about proclaiming
that the anonymous satirist was superior to Pope
in Pope's own peculiar department of literature.
It ought to Le remembered, to the honor of
Pope, that he joined heartily in the applause
with which the appearance of a rival genius was
welcomed. He made inquiries about the author
of "London."  Such a man, he said, could not
long be concealed. The name was soon discovered; and Pope, with great kindness, exerted
himself to obtain an academical degree and the
mastership of a grammar-school for the poor
young poet. The attempt failed, and Johnson
remained a bookseller's hack.
It does not appear that these two men-the
most eminent writer of the generation which was
going out, and the most eminent writer of the
generation which was coming in-ever saw each
other. They lived in very different circles-one
surrounded by dukes and earls, the other by
starving pamphleteers and index-makers. Among




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


95


Johnson's associates at this time may be mentioned Boyse, who, when his shirts were pledged,
scrawled Latin verses sitting up in bed with his
arms through two holes in his blanket, who composed very respectable sacred poetry when he
was sober, and who was at last run over by a
hackney-coach when he was drunk; Hoole, surnamed the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of
attending to his measures, used to trace geometrical diagrams on the board where he sat crosslegged; and the penitent impostor George Psalmanazar, who, after poring all day, in a humble
lodging, on the folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers, indulged himself at night with literary and theological conversation at an ale-house
in the City. But the most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time Johnson consorted
was Richard Savage, an earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, and had seen life in all its forms
-who had feasted among blue ribbons in St.
James's Square, and had lain with fifty pounds'
weight of irons on his legs in the condemned
ward of Newgate. This man had, after many
vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject
and hopeless poverty. His pen had failed him.
His patrons had been taken away by death, or
estranged by the riotous profusion with which he
squandered their bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he rejected their advice. He
now lived by begging. He dined on venison and
champagne whenever he hird been so fortunate
as to borrow a guinea. If his questing had been




96           SAMUEL JOIINSON.
unsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hunger
with some scraps of broken meat, and lay down
to rest under the piazza of Covent Garden in
warm weather, and, in cold weather, as near as
he could get to the furnace of a glass-house.
Yet, in his misery, he was still an agreeable companion. H-e had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that gay and brilliant world from
which he was now an outcast. IIe had observed
the great men of both parties in hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders of opposition without the mask of patriotism, and had
heard the Prime Minister roar with laughter and
tell stories not over-decent. During some months
Savage lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson; and then the friends parted, not without
tears. Johnson remained in London to drudge
for Cave; Savage went to the West of England,
lived there as he had lived everywhere, and, in
1743, died, penniless and heart- broken, in Bristol jail.
Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly excited about his extraordinary
character and his not less extraordinary adventures, a life of him appeared widely different
from the catchpenny lives of eminent men which
were then a staple article of manufacture in
Grub Street. The style was indeed deficient in
ease and variety; and the writer was evidently
too partial to the Latin element of our language.
But the little work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece.  No finer specimen of literary biogra



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


97


phy existed in any language, living or dead; and
a discerning critic might have confidently predicted that the author was destined to be the
founder of a new school of English eloquence.
The "Life of Savage" was anonymous; but it
was well known in literary circles that Johnson
was the writer. During the three years which
followed, he produced no important work; but
he was not, and indeed could not be, idle.  The
fame of his abilities and learning continued to
grow.  Warburton pronounced him a man of
parts and genius; and the praise of Warburton
was then no light thing. Such was Johnson's
reputation that, in 1747, several eminent booksellers combined to employ him in the arduous
work of preparing a " Dictionary of the English
Language," in two folio volumes. The sum which
they agreed to pay him was only fifteen hundred
guineas; and out of this sum he had to pay several poor men of letters who assisted him in the
humbler parts of his task.
The prospectus of the "Dictionary" he addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield
had long been celebrated for the politeness of
his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, and the
delicacy of his taste. He was acknowledged to
be the finest speaker in the House of Lords. He
had recently governed Ireland, at a momentous
conjuncture, with eminent firmness, wisdom, and
humanity, and he had since become Secretary of
State. He received Johnson's homage with the
most winning affability, and requited it with a
7




98          SAMUEL JOIINSON.
few guinbas, bestowed doubtless in a very graceful manner, but was by no means desirous to see
all his carpets blackened with the London mud,
and his soups and wines thrown to right and left
over the gowns of fine ladies and the waistcoats
of fine gentlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who gave strange starts and uttered strange
growls, who dressed like a scarecrow and ate
like a cormorant.  During some time Johnson
continued to call on his patron, but, after being
repeatedly told by the porter that his lordship
was not at home, took the hint, and ceased to present himself at the inhospitable door.
Johnson had flattered himself that he should
have completed his " Dictionary " by the end of
1750, but it was not till 1755 that he at length
gave his huge volumes to the world. During the
seven years which he passed in the drudgery of
penning definitions and marking quotations for
transcription, he sought for relaxation in literary labor of a more agreeable kind. In 1749 he
published the "Vanity of Human Wishes," an
excellent imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal.
It is, in truth, not easy to say whether the palm
belongs to the ancient or to the modern poet.
The couplets in which the fall of Wolsey is described, though lofty and sonorous, are feeble
when compared with the wonderful lines which
bring before us all Rome in tumult on the day
of the fall of Sejanus-the laurels on the doorposts, the white bull stalking toward the Capitol,
the statues rolling down from their pedestals, the




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


99


flatterers of the disgraced minister running to
see him dragged with a hook through the streets,
and to have a kick at his carcass before it is
hurled into the Tiber.  It must be owned, too,
that in the concluding passage the Christian
moralist has not made the most of his advantages, and has fallen decidedly short of the sublimity of his Pagan model. On the other hand,
Juvenal's Hannibal must yield to Johnson's
Charles; and Johnson's vigorous and pathetic
enumeration of the miseries of a literary life
must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's
lamentation over the fate of Demosthenes and
Cicero.
For the copyright of the "Vanity of Human
Wishes " Johnson received only fifteen guineas.
A few days after the publication of this poem,
his tragedy, begun many years before, was
brought on the stage. His pupil, David Garrick, had, in 1741, made his appearance on a
humble stage in Goodman's Fields, had at once
risen to the first place among actors, and was
now, after several years of almost uninterrupted
success, manager of Drury Lane Theatre. The
relation between him and his old preceptor was
of a very singular kind. They repelled each other strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly. Nature had made them of very different
clay, and circumstances had fully brought out
the natural peculiarities of both. Sudden prosperity had turned Garrick's head.  Continued
adversity had soured Johnson's temper. John



100         SAMUEL JOHNSON.
son saw with more envy than became so great a
man the villa, the plate, the china, the Brussels
carpet, which the little mimic had got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticulations, what wiser
men had written; and the exquisitely sensitive
vanity of Garrick was galled by the thought
that, while all the rest of the world was applauding him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose opinion it was ilpossible to despise,
scarcely any compliment not acidulated with
scorn. Yet the two Lichfield men had so many
early recollections in common, and sympathized
with each other on so many points on which they
sympathized with nobody else in the vast population of the capital, that, though the master was often provoked by the monkey-like impertinence of
the pupil, and the pupil by the bearish rudeness
of the master, they remained friends till they
were parted by death.  Garrick now brought
"Irene" out, with alterations sufficient to displease the author, yet not sufficient to make the
piece pleasing to the audience. The public, however, listened, with little emotion, but with much
civility, to five acts of monotonous declamation.
After nine representations, the play was withdrawn. It is, indeed, altogether unsuited to the
stage, and, even when perused in the closet, will
be found hardly worthy of the author. HIe had
not the slightest notion of what blank verse
should be. A change in the last syllable of every other line would make the versification of
the "Vanity of Human Wishes" closely resem-.;
~  e*l  ~




SAMUEL JOIINSON.


101


ble the versification of " Irene."  The poet, however, cleared, by his benefit nights, and by the
sale of the copyright of his tragedy, about three
hundred pounds-then a great sum in his estimation.
About a year after the representation of
"Irene," he began to publish a series of short
essays on morals, manners, and literature. This
species of composition had been brought into
fashion by the success of The Taller, and by the
still more brilliant success of The Spectator. A
crowd of small writers had vainly attempted to
rival Addison. "The Lay Monastery," The Censor, The F'reethinker, The Plain Dealer, The
Champion, and other works of the same kind,
had had their short day. None of them had obtained a permanent place in our literature; and
they are now to be found cnly in the libraries of
the curious. At length Johnson undertook the
adventure in which so many aspirants had failed.
In the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of
the last number of The Spectator appeared the
first number of The Rambler. From March, 1750,
to March, 1752, this paper continued to come out
every Tuesday and Saturday.
From the first, The.Rambler was enthusiastically admired by a few eminent men. Richardson, when only five numbers had appeared, pronounced it equal, if not superior, to The Spectator. Young and Hartley expressed their approbation not less warmly. Bubb Dodington, among
whose many faults indifference to the claims of




102          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
genius and learning cannot be reckoned, solicited
the acquaintance of the writer. In consequence,
probably, of the good offices of Dodington, who
was then the confidential adviser of Prince Frederic, two of his royal highness's gentlemen carried a gracious message to the printing-office, and
ordered seven copies or Leicester House. But
these overtures seem to have been very coldly received. Johnson had had enough of the patronage of the great to last him all his life, and was
not disposed to haunt any other door as he had
haunted the door of Chesterfield.
By the public T7'e Rambler was at first very
coldly received. Though the price of a number
was only twopence, the sale did not amount to
five hundred.  The profits were therefore very
small. But as soon as the flying leaves were
collected and reprinted, they became popular.
The author lived to see thirteen thousand copies
spread over England alone.  Separate editions
were published for the Scotch and Irish markets.
A large party pronounced the style perfect, so
absolutely perfect, that in some essays it would
be impossible for the writer himself to alter a
single word for the better. Another party, not
less numerous, vehemently accused him of having corrupted the purity of the English tongue.
The best critics admitted that his diction was too
monotonous, too obviously artificial, and now and
then turgid even to absurdity. But they did justice to the acuteness of his observations on morals and manners, to the constant precision and




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


103


frequent brilliancy of his language, to the weighty
and magnificent eloquence of many serious passages, and to the solemn yet pleasing humor of
some of the lighter papers. On the question of
precedence between Addison and Johnson, a question which, seventy years ago, was much disputed,
posterity has pronounced a decision from which
there is no appeal. Sir Roger, his chaplain and
his butler, Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, the
"Vision of Mirza," the "Journal of the Retired
Citizen," the "Everlasting Club," the "Dunmow
Flitch," the '"Loves of Hilpah and Shalum," the
"Visit to the Exchange," and the " Visit to the
Abbey," are known to everybody.  But many
men and women, even of highly cultivated minds,
are unacquainted with Squire Bluster and Mrs.
Busy, " Quisquillius and Venustulus," the "Allegory of Wit and Learning," the Chronicle of
the Revolutions of a Garret," and the sad fate of
"Aningait and Ajut."
The last Rambler was written in a sad and
gloomy hour. Mrs. Johnson had been given over
by the physicians. Three days later she died.
She left her husband almost broken-hearted.
Many people had been surprised to see a man of
his genius and learning stooping to every drudgery, and denying himself almost every comfort,
for the purpose of supplying a silly, affected old
woman with superfluities which she accepted
with but little gratitude. But all his affection
had been concentrated on her. He had neither
brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. To




104          SAMUEL JOHNSON.
him she was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty
as Lady Mary. Her opinion of his writings was
more important to him than the voice of the pit
of Drury Lane Theatre, or the judgment of The
Mlonthly Rviewo. The chief support which had
sustained him through the most arduous labor of
his life was the hope that she would enjoy the
fame and the profit which he anticipated from
his "Dictionary."  She was gone; and, in that
vast labyrinth of streets, peopled by eight hundred thousand human beings, he was alone. Yet
it was necessary for him to set himself, as he expressed it, doggedly to work. After three more
laborious years, the " Dictionary " was at length
complete.
It had been generally supposed that this great
work would be dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished nobleman to whom the Prospectus
had been addressed. He well knew the value of
such a compliment; and therefore, when the day
of publication drew near, he exerted himself to
soothe, by a show of zealous and at the same
time of delicate and judicious kindness, the pride
which he had so cruelly wounded.  Since the
Ramblers had ceased to appear, the town had
been entertained by a journal called The World,
to which many men of high rank and fashion
contributed. In two successive numbers of The
FVorld, the " Dictionary" was, to use the modern
phrase, puffed with wonderful skill. The writings of Johnson were warmly praised. It was
proposed that he should be invested with the au



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


105


thority of a dictator, nay, of a pope, over our language, and that his decisions about the meaning
and the spelling of words should be received as
final. His two folios, it was said, would of course
be bought by everybody who could afford to buy
them.  It was soon known that these papers
were written by Chesterfield. But the just resentment of Johnson was not to be so appeased.
In a letter written with singular energy and dignity of thought and language, he repelled the
tardy advances of his patron. The " Dictionary "
came forth without a dedication. In the preface
the author truly declared that he owed nothing to
the great, and described the difficulties with which
he had been left to struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest and most malevolent of
all the enemies of his fame, Home Tooke, never
could read that passage without tears.
The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full
justice, and something more than justice. The
best lexicographer may well be content if his productions are received by the world with cold esteem. But Johnson's "Dictionary" was hailed
with an enthusiasm such as no similar work has
ever excited. It was indeed the first dictionary
which could be read with pleasure. The definitions show so much acuteness of thought and
command of language, and the passages quoted
from poets, divines, and philosophers are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be
very agreeably spent in turning over the pages.
The faults of the book resolve themselves, for the




106         SAMUEL JOHNSON.
most part, into one great fault. Johnson was a
wretched etymologist. He knew little or nothing
of any Teutonic language except English, which
indeed, as he wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic
language; and thus he was absolutely at the
mercy of Junius and Skinner.
The " Dictionary" though it raised Johnson's
fame, added nothing to his pecuniary means.
The fifteen hundred guineas which the booksellers had agreed to pay him had been advanced
and spent before the last sheets issued from the
press. It is painful to relate that, twice in the
course of the year which followed the publication
of this great work, he was arrested and carried
to spunging-houses, and that he was twice indebted for his liberty to his excellent friend Richardson. It was still necessary for the man who
had been formally saluted by the highest authoritv as dictator of the English language to supply
his wants by constant toil. He abridged his
"Dictionary."  He proposed to bring out an edition of Shakspeare by subscription, and many
subscribers sent in their names and laid down
their money; but he soon found the task so little to his taste that he turned to more attractive
employments. He contributed many papers to
a new monthly journal, which was called The Literary lMacgazine. Few of these papers have much
interest; but among them was the very best thing
that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of reasoning
and of satirical pleasantry, the review of Jenyns's
" Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil."




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


iuo


In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the
first of a series of essays, entitled The Idler.
During two years these essays continued to appear weekly. They were eagerly read, widely
circulated, and, indeed, impudently pirated while
they were still in the original form, and had a
large sale when collected into volumes. The Idler
may be described as a second part of Tlhe amnbler, somewhat livelier and somewhat weaker
than the first part.
While Johnson was busied with his Idlers, his
mother, who had accomplished her ninetieth year,
died at Lichfield. It was long since he had seen
her; but he had not failed to contribute largely
out of his small means to her comfort. In order
to defray the charges of her funeral, and to pay
some debts which she had left, he wrote a little
book in a single week, and sent off the sheets to
the press without reading them over. A hundred pounds were paid him for the copyright;
and the purchasers had great cause to be pleased
with their bargain; for the book was " Rasselas."
The success of " Rasselas " was great, though
such ladies as Miss Lydia Languish must have
been grievously disappointed when they found
that the new volume from the circulating library
was little more than a dissertation on the author's
favorite theme, the Vanity of Human Wishes;
that the Prince of Abyssinia was without a mistress, and the Princess without a lover; and that
the story set the hero and the heroine down exactly where it had taken them up. The style




108        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


was the subject of much eager controversy. The
Monthly lzeiewto and Th]e Critical Review took
different sides. Many readers pronounced the
writer a pompous pedant, who would never use a
word of two syllables where it was possible to use
a word of six, and who could not make a waitingwoman relate her adventures without balancing
every noun with another noun, and every epithet
with another epithet. Another party, not less
zealous, cited with delight numerous passages in
which weighty meaning was expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splendor. And both
the censure and the praise were merited.
About the plan of " Rasselas" little was said
by the critics; and yet the faults of the plan
might seem to invite severe criticism. Johnson
has frequently blamed Shakspeare for neglecting
the proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shakspeare has not sinned
in this way more grievously than Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinians of the eighteenth
century; for the Europe which Imlac describes
is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and the
inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of
that law of gravitation which Newton discovered,
and which was not fully received even at Cambridge till the eighteenth century. What a real
company of Abyssinians would have been may
be learned from Bruce's "Travels."  But Johnson, not content with turning filthy savages, igno



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


109


rant of their letters, and gorged with raw steaks
cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and enlightened as himself or his friend
Burke, and into ladies as highly accomplished
as Mrs. Lennox or Mrs. Sheridan, transferred the
whole domestic system of England to Egypt. Into
a land of harems, a land of polygamy, a land
where women are married without ever being
seen, he introduced the flirtations and jealousies
of our ballrooms. In a land where there is boundless liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as
the indissoluble compact. "A youth and maiden
meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go
home, and dream of each other. Such," says
Rasselas, "is the common process of marriage."
Such it may have been, and may still be, in London, but assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who
was guilty of such improprieties had little right
to blame the poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, and represented Julio Romano as flourishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi.
By such exertions as have been described,
Johnson supported himself till the year 1762.
In that year a great change in his circumstances
took place. He had from a child been an enemy
of the reigning dynasty. His Jacobite prejudices
had been exhibited with little disguise both in
his works and in his conversation. Even in his
massy and elaborate "Dictionary," he had, with
a strange want of taste and judgment, inserted
bitter and contumelious reflections on the Whig




110       SAMUEL JOHNSON.


party. The excise, which was a favorite resource
of Whig financiers, he had designated as a hateful tax. lie had railed against the commissioners of excise in language so coarse that they had
seriously thought of prosecuting him. He had
with difficulty been prevented from holding up
the Lord Privy Seal by name as an example of
the meaning of the word "renegade."  A penjion he had defined as pay given to a State hireling to betray his country; a pensioner, as a slave
of State hired by a stipend to obey a master. It
seemed unlikely that the author of these definitions would himself be pensioned. But that was
a time of wonders. George the Third had ascended the throne; and had, in the course of a
few months, disgusted many of the old friends
and conciliated many of the old enemies of his
house. The City was becoming mutinous. Oxford was becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. Somersets and Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. The head
of the Treasury was now Lord Bute, who was a
Tory, and could have no objection to Johnson's
Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron
of men of letters; and Johnson was one of the
most eminent and one of the most needy men of
letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred
a year was graciously offered, and with very little hesitation accepted.
This event produced a change in Johnson's
whole way of life. For the first time since his
boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad urging




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


11I


him to the daily toil. He was at liberty, after
thirty years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge
his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till two
in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four
in the morning, without fearing either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer.
One laborious task, indeed, he had bound himself to perform. He had received large subscriptions for his promised edition of Shakspeare; he
had lived on those subscriptions during some
years; and he could not without disgrace omit
to perform his part of the contract. His friends
repeatedly exhorted him to make an effort, and
he repeatedly resolved to do so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolutions,
month followed month, year followed year, and
nothing was done. He prayed fervently against
his idleness; he determined, as often as he received the sacrament, that he would no longer
doze away and trifle away his time; but the spell
under which he lay resisted prayer and sacrament. His private notes at this time are made
up of self-reproaches. " My indolence," he wrote
on Easter-eve in 1764, "has sunk into grosser
sluggishness. A kind of strange oblivion has
overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year." Easter, 1765, came, and
found him still in the same state. "My time,"
he wrote, "has been unprofitably spent, and seems
as a dream that has left nothing behind. My
memory grows confused, and I know not how the
days pass over me." Happily for his honor, the




112         SAMUEL JOHNSON.
charm which held him captive was at length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. Ile had been
weak enough to pay serious attention to a story
about a ghost which haunted a house in Cock
Lane, and had actually gone himself, with some
of his friends, at one in the morning, to St. John's
Church, Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiving a
communication from the perturbed spirit. But
the spirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained obstinately silent; and it soon appeared
that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing
herself by making fools of so many philosophers.
Churchill, who, confident in his powers, drunk
with popularity, and burning with party spirit,
was looking for some man of established fame
and Tory politics to insult, celebrated the Cock
Lane Ghost in three cantos, nicknamed "Johnson
Pomposo," asked where the book was which had
been so long promised and so liberally paid for,
and directly accused the great moralist of cheating. This terrible word proved effectual; and
in October, 1765, appeared, after a delay of nine
years, the new edition of Shakspeare.
This publication saved Johnson's character
for honesty, but added nothing to the fame of
his abilities and learning. The preface, though
it contains some good passages, is not in his best
manner. The most valuable notes are those in
which he had an opportunity of showing how attentively   he had during many years observed
human life and human nature. Tile best specimen is the note on the character of Polonius.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


113


Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm
Meister's admirable examination of "Hamlet."
But here praise must end. It would be difficult
to name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great classic. The reader may turn
over play after play without finding one happy
conjectural emendation, or one ingenious and
satisfactory explanation of a passage which had
baffled preceding commentators. Johnson had,
in his Prospectus, told the world that he was
peculiarly fitted for the task which he had undertaken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been
under the necessity of taking a wider view of the
English language than any of his predecessors.
That his knowledge of our literature was extensive, is indisputable. But, unfortunately, he had
altogether neglected that very part of our literature with which it is especially desirable that an
editor of Shakspeare should be conversant. It
is dangerous to assert a negative. Yet little will
be risked by the assertion that in the two folio
volumes of the "English Dictionary" there is
not a single passage quoted from any dramatist
of the Elizabethan age, except Shakspeare and
Ben. Even from Ben the quotations are few.
Johnson might easily, in a few months, have
made himself well acquainted with every old
play that was extant. But it never seems to
have occurred to him that this was a necessary
preparation for the work which he had undertaken. He would doubtless have admitted that
it would be the height of absurdity in a man
8




114         SAMUEL JOHNSON.
who was not familiar with the works of Eschylus and Euripides to publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition of
Shakspeare without having ever in his life, as
far as can be discovered, read a single scene of
Massinger, Ford, Decker,Webster, Marlowe, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and
scurrilous. Those who most loved and honored
him had little to say in praise of the manner in
which he had discharged the duty of a commentator. lie had, however, acquitted himself of a
debt which had long lain heavy on his conscience,
and he sunk back into the repose from which the
sting of satire had roused him. Ile long continued to live upon the fame which he had already
won. He was honored by the University of Oxford with a doctor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by the king with
an interview, in which his majesty most graciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer
would not cease to write. In the interval, however, between 1765 and 17'75 Johnson published
only two or three political tracts, the longest of
which he could have produced in forty- eight
hours, if he had worked as he worked on the
"Life of Savage " and on " Rasselas."
But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue
was active. The influence exercised by his conversation, directly upon those with whom he lived,
and indirectly on the whole literary world, was
altogether without a parallel. His colloquial talents were indeed of the highest order. He had




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


115


strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge of literature and of life, and an
infinite store of curious anecdotes. As respected style, he spoke far better than he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from his lips was
as correct in structure as the most nicely balanced period of The Rambler. But in his talk
there were no pompous triads, and little more than
a fair proportion of words in osity and ation.
All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He uttered
his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a
power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis, of which the effect was rather increased
than diminished by the rollings of his huge form,
and by the asthmatic gaspings and puffings in
which the peals of his eloquence generally ended.
Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling
to sit down to his desk prevent him from giving
instruction or entertainment orally. To discuss
questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in
language so exact and so forcible that it might
have been printed without the alteration of a
word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure.
He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have
his talk out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on anybody who would
start a subject, on a fellow-passenger in a stagecoach, or on the person who sat at the same table with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant and striking
as when he was surrounded by a few friends,
whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as




116         SAMUEL JOHNSON.
he once expressed it, to send him back every ball
that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed
themselves into a club, which gradually became
a formidable power in the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by this conclave
on new books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the
service of the trunk-maker and the pastry-cook.
Nor shall we think this strange when we consider what great and various talents and acquirements met in the little fraternity.  Goldsmith
was the representative of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political
eloquence and political philosophy. There, too,
were Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones,
the greatest linguist, of the age. Garrick brought
to the meeting his inexhaustible pleasantry, his
incomparable mimicry, and his consummate
knowledge of stage effect.  Among the most
constant attendants were two high-born and highbred gentlemen, closely bound together by friendship, but of widely different characters and habits-Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill
in Greek literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life; and Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his
knowledge of the gay world, his fastidious taste,
and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over such
a society was not easy. Yet even over such a
society Johnson predominated. Burke might indeed have disputed the supremacy to which oth



SAMUEL JOHNSON.


117


ers were under the necessity of submitting. But
Burke, though not generally a very patient listener, was content to take the second part when
Johnson was present; and the club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is to this day
popularly designated as Johnson's Club.
Among the members of this celebrated body
was one to whom it has owed the greater part
of its delebrity, yet who was regarded with little
respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a seat among them. This was
James Boswell, a young Scotch lawyer, heir to an
honorable name and a fair estate. That he was
a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who were acquainted with him. That he could not reason,
that he had no wit, no humor, no eloquence, is
apparent from his writings. And yet his writings are read beyond the Mississippi, and under
the Southern Cross, and are likely to be read as
long as the English exists, either as a living or as
a dead language. Nature had made him a slave
and an idolater. His mind resembled those creepers which the botanists call parasites, and which
can subsist only by clinging round the stems and
imbibing the juices of stronger plants. He must
have fastened himself on somebody. He might
have fastened himself on Wilkes, and have become the fiercest patriot in the Bill of Rights Society. He might have fastened himself on Whitefield, and have become the loudest field-preacher
among the Calvinistic Methodists. In a happy




118         SAMUEL JOHNSON.
hour he fastened himself on Johnson. The pair
might seem ill-matched; for Johnson had early
been prejudiced against Boswell's country. To a
man of Johnson's strong understanding and irritable temper, the silly egotism and adulation of
Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to be questioned; and Boswell was eternally catechising
him on all kinds of subjects, and sometimes propounded such questions as, " What would you do,
sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a baby?"
Johnson was a water-drinker, and Boswell was a
wine-bibber, and indeed little better than an habitual sot. It was impossible that there should be
perfect harmony between two such companions.
Indeed, the great man was sometimes provoked
into fits of passion, in which he said things which
the small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. Every quarrel, however, was soon made
up. During twenty years the disciple continued
to worship the master: the master continued to
scold the disciple, to sneer at him, and to love
him.  The two friends ordinarily resided at a
great distance from each other. Boswell practised in the Parliament-house of Edinburgh, and
could pay only occasional visits to London. During those visits his chief business was to watch
Johnson, to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn
the conversation to subjects about which Johnson was likely to say something remarkable, and
to fill quarto note-books with minutes of what
Johnson had said. In this way were gathered




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


119


the materials out of which was afterward constructed the most interesting biographical work
in the world.
Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson
formed a connection less important indeed to his
fame, but much more important to his happiness,
than his connection with Boswell. Henrv Thrale,
one of the most opulent brewers in the kingdom,
a man of sound and cultivated understanding,
rigid principles, and liberal spirit, was married to
one of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain,
pert, young women, who are perpetually doing
or saying what is not exactly right, but who, do
or say what they may, are always agreeable. In
1765 the Thrales became acquainted with Johnson, and the acquaintance ripened fast into friendship. They were astonished and delighted by the
brilliancy of his conversation.  They were flattered by finding that a man so widely celebrated
preferred their house to any other in London.
Even the peculiarities which seemed to unfit him
for civilized society, his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the strange way
in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which he devoured his dinner, his
fits of melancholy, his fits of anger, his frequent
rudeness, his occasional ferocity, increased the
interest which his new associates took in him.
For these things were the cruel marks left behind by a life which had been one long conflict
with disease and with adversity.  In a vulgar
hack writer, such oddities would have excited




120          SAMUEL JOIHNSON.
only disgust. But in a man of genius, learning,
and virtue, their effect was to add pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an apartment at the brewery in Southwark, and a still
more pleasant apartment at the villa of his friends
on Streatham Common. A large part of every year
he passed in those abodes -abodes which must
have seemed magnificent and luxurious indeed,
when compared with the dens in which he had
generally been lodged.  But his chief pleasures
were derived from what the astronomer of his
Abyssinian tale called " the endearing elegance
of female friendship."  Mrs. Thrale rallied him,
soothed him, coaxed him, and, if she sometimes
provoked him by her flippancy, made ample
amends by listening to his reproofs with angelic
sweetness of temper. When he was diseased in
body and in mind, she was the most tender of
nurses. No comfort that wealth could purchase,
no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to
work by womanly compassion, could devise, was
wanting to his sick-room. IIe requited her kindness by an affection pure as the affection of a father, yet delicately tinged with a gallantry which,
though awkward, must have been more flattering than the attentions of a crowd of the fools
who gloried in the names, now obsolete, of Buck
and Maccaroni. It should seem that a full half
of Johnson's life, during about sixteen years, was
passed under the roof of the Thrales.  He accompanied the family sometimes to- Bath, and
sometimes to Brighton; once to Wales, and once




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


121


to Paris. But he had at the same time a house
in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the
north of Fleet Street.  In the garrets was his
library, a large and miscellaneous collection of
books, falling to pieces and begrimed with dust.
On a lower floor he sometimes, but very rarely,
regaled a friend with a plain dinner, a veal pie,
or a leg of lamb and spinach, and a rice pudding. Nor was the dwelling uninhabited during
his long absences. It was the home of the most
extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever
was brought together. At the head of the establishment Johnson had placed an old lady named
Williams, whose chief recommendations were her
blindness and her poverty. But, in spite of her
murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to
another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs.
Desmoulins, whose family he had known many
years before in Staffordshire. Room was found
for the daughter of Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack doctor
named Levett, who bled and dosed coal-heavers
and hackney coachmen, and received for fees
crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and
sometimes a little copper, completed this strange
menagerie.  All these poor creatures were at
constant war with each other, and with Johnson's negro servant Frank. Sometimes, indeed,
they transferred their hostilities from the servant
to the master, complained that a better table was




122         SAMUEL JOHNSON.
not kept for them, and railed or maundered till
their benefactor was glad to make his escape to
Streatham, or to the Mitre tavern. And yet he,
who was generally the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt to resent anything which looked like a slight on the
part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble
and powerful patron, bore patiently from mendicants, who, but for his bounty, must have gone
to the workhouse, insults more provoking than
those for which he had knocked down Osborne
and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year after
year Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly
and Levett, continued to torment him and to live
upon him.
The course of life which has been described
was interrupted in Johnson's sixty-fourth year
by an important event.  He had early read an
account of the Hebrides, and had been much interested by learning that there was so near him
a land peopled by a race which was still as rude
and simple as in the Middle Ages.  A wish to
become intimately acquainted with a state of society so utterly unlike all that he had ever seen
frequently crossed his mind. But it is not probable that his curiosity would have overcome his
habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke,
the mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell importuned him to attempt the adventure,
and offered to be his squire. At length, in August, 1773, Johnson crossed the Highland line,
and plunged courageously into what was then
CYI~~I~~VU VU~V~V~~I  ~~YV~~CU




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


123


considered, by most Englishmen, as a dreary and
perilous wilderness. After wandering about two
months through the Celtic region, sometimes in
rude boats which did not protect him from the
rain, and sometimes on small shaggyponies which
could hardly bear his weight, he returned to his
old haunts with a mind full of new images and
new theories.  During the following year he
employed himself in recording his adventures.
About the beginning of 1775, his "Journey to
the Hebrides" was published, and was, during
some weeks, the chief subject of conversation in
all circles in which any attention was paid to literature.  The book is still read with pleasure.
The narrative is entertaining; the speculations,
whether sound or unsound, are always ingenious; and the style, though too stiff and pompous,
is somewhat easier and more graceful than that
of his early writings. His prejudice against the
Scotch had at length become little more than
matter of jest; and whatever remained of the
old feeling had been effectually removed by the
kind and respectful hospitality with which he
had been received in every part of Scotland. It
was, of course, not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory should praise the Presbyterian polity
and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to the
hedge-rows and parks of England should not be
struck by the bareness of Berwickshire and East
Lothian.  But even in censure Johnson's tone
is not unfriendly. The most enlightened Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well




124        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


pleased. But some foolish and ignorant Scotchmen were moved to anger by a little unpalatable
truth which was mingled with much eulogy, and
assailed him whom they chose to consider as
the enemy of their country with libels much more
dishonorable to their country than anything that
he had ever said or written. They published paragraphs in the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny pamphlets, five- shilling books.
One scribbler abused Johnson for being bleareyed; another for being a pensioner; a third informed the world that one of the doctor's uncles
had been convicted of felony in Scotland, and
had found that there was in that country one
tree capable of supporting the weight of an Englishman. Macpherson, whose " Fingal" had been
proved in the " Journey " to be an impudent
forgery, threatened to take vengeance with a
cane.  The only effect of this threat was that
Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery in the
most contemptuous terms, and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel, which, if the impostor had not been too wise to encounter it,
would assuredly have descended upon him, to
borrovw the sublime language of his own epic
poem, " like a hammer on the red son of the furnace."
Of other assailants Johnson took no notice
whatever. He had early resolved never to be
drawn into controversy; and he adhered to his
resolution with a steadfastness which is the more
extraordinary because he was, both intellectually




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


125


and morally, of the stuff of which controversialists are made. In conversation he was a singularly eager, acute, and pertinacious disputant.
When at a loss for good reasons, he had recourse
to sophistry; and when heated by altercation, he
made unsparing use of sarcasm and invective.
But when he took his pen in his hand, his whole
character seemed to be changed. A hundred bad
writers misrepresented him and reviled him; but
not one of the hundred could boast of having
been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or
even of a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNichols, and Hendersons did their best to annoy
him, in the hope that he would give them importance by answering them. But the reader will in
vain search his works for any allusion to Kenrick or Campbell, to MacNichol or Henderson.
One Scotchman, bent on vindicating the fame of
Scotch learning, defied him to the combat in a
detestable Latin hexameter:
"M axime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecnm."
But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He
had learned, both from his own observation and
from literary history, in which he was deeply
read, that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about
them, but by what is written in them; and that
an author whose works are likely to live is very
unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors
whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock, which could




126        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


be kept up only by being beaten back, as well
as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if
there were only one battledore. No saying was
oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm
of Bentley, that no man was ever written down
but by himself.
Unhappily, a few months after the appearance
of the "Journey to the Hebrides," Johnson did
what none of his envious assailants could have
done, and, to a certain extent, succeeded in writing himself down. The disputes between England and her American colonies had reached a
point at which no amicable adjustment was possible. Civil war was evidently impending; and
the ministers seem to have thought that the eloquence of Johnson might, with advantage, be employed to inflame the nation against the opposition here, and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic. He had already written two or three
tracts in defense of the foreign and domestic policy of the Government; and those tracts, though
hardly worthy of him, were much superior to the
crowd of pamphlets which lay on the counters of
Almon and Stockdale. But his " axation No
Tyranny" was a pitiable failure. The very title
was a silly phrase, which can have been recommended to his choice by nothing but a jingling
alliteration which he ought to have despised.
The arguments were such as boys use in debating
societies. The pleasantry was as awkward as
the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even Boswell
was forced to own that in this unfortunate piece




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


127


he could detect no trace of his master's powers.
The general opinion was that the strong faculties
which had produced the "Dictionary" and The
Rambler were beginning to feel the effect of time
and of disease, and that the old man would best
consult his credit by writing no more.
But this was a great mistake. Johnson had
failed, not because his mind was less vigorous
than when he wrote " Rasselas " in the evenings
of a week, but because he had foolishly chosen,
or suffered others to choose for him, a subject
such as he would at no time have been competent to treat. He was in no sense a statesman.
He never willingly read, or thought, or talked
about affairs of State. He loved biography, literary history, the history of manners; but political history was positively distasteful to him.
The question at issue between the colonies and
the mother-country was a question about which
he had really nothing to say. He failed, therefore, as the greatest men must fail when they attempt to do that for which they are unfit; as
Burke would have failed if Burke had tried to
write comedies like those of Sheridan; as Reynolds would have failed if Reynolds had tried to
paint landscapes like those of Wilson. Happily,
Johnson soon had an opportunity of proving most
signally that his failure was not to be ascribed to
intellectual decay.
On Easter-eve, 11777, some persons, deputed by
a meeting which consisted of forty of the first
booksellers in London, called upon him. Though




128         SAMUEL JOHINSON.


hl had some scruples about doing business at
that season, he received his visitors with much
civility. They came to inform him that a new
edition of the English poets, from Cowley downward, was in contemplation, and to ask him to
furnish short biographical prefaces. Ile readily
undertook the task, a task for which he was preeminently qualified. His knowledge of the literary history of England since the Restoration was
unrivalled. That knowledge he had derived partly from books, and partly from sources which
had long been closed; from old Grub Street traditions; from the talk of forgotten poetasters
and pamphleteers who had long been lying in
parish vaults; from the recoilections of such men
as Gilbert Walmesley, who had conversed with
the wits of Button; Cibber, who had mutilated
the plays of two generations of dramatists; Orrery, who had been admitted to the society of
Swift; and Savage, who had rendered services of
no very honorable kind to Pope. The biographer,
therefore, sat down to his task with a mind full
of matter. He had at first intended to give only
a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four
or five pages to the greatest name. But the flood
of anecdote and criticism overflowed the narrow
channel. The work, which was originally meant
to consist only of a few sheets, swelled into ten
volumes-small volumes, it is true, and not closely printed. The first four appeared in 1779, the
remaining six in 1781.
The " Lives of the Poets " are, on the whole, the




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


129


best of Johnson's works. The narratives are as
entertaining as any novel. The remarks on life
and on human nature are eminently shrewd and
profound. The criticisms are often excellent,
and, even when grossly and provokingly unjust,
well deserve to be studied; for, however erroneous they may be, they are never silly. They
are the judgments of a mind trammelled by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but vigorous and
acute. They therefore generally contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be separated from the alloy; and, at the very worst, they
mean something, a praise to which much of what
is called criticism in our time has no pretensions.
" Savage's Life " Johnson reprinted nearly as it
had appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading
that life, will turn to the other lives, will be struck
by the difference of style. Since Johnson had been
at ease in his circumstances, he had written little
and had talked much. When, therefore, he, after
the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had contracted while he was in the
constant habit of elaborate composition was less
perceptible than formerly; and his diction frequently had a colloquial ease which it had formerly wanted. The improvement may be discerned by a skilful critic in the " Journey to the
Hebrides," and in the "Lives of the Poets" is
so obvious that it cannot escape the notice of the
most careless reader.
Among the " Lives " the best are perhaps those
9




130        SAMUEL JOHNSON.


of Cowley, Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is,
beyond all doubt, that of Gray.
This great work at once became popular.
There was, indeed, much just and much unjust
censure; but even those who were loudest in
blame were attracted by the book in spite of
themselves. Malone computed the gains of the
publishers at five or six thousand pounds. But
the writer was very poorly remunerated. Intending at first to write very short prefaces, he had
stipulated for only two hundred guineas. The
booksellers, when they saw how far his performance had surpassed his promise, added only another hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he did
not despise, or affect to despise, money, and though
his strong sense and long experience ought to
have qualified him to protect his own interests,
seems to have been singularly unskilful and unlucky in his literary bargains. He was generally
reputed the first English writer of his time. Yet
several writers of his time sold their copyrights
for sums such as he never ventured to ask. To
give a single instance, Robertson received four
thousand five hundred pounds for the " History
of Charles the Fifth;" and it is no disrespect to
the memory of Robertson to say that the " History of Charles the Fifth" is both a less valuable
and less amusing book than the " Lives of the
Poets."
Johnson was now in his seventy-second year.
The infirmities of age were coming fast upon
him. That inevitable event, of which he never




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


131


thought without horror, was brought near to him,
and his whole life was darkened by the shadow
of death. He had often to pay the cruel price
of longevity. Every year he lost what could never be replaced. The strange dependents to whom
he had given shelter, and to whom, in spite of
their faults, he was strongly attached by habit,
dropped off one by one; and, in the silence of
his home, he regretted even the noise of their
scolding-matches. The kind and generous Thrale
was no more; and it would have been well if his
wife had been laid beside him. But she survived
to be the laughing-stock of those who had envied
her, and to draw from the eyes of the old man
who had loved her beyond anything in the world,
tears far more bitter than he would have shed
over her grave. With some estimable and many
agreeable qualities, she was not made to be independent. The control of a mind more steadfast
than her own was necessary to her respectability.
While she was restrained by her husband, a man
of sense and firmness, indulgent to her taste in
trifles, but always the undisputed master of his
house, her worst offenses had been impertinent
jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettishness
ending in sunny good-humor. But he was gone;
and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with
strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment. She soon fell in love with a music-master
from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could
discover anything to admire. Her pride, and
perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard




132       SAMUEL JOHNSON.


against this degrading passion. But the struggle irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and
at length endangered her health. Conscious that
her choice was one which Johnson could not approve, she became desirous to escape from his
inspection. Her manner toward him changed.
She was sometimes cold and sometimes petulant.
She did not conceal her joy when he left Streatham: she never pressed him to return; and if
he came unbidden, she received him in a manner which convinced him that he was no longer
a welcome guest. He took tile very intelligible
hints which she gave. He read, for the last
time, a chapter of the Greek Testament in the
library which had been formed by himself. In
a solemn and tender prayer he commended the
house and its inmates to the Divine protection,
and, with emotions which choked his voice and
convulsed his powerful frame, left forever that
beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house
behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil days
which still remained to him were to run out.
Here, in June, 1783, he had a paralytic stroke,
from which, however, he recovered, and which
does not appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties. But other maladies came thick
upon him. His asthma tormented him day and
night. Dropsical symptoms made their appearance. While sinking under a complication of
diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen
years of his life had married an Italian fiddler;




SAMUEL JOHNSON.


133


that all London was crying shame upon her;
and that the newspapers and magazines were
filled with allusions to the Ephesian matron and
the two pictures in "Hamlet." He vehemently
said that he would try to forget her existence.
He never uttered her name. Every memorial of
her which met his eye he flung into the fire. She,
meanwhile, fled from the laughter and hisses of
her countrymen and countrywomen to a land
where she was unknown, hastened across Mont
Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan,
that the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated had ceased to exist.
He had, in spite of much mental and much
bodily affliction, clung vehemently to life. The
feeling described in that fine but gloomy paper
which closes the series of his Idlers seemed to
grow stronger in him as his last hour drew near.
He fancied that he should be able to draw his
breath more easily in a Southern climate, and
would probably have set out for Rome and Naples but for his fear of the expense of the journey. That expense, indeed, he had the means of
defraying; for he had laid up about two thousand
pounds, the fruit of labors which had made the
fortune of several publishers. But he was unwilling to break in upon this hoard, and he seems
to have wished even to keep its existence a secret.
Some of his friends hoped that the Government
might be induced to increase his pension to six
hundred pounds a year, but this hope was disap



134         SAMUEL JOHNSON.
pointed, and he resolved to stand one English
winter more. This winter was his last. His
legs grew weaker; his breath grew shorter; the
fatal water gathered fast, in spite of incisions
which he, courageous against pain, but timid
against death, urged his surgeons to make deeper and deeper. Though the tender care which
had mitigated his sufferings during months of
sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not
left desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, and refused to accept fees
from him. Burke parted from him with deep
emotion. Windham sat much in the sick-room,
arranged the pillows, and sent his own servant
to watch at night by the bed. Frances Burney,
whom the old man had cherished with fatherly
kindness, stood weeping at the door; while Langton, whose piety eminently qualified him to be an
adviser and comforter at such a time, received
the last pressure of his friend's hand within.
When at length the moment, dreaded through
so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed
away from Johnson's mind. His temper became
unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to think
with terror of death, and of that which lies beyond death; and he spoke much of the mercy of
God, and of the propitiation of Christ. In this
serene frame of mind he died on the 13th of December, 1784. He was laid, a week later, in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom
he had been the historian-Cowley and Denham,
Dryden and Congreve, Gay, Prior, and Addison.




SAMUEL JOHNSON.           135
Since his death, the popularity of his worksthe "Lives of the Poets," and, perhaps, the
"Vanity of Human Wishes," excepted-has
greatly diminished. His "Dictionary" has been
altered by edfors till it can scarcely be called
his. An allusion to his Rambler or his Idler is
not readily apprehended in literary circles. The
fame even of " Rasselas" has grown somewhat
dim. But though the celebrity of the writings
may have declined, the celebrity of the writer,
strange to say, is as great as ever. Boswell's
book has done for him more than the best of
his own books could do. The memory of other
authors is kept alive by their works. But the
memory of Johnson keeps many of his works
alive. The old philosopher is still among us in
the brown coat with the metal buttons and the
shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers,
tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his
tea in oceans. No human being who has been
more than seventy years in the grave is so well
known to us. And it is but just to say that our
intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and ofihis terner serves onlv ostrengten
ouli conviction that he was both a greai am a
goodman............
THE END.




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