BIOGRAPHICAL AND GENERAL

70. Charles Churchill, ‘Pomposo’ in The Ghost

1762

Text from third edition of Book II, second edition of Book III; see Poetical Works, ed. D.Grant, 1956, 97–8, 126–7.
Book II containing the first portrait of Johnson as ‘Pomposo’ appeared in March 1762. Before Book III, containing the second, was published in October 1762, Churchill had struck up his friendship with John Wilkes and Johnson had accepted a royal pension. See Introduction, pp. 5, 19.

POMPOSO (insolent and loud,
Vain idol of a scribbling crowd,
Whose very name inspires an awe,
Whose ev’ry word is Sense and Law,
For what his Greatness hath decreed,
Like Laws of PERSIA and of MEDE,
Sacred thro’ all the realm of Wit,
Must never of Repeal admit;
Who, cursing flatt’ry, is the tool
Of ev’ry fawning flatt’ring fool;
Who Wit with jealous eye surveys,
And sickens at another’s praise;
Who, proudly seiz’d of Learning’s throne,
Now damns all Learning but his own;
Who scorns those common wares to trade in,
Reas’ning, Convincing, and Persuading,
But makes each Sentence current pass
With Puppy, Coxcomb, Scoundrel, Ass;
For ’tis with him a certain rule,
The Folly’s prov’d, when he calls Fool;
Who, to increase his native strength,
Draws words, six syllables in length,
With which, assisted with a frown
By way of Club, he knocks us down;
Who ’bove the Vulgar dares to rise,
And sense of Decency defies,
For this same Decency is made
Only for Bunglers in the trade;
And, like the Cobweb Laws, is still
Broke thro’ by Great ones when they will) —
POMPOSO, with strong sense supplied,
Supported, and confirm’d by Pride,
His Comrades’ terrors to beguile,
Grinn’d horribly a ghastly smile:¹
Features so horrid, were it light,
Would put the Devil himself to flight….
Horrid, unwieldy, without Form,
Savage, as OCEAN in a Storm,
Of size prodigious, in the rear,
That Post of Honour, should appear
POMPOSO; Fame around should tell
How he a slave to int’rest fell,
How, for Integrity renown’d,
Which Booksellers have often found,
He for Subscribers baits his hook,
And takes their cash—but where’s the Book?²
No matter where—Wise Fear, we know,
Forbids the robbing of a Foe,
But what, to serve our private ends,
Forbids the cheating of our Friends?
No Man alive, who would not swear
All’s safe, and therefore honest there.
For spite of all the learned say,
If we to Truth attention pay,
The word Dishonesty is meant
For nothing else but Punishment.

Fame too should tell, nor heed the threat
Of Rogues, who Brother Rogues abet,
Nor tremble at the terrors hung
Aloft, to make her hold her tongue,
How to all Principles untrue,
Nor fix’d to old Friends, nor to New,
He damns the Pension which he takes,
And loves the STUART he forsakes.³
NATURE (who justly regular
Is very seldom known to err,
But now and then in sportive mood,
As some rude wits have understood,
Or through much work requir’d in haste,
Is with a random stroke disgrac’d)
POMPOSO form’d on doubtful plan,
Not quite a Beast, nor quite a Man,
Like—God knows what—for never yet
Could the most subtle human Wit,
Find out a Monster, which might be
The Shadow of a Simile.

71. John Wilkes, North Briton Nos. XI and XII

5–12 August 1762

Text from North Briton, second edition, 1771, 34–5.
Wilkes (1727–97), then M.P. for Aylesbury, and Churchill produced the first issue of the North Briton on 5 June 1762 to attack the new ministry of George III’s favourite, the Earl of Bute. Wilkes was responsible for Nos. xi and xii. See Introduction, p. 5.

I have only two words to settle with the BRITON¹ this week. They are glorification and vouchsafement. He says that I have twice twitted him in the teeth (a most elegant phrase) with the word GLORIFICATION printed in Italics. He affirms that it is an English word, to be found in all the common dictionaries, and to be met with more than once in Scripture. I never denied that it was an English word, but I ridiculed it as a cant word of the illiberal and illiterate Scottish Presbyterians; and it found favour among their long-winded divines, only because it was so long, and mouthed so well. I will say, however, that I have not met with it in Scripture, and I am satisfied that he cannot name one text where it is to be found.

Now for vouchsafement. He says, I could wish he would settle the authenticity of the word VOUCHSAFEMENTS, used as a substantive, a word which I do not remember to have seen in any dictionary or writer of reputation. What so ignorant a fellow has seen, I do not know; but I know he may see the word vouchsafement, as a substantive too, in Johnson’s English Dictionary, and the great Boyle quoted as the authority for it. I hope Johnson is a writer of reputation, because as a writer he has just got a pension of 300l. per ann. I hope too that he is become a friend to this constitution and the family on the throne, now he is thus nobly provided for: but I know he has much to unwrite, more to unsay, before he will be forgiven by the true friends of the present illustrious family, for what he has been writing and saying for many years. As to the Briton, he

is so ignorant and foolish, I shall for the future vouchsafe him a very small share of my attention; for as every body has left off reading, it is high time that I should leave off answering him.

Numb. XII. Saturday, August 12, 1762.

Pensions, which reason to the worthy gave,

Add fresh dishonour to the fool and knave.

ANON.

TO THE NORTH BRITON.

SIR,

I do not know in any controversy so sure a method of coming at truth, which is always the pretence, though so seldom the real object of modern enquiries, as a just and strict definition of all the words and phrases of any importance, which are afterwards to be in use. This practice is universal, excepting only in theological and political controversy. If I take up a book of mathematics, the writer defines in the very first page, what a triangle, a circle, or a trapezium is; and then argues closely from the precise and accurate ideas of each, which the author and reader have previously settled. A book of fortification as regularly sets out with explaining to me what a bastion, a demi-lune, or a hornwork is. I have read much religious controversy; for, unhappily, there is as little agreement between the ministers of the gospel, as between the ministers of state. I do not, however, remember to have found in any of our divines a satisfactory definition of faith, free-will, or predestination. We are not yet arrived at the same accuracy, with respect to the meaning of these words, as of a circle or a square. The same remark will hold true in political controversy. Who has with any precision defined the words faction or patriot? The word favourite alone we have of late pretty fully understood the force of, both from the definitions of the MONITOR² and of the NORTH BRITON: yet give me leave to say, Sir, that neither of you have reached the force and closeness of expression in the great lexicographer, Mr. JOHNSON, who defines a favourite to be a mean wretch, whose whole business is by any means to please. But whether the word has been well defined or not, in former periods of the English history, the effect of it has been very fully felt, and even at this hour it is never uttered without the most unjust passion and ill-founded resent-

ment, as if the nation was now smarting from the sad consequences of its reality, and exertion in pride and insolence.

The word pension likewise has of late much puzzled our politicians. I do not recollect that any one of them has ventured at a definition of it. Mr. Johnson, as he is now a pensioner, one should naturally have recourse to, for the truest literary information on this subject. His definition then of a pension is, an allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country. And under the word pensioner we read, 1. One who is supported by an allowance paid at the will of another: a dependant. 2. A slave of state, hired by a stipend to obey his master. But with submission to this great prodigy of learning, I should think both definitions very erroneous. Is the said Mr. Johnson a dependant? Or is he a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey his master? There is according to him, no alternative. Is his pension, understood to be pay given him as state hireling for treason to his country? Whoever gave it him, must then have read London, a Poem, &c. &c. and must have mistaken all his distant hints and dark allusions. As Mr. Johnson therefore has, I think, failed in this account, may I, after so great an authority, venture at a short definition of so intricate a word? A pension then I would call a gratuity during the pleasure of the Prince for services performed, or expected to be performed, to himself or to the state. Let us consider the celebrated Mr. Johnson and a few other late pensioners, in this light.

Mr. Johnson’s many writings in the cause of liberty, his steady attachment to the present Royal Family, his gentleman-like compliments to his Majesty’s grandfather, and his decent treatment of the parliament, intitle him to a share of the royal bounty. It is a matter of astonishment that no notice has till now been taken of him by government for some of the most extraordinary productions, which appeared with the name of Samuel Johnson; a name sacred to George and Liberty. No man, who has read only one poem of his, London, but must congratulate the good sense and discerning spirit of the minister, who bestows such a part of the public treasure on this distinguished friend of the public, of his master’s family, and of the constitution of this country. The rewards are now most judiciously given to those who have supported, not to those who have all their lives written with bitterness, and harangued with virulence, against the government. With all due deference to the first minister’s discernment, I rather think that Mr. Johnson (as merit of this kind must now be rewarded) might have been better provided for in another way: I mean at the board of Excise. I am desirous of seeing him one of the commissioners, if not at the head of that board, that the gentlemen there may cease to be wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid. His definition of excise is, that it is a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid. Is the excise still on the same footing? I wish to know who hires these wretches, the commissioners of excise. Mr. Johnson says, those to whom excise is paid! If that is indeed the case, I am not at a loss to find out to whom excise is paid, nor who of consequence, in Mr. Johnson’s idea, hires these wretches.

72. William Blake, ‘An Island in the Moon’

c. 1784

Text from Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 1966, 54.
The speakers in this brief extract from Blake’s rombustious satire are ‘Suction the Epicurean’ (probably representing his favourite brother Robert) and ‘Quid the Cynic’ (the poet himself). See Introduction, p. 32.

‘I say, this evening we’ll all get drunk—I say—dash! —an Anthem, an Anthem!’ said Suction.

‘Lo the Bat with Leathern wing¹

Winking & blinking,

Winking & blinking,

Winking & blinking,

Like Doctor Johnson/

Quid. ‘Oho’, said Dr. Johnson

To Scipio Africanus,

‘If you don’t own me a Philosopher,

I’ll kick your Roman Anus.’

Suction. ‘Aha’, To Dr. Johnson

Said Scipio Africanus,

‘Lift up my Roman Petticoat

And kiss my Roman Anus.’

73. John Courtenay, A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson LL.D.

1786

Extracts from pp. 10–27.
Courtenay (1741–1816), M.P. for Tamworth and well known in the Commons for his ironic wit, was a member of the ‘Literary Club’ and one to whom Boswell turned for advice about his Life of Johnson (see Life, iv. 542, 557). Boswell quotes from the Poetical Review (see No. 75). Courtenay’s poem is liberally provided with notes. See Introduction, pp. 18, 31.

[illustrates the strange paradoxes in Johnson’s character.]

But who to blaze his frailties feels delight,
When the great Author rises to our sight?
When the pure tenour of his life we view,
Himself the bright exemplar that he drew?
Whose works console the good, instruct the wise,
And teach the soul to claim her kindred skies.
By grateful bards his name be ever sung,
Whose sterling touch has fix’d the English tongue!
Fortune’s dire weight, the patron’s cold disdain,
‘Shook off, like dew-drops from the lion’s mane;’*

Unknown, unaided, in a friendless state,
Without one smile of favour from the great;
The bulky tome his curious care refines,
Till the great work in full perfection shines:
His wide research and patient skill displays
What scarce was sketch’d in ANNA’S golden days;
What only learning’s aggregated toil
Slowly accomplish’d in each foreign soil.
Yet to the mine though the rich coin he trace,
No current marks his early essays grace;
For in each page we find a massy store
Of English bullion mix’d with Latian ore:
In solemn pomp, with pedantry combin’d,
He vents the morbid sadness of his mind;
In scientifick phrase affects to smile,
Form’d on Brown’s turgid Latin-English style;*
Where oft the abstract in stiff state presides,
And measur’d numbers, measur’d periods guides:
But all propriety his Ramblers mock,
When Betty prates from Newton and from Locke;
When no diversity we trace between
The lofty moralist and gay fifteen.† —
Yet genius still breaks through the encumbering phrase;
His taste we censure, but the work we praise:
There learning beams with fancy’s brilliant dyes,
Vivid as lights that gild the northern skies;
Man’s complex heart he bares to open day,
Clear as the prism unfolds the blended ray:
The picture from his mind assumes its hue,
The shade’s too dark, but the design still true.
Though Johnson’s merits thus I freely scan,
And paint the foibles of this wond’rous man;
Yet can I coolly read, and not admire,

When Learning, Wit and Poetry conspire
To shed a radiance o’er his moral page,
And spread truth’s sacred light to many an age:
For all his works with innate lustre shine,
Strength all his own, and energy divine:
While through life’s maze he darts his piercing view,
His mind expansive to the object grew.
In judgment keen he acts the critick’s part,
By reason proves the feelings of the heart;
In thought profound, in nature’s study wise,
Shews from what source our fine sensations rise;
With truth, precision, fancy’s claims defines,
And throws new splendour o’er the poet’s lines.*
When specious sophists with presumption scan
The source of evil, hidden still from man;†
Revive Arabian tales,‡ and vainly hope
To rival St. John, and his scholar, Pope;§
Though metaphysicks spread the gloom of night,
By reason’s star he guides our aching sight;
The bounds of knowledge marks; and points the way
To pathless wastes, where wilder’d sages stray;
Where, like a farthing linkboy, J[enyn]s stands,
And the dim torch drops from his feeble hands.
Impressive truth, in splendid fiction drest,||
Checks the vain wish, and calms the troubled breast;
O’er the dark mind a light celestial throws,
And sooths the angry passions to repose:
As oil effus’d illumes and smooths the deep,
When round the bark the swelling surges sweep.—
With various stores of erudition fraught,
The lively image, the deep-searching thought,
Slept in repose; —but when the moment press’d,

The bright ideas stood at once confess’d;
Instant his genius sped its vigorous rays,
And o’er the letter’d world diffus’d a blaze:
As womb’d with fire the cloud electrick flies,
And calmly o’er the horizon seems to rise;
Touch’d by the pointed steel, the lightning flows,
And all the expanse with rich effulgence glows.
Soft-ey’d compassion with a look benign,
His fervent vows he offer’d at thy shrine;
To guilt, to woe, the sacred debt was paid,
And helpless females bless’d his pious aid;
Snatch’d from disease, and want’s abandon’d crew,
Despair and anguish from their victims flew:
Hope’s soothing balm into their bosoms stole,
And tears of penitence restor’d the soul.
But hark, he sings! the strain ev’n Pope admires;
Indignant Virtue her own bard inspires;
Sublime as Juvenal, he pours his lays,
And with the Roman shares congenial praise:—
In glowing numbers now he fires the age,
And Shakspeare’s sun relumes the clouded stage.*
So full his mind with images was fraught,
The rapid strains scarce claim’d a second thought;
And with like ease his vivid lines assume
The garb and dignity of ancient Rome.—
Let college versemen flat conceits express,
Trick’d out in splendid shreds of Virgil’s dress;
From playful Ovid cull the tinsel phrase,
And vapid notions hitch in pilfer’d lays;
Then with mosaick art the piece combine,
And boast the glitter of each dulcet line:
Johnson adventur’d boldly to transfuse
His vigorous sense into the Latian muse;
Aspir’d to shine by unreflected light,
And with a Roman’s ardour think and write.
He felt the tuneful Nine his breast inspire,
And, like a master, wak’d the soothing lyre:
Horatian strains a grateful heart proclaim,

While Sky’s wild rocks resound his Thralia’s name.¹ —
Hesperia’s plant, in some less skillful hands,
To bloom a while, factitious heat demands;
Though glowing Maro a faint warmth supplies,
The sickly blossom in the hot-house dies:
By Johnson’s genial culture, art, and toil,
Its root strikes deep, and owns the fost’ring soil;
Imbibes our sun through all its swelling veins,
And grows a native of Britannia’s plains.
How few distinguish’d of the studious train
At the gay board their empire can maintain!
In their own books intomb’d their wisdom lies;
Too dull for talk, their slow conceptions rise:
Yet the mute author, of his writings proud,
For wit unshewn claims homage from the crowd;
As thread-bare misers, by mean avarice school’d,
Expect obeisance from their hidden gold.—
In converse quick, impetuous Johnson press’d
His weighty logick, or sarcastick jest:
Strong in the chace, and nimble in the turns,
For victory still his fervid spirit burns;
Subtle when wrong, invincible when right,
Arm’d at all points, and glorying in his might,
Gladiator-like, he traverses the field,
And strength and skill compel the foe to yield.—
Yet have I seen him, with a milder air,
Encircled by the witty and the fair,
Ev’n in old age with placid mien rejoice
At beauty’s smile, and beauty’s flattering voice.—
With Reynolds’ pencil, vivid, bold, and true,
So fervent Boswell gives him to our view.
In every trait we see his mind expand;
The master rises by the pupil’s hand;
We love the writer, praise his happy vein,
Grac’d with the naiveté of the sage Montaigne.
Hence not alone are brighter parts display’d,
But ev’n the specks of character portray’d:
We see the Rambler with fastidious smile

Mark the lone tree, and note the heath-clad isle;
But when the heroick tale of Flora charms,*
Deck’d in a kilt, he wields a chieftain’s arms:
The tuneful piper sounds a martial strain,
And Samuel sings, ‘The King shall have his ain’:
Two Georges in his loyal zeal are slur’d,
A gracious pension only saves the third!—
By Nature’s gifts ordain’d mankind to rule,
He, like a Titian, form’d his brilliant school;
And taught congenial spirits to excel,
While from his lips impressive wisdom fell.
Our boasted GOLDSMITH felt the sovereign sway;
To him we owe his sweet yet nervous lay.
To Fame’s proud cliff he bade our Raphael rise;
Hence REYNOLDS’ pen with REYNOLDS’ pencil vyes.
With Johnson’s flame melodious BURNEY glows,²
While the grand strain in smoother cadence flows.
And thou, MALONE,³ to critick learning dear,
Correct and elegant, refin’d, though clear,
By studying him, first form’d that classick taste,
Which high in Shakspeare’s fane thy statue plac’d.
Near Johnson STEEVENS⁴ stands, on scenick ground,
Acute, laborious, fertile, and profound.
Ingenious HAWKESWORTH⁵ to this school we owe,
And scarce the pupil from the tutor know.
Here early parts accomplish’d JONES⁶ sublimes,
And science blends with Asia’s lofty rhimes:
Harmonious JONES! who in his splendid strains
Sings Camdeo’s sports, on Agra’s flowery plains;
In Hindu fictions while we fondly trace
Love and the Muses, deck’d with Attick grace.
Amid these names can BOSWELL be forgot,

Scarce by North Britons now esteem’d a Scot?
Who to the sage devoted from his youth,
Imbib’d from him the sacred love of truth;
The keen research, the exercise of mind,
And that best art, the art to know mankind.—
Nor was his energy confin’d alone
To friends around his philosophick throne;
Its influence wide improv’d our letter’d isle,
And lucid vigour mark’d the general style:
As Nile’s proud waves, swol’n from their oozy bed,
First o’er the neighbouring meads majestick spread;
Till gathering force, they more and more expand,
And with new virtue fertilise the land.
Thus sings the Muse, to Johnson’s memory just,
And scatters praise and censure o’er his dust;
For through each checker’d scene a contrast ran,
Too sad a proof, how great, how weak is man!
Though o’er his passions conscience held the rein,
He shook at dismal phantoms of the brain:
A boundless faith that noble mind debas’d,
By piercing wit, energick reason grac’d:
A generous Briton, yet he seem’d to hope
For James’s grandson, and for James’s Pope:
Though proudly splenetick, yet idly vain,
Accepted flattery, and dealt disdain.—
E’en shades like these, to brilliancy ally’d,
May comfort fools, and curb the Sage’s pride.
Yet Learning’s sons, who o’er his foibles mourn,
To latest time shall fondly view his urn;
And wond’ring praise, to human frailties blind,
Talents and virtues of the brightest kind;
Revere the man, with various knowledge stor’d,
Who science, arts, and life’s whole scheme explor’d;
Who firmly scorn’d, when in a lowly state,
To flatter vice, or court the vain and great;*
Whose heart still felt a sympathetick glow,
Prompt to relieve man’s variegated woe;
Who even shar’d his talents with his friends;

By noble means who aim’d at noble ends;*
Whose ardent hope, intensely fixed on high,
Saw future bliss with intellectual eye.
Still in his breast Religion held her sway,
Disclosing visions of celestial day;
And gave his soul, amidst this world of strife,
The blest reversion of eternal life:
By this dispell’d, each doubt and horrour flies,
And calm at length in holy peace he dies.
The sculptur’d trophy, and imperial bust,
That proudly rise around his hallow’d dust,
Shall mould’ring fall, by Time’s slow hand decay’d,
But the bright meed of virtue ne’er shall fade.
Exulting Genius stamps his sacred name,
Enroll’d for ever in the dome of Fame.

74. Joseph Towers, An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson

1786

Extracts from the Essay, 6–8, 40–59, 101–2, 114–24.
See headnote to No. 41; see Introduction, pp. 32–3.

It was very pardonable in Mr. Tyers,¹ and the other zealous friends of Dr. Johnson, to speak somewhat too highly of his character. The warmth of attachment to the memory of a deceased friend, was a sufficient apology for their conduct. But positions must not too hastily be admitted, which are not supported by fact, and which are not consistent with a just regard

to the honour of human nature. It seems also injurious to the interests of religion and virtue, to represent Dr. Johnson as a pattern of human excellence. Better models might undoubtedly be pointed out. He had great virtues, but he had also too many striking and apparent faults, to be considered as a proper object of indiscriminate imitation. Highly as he thought of himself, his attachment to the interests of virtue was too sincere to have suffered him to countenance such an opinion. When, in his last illness, he said to his surrounding friends, ‘Don’t live such a life as I have done,’² he had no idea of being considered as a man of exemplary piety and virtue. There have been many men, who were more uniformly pious, and more uniformly benevolent, than Dr. Johnson, and who had neither his arrogance, nor his bigotry; and such men, in a moral and religious view, were superior characters. There were such men before the death of this celebrated writer, and there can be no reasonable doubt but that such men are yet remaining.

Having made these remarks, I think it here proper to observe, that I am totally devoid of the least inclination to degrade injuriously the character of Dr. Johnson; and that I only wish to see it equitably and accurately ascertained, in such a manner as shall do justice to his real excellencies, without injury to the interests either of virtue or of truth.

[comments follow on all Johnson’s major writings; it is possible only to give a selection.]

His History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, which was published in 1758, is elegantly written, and contains striking remarks upon the vanity of human pursuits, and the unsatisfactory nature of human enjoyments; together with a variety of acute observations on men and manners. But the representations given in it of human life are extremely gloomy, and more gloomy than are warranted by truth or reason. The character of Imlac is well sustained, and his enumeration of the qualifications of a poet is highly eloquent; but in some of the conversations between Rasselas and Nekayah, the princess is made too profound a philosopher. The character of the Arabian chief, by whom Pekuah was captured, is well delineated; and the disquisition concerning marriage is amusing and instructive. It is observable, that in this work the reality of apparitions is strongly maintained; and the remarks which it contains on disorders of the intellect, and the dangerous prevalence of imagination, seem to have taken their rise from those fears of some derangement of understanding,

and that morbid melancholy, with which Johnson was not unfrequently afflicted.

The Idler, which was finished in the year 1760, has, perhaps, hardly yet obtained the reputation which it deserves. It is not equal to the Rambler; but it is, upon the whole, a very pleasing collection of essays, and there are some papers in it of great excellence. Among the best papers in the Idler are those on the robbery of time, on the retirement of Drugget, on the imprisonment of debtors, on the uncertainty of friendship, admonitions on the flight of time, the journey of Will Marvel, on the necessity of self-denial, on the vanity of riches, on the decline of reputation, on the progress of arts and language, on the fate of posthumous works, the history of translations, on the sufficiency of the English language, and on the obstructions of learning.* Some of the characters in other papers are also well drawn; and it is a circumstance rather curious, that the character of SOBER, in the 31st number, should have been intended by Johnson, as Mrs. Piozzi informs us it was,³ as a satirical description of himself.

His edition of SHAKESPEARE was published in the year 1765; it had been long delayed; and, perhaps, at last, did not fully answer the expectations of the public; but many of his notes are valuable, and the short strictures at the end of the several plays are written with his usual vigour. His preface is also a composition of great merit; though there are parts of it which have somewhat of affectation, and somewhat of inconsistency; but it contains many fine passages; and some of his remarks respecting the unities of time and place are original, acute, and rational. In characterizing the preceding commentators of our great dramatic poet, he has treated Theobald with too much severity, and appears not to have done him justice as an editor of Shakespeare; but he is partial to Warburton, and speaks of the opponents of that prelate with a degree of contempt which they certainly did not deserve. Since the publication of Dr. Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare, our great dramatic poet has been farther elucidated, and his plays enriched with many valuable notes, by the successive labours of Mr. Steevens, Mr. Malone, Mr. Reed, and other gentlemen.

Of the POLITICAL WRITINGS of Dr. Johnson, it would be injurious to the interests of truth, and to the common rights of human nature, to speak in terms of much commendation, in any other view except as to their style. His False Alarm was published in 1770, and chiefly relates

to the proceedings respecting Mr. Wilkes in the case of the Middlesex election, and to the petitions and public meetings which were occasioned by that transaction. His Falkland’s Islands appeared the following year, and his Patriot in 1774. In the latter he ridiculed the pretensions to patriotism of the leaders of the popular party, opposed the claims of the colonies to be exempted from taxation by the British parliament, and defended the Quebec act.

In these political productions many positions are laid down, in admirable language, and in highly polished periods, which are inconsistent with the principles of the English constitution, and repugnant to the common rights of mankind. As a political writer, he makes much more use of his rhetoric than of his logic, and often gives his readers high sounding declamation instead of fair argument. And, indeed, in characterizing those who differ from him in sentiment, he seems sometimes to pay so little attention to truth, equity, or candour, that, in perusing his pieces, we are inclined readily to assent to a proposition of his own, that ‘there is no credit due to a rhetorician’s account either of good or evil.’⁴ However we may respect the memory of Johnson, and however unwilling we may be to speak of him with harshness, those who impartially peruse his political publications will be obliged to confess, that few party pamphlets have appeared in this country, which contain greater malignity of misrepresentation. Even Swift, who carried the rancour of party to a great height, hardly equalled the malignity of Johnson’s representations of those who differed from himself on political subjects. It seems difficult to suppose, that he could seriously believe many things that he has advanced, concerning those whose political sentiments were different from his own; and, if he did not, it is still more difficult to vindicate his conduct.

The petitions presented to the King about the year 1769, and in which many of the best and worthiest men in the kingdom undoubtedly concurred, are represented by Dr. Johnson as containing ‘the sense only of the profligate and dissolute.’⁵ And he was such an enemy to public assemblies of the people, and so little inquired whether what he advanced was truth in matters of this kind, that he maintained, that ‘meetings held for directing representatives are seldom attended but by the idle and the dissolute.’⁶ No man who had ever attended many meetings of that kind could be of this opinion; and next to a man’s advancing things which he knows to be false, is his asserting things which he cannot know to be true.

In 1775, he published his Taxation no Tyranny; an answer to the resolutions and address of the American congress. The style of this pamphlet must appear extraordinary to those who are acquainted with the termination of the great contest, which then subsisted between Great-Britain and the American colonies. The terms which he employs in speaking of the congress, of the people of America, and of their cause, are grossly indecent, and unworthy of a man of letters, a Christian or a philosopher. They reflect dishonour only on himself, and we are grieved that such sentiments should be couched in such language, and should proceed from such a man.

Dr. Johnson contended, that the parliament of Great-Britain had ‘a legal and constitutional power of laying upon the Americans any tax or impost, whether external or internal, upon the product of land, or the manufactures of industry, in the exigencies of war, or in the time of profound peace, for the defence of America, for the purpose of raising a revenue, or for any other end beneficial to the empire;’ and that they had ‘a right to bind them by statutes, and to bind them in all cases whatsoever.’⁷ Every impartial man is now convinced of the injustice and ridiculousness of these claims; and there are few who do not lament that any attempts were ever made to enforce them.

It must always be regretted, that a man of Johnson’s intellectual powers should have had so strong a propensity to defend arbitrary principles of government. But on this subject, the strength of his language was not more manifest than the weakness of his arguments. In apology for him, it may be admitted, that he was a Tory from principle, and that much of what he wrote was conformable to his real sentiments. But to defend all that was written by him, his warmest friends will find impossible. In all his political writings, the passages which are, perhaps, the most worthy of regard, and the best supported by principles of reason, are those in which he has introduced such arguments, as should prevent nations from being too ready to engage in war. The inhabitants of this country have always had too great a propensity of this kind; and it is on this subject only that I would recommend to them some attention to Dr. Johnson as a politician.

It was in the autumn of the year 1773, that he undertook his journey to the Hebrides, or Western islands of Scotland; of which he published an account in the year 1775. This is a very masterly performance; for, besides a very pleasing account of his journey, it also contains a variety of acute observations on human life, and many curious incidental remarks

relative to the history of literature, with which Dr. Johnson was very intimately conversant. In this journey he was accompanied by Mr. Boswell; and the habitual good humour of this gentleman, his vivacity, his love of literature, and his personal attachment to Johnson, together with his natural influence in Scotland, must have rendered him a very agreeable companion to him, during the course of his tour to the Hebrides. Of this journey Mr. Boswell has himself since published an account, which is highly entertaining, and which appears to contain a very natural, exact, and faithful representation, not only of the incidents which occurred during the tour, but also of the very singular manners of his learned and celebrated friend.

In 1779, when he was seventy years of age, he published his Lives of the Poets, which seem to have been the most popular of all his productions. These, considered as compositions, and as abounding with strong and acute remarks, and with many very fine, and some even sublime passages, have unquestionably great merit; but if they be regarded merely as containing narrations of the lives, delineations of the characters, and strictures on the works of the authors concerning whom he wrote, they are far from being always to be depended on; the characters are sometimes partial, and there is sometimes too much malignity of misrepresentation; to which, perhaps, may be added, no inconsiderable portion of erroneous criticism.

The first life which occurs in this collection is that of COWLEY, which is very favourably written, and contains an elaborate criticism on his works. The false taste, which so frequently appears in the productions of that poet, is treated by his biographer with sufficient indulgence; and we are apt to be somewhat surprized, that so fastidious a critic, as Johnson sometimes was, should descant so copiously on such petty conceits, as Cowley frequently exhibits. He is unjustly partial to Cowley in the preference which he gives to his Latin poetry over that of Milton; but his observations on the writings of the metaphysical poets are novel and ingenious.

The second life in this collection is that of WALLER, of whom Dr. Johnson says, that, in 1640, he ‘produced one of those noisy speeches which disaffection and discontent regularly dictate; a speech filled with hyperbolical complaints of imaginary grievances.’⁸ This noisy speech, as our author terms it, was dictated by good sense and real patriotism. The complaints in it were not hyperbolical, and the grievances that Waller enumerated were real, and not imaginary. The grievances of which he

complained were the encroachments of prerogative on the rights of the people, the imprisoning their persons without law, and the power assumed by the king of taxing his subjects, and seizing their property, without the authority of parliament; and the language of the complaints made by him on this subject was not too strong for the occasion. He afterwards made a speech in favour of episcopacy: but with this his biographer was better pleased, and speaks in terms of high commendation. The character of Waller by Clarendon is given by Johnson at full length: upon which it may not be improper to observe, that the noble historian’s account is in several particulars manifestly erroneous; and as it is said that Waller had some animosity against Clarendon, it seems equally apparent, that the latter wrote the character of the poet under the influence of sentiments of personal dislike.

In his life of MILTON, he has spoken in the highest terms of the abilities of that great poet, and has bestowed on his principal poetical compositions the most honourable encomiums: but he has very injuriously misrepresented his character and conduct as a man. He could not endure those high sentiments of liberty, which Milton was so ardently desirous to propagate. He viewed with aversion the man, who had dared publickly to defend the execution of King Charles the First. There is something curious, in tracing the conduct of Johnson with respect to Milton, and in observing the struggle which there was in his mind concerning him, resulting from his reverence for him as a poet, and his rooted dislike against him as a political writer. It can hardly be doubted, but that his aversion to Milton’s politics, was the cause of that alacrity, with which he joined with Lauder, in his infamous attack on our great epic poet, and which induced him to assist him in that transaction. But Johnson was unacquainted with the imposture; and, when it was discovered, urged Lauder to an open recantation. It is well known, that the forgeries of Lauder were completely detected by Dr. Douglas, and that by that ingenious and able writer Milton was sufficiently vindicated from the charge of plagiarism. But it is, perhaps, not generally known, that Lauder died, some years since, in very indigent circumstances, at Barbadoes.

It seems to have been by way of making some compensation to the memory of Milton, for the share he had in the attack of Lauder, that Johnson wrote the prologue that was spoken by Garrick, at Drury-lane theatre, in 1750, on the performance of the mask of Comus, for the benefit of Milton’s grand-daughter; and in which the following lines appear to refer to the detection of Lauder:

At length our mighty Bard’s victorious lays,
Fill the loud voice of universal praise,
And baffled spite, with hopeless anguish dumb,
Yields to renown the centuries to come.⁹

But many years after, when his Lives of the Poets appeared, his old dislike to Milton’s politics was again manifested; and we see strikingly exhibited, in his account of him, his reverence for his talents, and his aversion for his principles….

The principal fault of Johnson, as a biographical writer, seems to have been, too great a propensity to introduce injurious reflections against men of respectable character, and to state facts unfavourable to their memory, on slight and insufficient grounds. Biographical writers in general are charged with the contrary fault, too great a partiality in favour of the persons whose lives they undertake to relate. Impartiality should certainly be aimed at; and the truth should be given, when it can be obtained. But truth, at least the whole truth, is often not attainable; and, in doubtful cases, candour and equity seem to dictate, that it is best to err on the favourable side. No benefit can be derived to the interests either of virtue, or of learning, by injurious representations of men eminent for genius and literature.

Notwithstanding the errors, and instances of partiality and misrepresentation, which occasionally occur in the Lives of the Poets, they contain so many accurate and just observations on human nature, such original and curious remarks on various literary subjects, and abound with so many beauties of style, that they cannot be perused by any reader of taste without a great degree of pleasure. Besides their general merit as compositions, they also contain many particular passages of distinguished excellence. The character of Gilbert Walmsley, in the life of Edmund Smith, is finely drawn; the account, in the life of Addison, of the rise and progress of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, and of the effects produced by those admirable essays on the manners of the nation, is just and curious; and there are many excellent observations on the modes of study, and on literary composition.

The style of Johnson appeared suited to his peculiar character, and mode of thinking. It seems too learned for common readers; and, on the first publication of his Ramblers, many complaints were made of the frequent recurrence of hard words in those essays. It was with a view to this accusation against him, that he wrote that essay in the Idler [No. 70], which contains a defence of the use of hard words, and in which he

remarks, that ‘every author does not write for every reader.’ He was not ambitious of illiterate readers, and was willing to resign them to those writers whose productions were better adapted to their capacities. ‘Difference of thoughts,’ says he, ‘will produce difference of language. He that thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger meaning. He that thinks with more subtilty will seek for terms of more nice discrimination.’ It is certain, that passages sometimes occur in his writings, which are not very intelligible to ordinary readers. Thus, in the preface to his Dictionary, he puts the following question: ‘When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive series be formed of senses in their nature collateral?’

He was occasionally fond of antithesis and of alliteration; and his periods are sometimes too artificial, and his phrases too remote from the ordinary idiom of our language. But notwithstanding the peculiarity of his style, he has seldom made use of words not to be found in preceding writers. ‘When common words,’ says he, ‘were less pleasing to the ear, or less distinct in their signification, I have familiarized the terms of philosophy by applying them to known objects and popular ideas; but have rarely admitted any word not authorized by former writers.’¹⁰ He considered himself as having contributed to the improvement of the English language. He says in his last Rambler, ‘I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations. Something, perhaps, I have added to the elegance of its construction, and something to the harmony of its cadence.’ Whatever may be the faults of his style, it has certainly great strength and great dignity, and his periods are often highly polished; and, perhaps, it would be difficult to point out any of his contemporaries, by whom the English language was written with equal energy.

When the great intellectual powers that Dr. Johnson possessed are considered, and the rapidity with which he finished his compositions, when he could prevail on himself to sit down to write, little doubt can be entertained, but that he might have produced much more than he did: and it was probably this consciousness that occasioned his frequent self-reproaches. The works, however, that he did produce, were very considerable, and such as will undoubtedly secure to him a great and lasting reputation.

With a slight sketch of some of the principal features of his character, I shall conclude this Essay.

He possessed extraordinary powers of understanding, which were much cultivated by study, and still more by meditation and reflection. His memory was remarkably retentive, his imagination uncommonly vigorous, and his judgment keen and penetrating. He had a strong sense of the importance of religion; his piety was sincere, and sometimes ardent; and his zeal for the interests of virtue was often manifested in his conversation and in his writings. The same energy, which was displayed in his literary productions, was exhibited also in his conversation, which was various, striking, and instructive; and, perhaps, no man ever equalled him for nervous and pointed repartees.

The great originality which sometimes appeared in his conceptions, and the perspicuity and force with which he delivered them, greatly enhanced the value of his conversation; and the remarks that he delivered received additional weight from the strength of his voice, and the solemnity of his manner. He was conscious of his own superiority; and when in company with literary men, or with those with whom there was any possibility of rivalship or competition, this consciousness was too apparent. With inferiors, and those who readily admitted all his claims, he was often mild and gentle: but to others, such was often the arrogance of his manners, that the endurance of it required no ordinary degree of patience. He was very dextrous at argumentation; and, when his reasonings were not solid, they were at least artful and plausible. His retorts were so powerful, that his friends and acquaintance were generally cautious of entering the lists against him; and the ready acquiescence, of those with whom he associated, in his opinions and assertions, probably rendered him more dogmatic than he might otherwise have been. With those, however, whom he loved, and with whom he was familiar, he was sometimes chearful and sprightly, and sometimes indulged himself in sallies of wit and pleasantry. He spent much of his time, especially in his latter years, in conversation; and seems to have had such an aversion to being left without company, as was somewhat extraordinary in a man possessed of such intellectual powers, and whose understanding had been so highly cultivated.

He sometimes discovered much impetuosity and irritability of temper, and was too ready to take offence at others; but when concessions were made, he was easily appeased. For those from whom he had received kindness in the earlier part of his life, he seemed ever to retain a particular regard, and manifested much gratitude towards those by whom he had at any time been benefited. He was soon offended with pertness, or ignorance: but he sometimes seemed to be conscious of having answered the questions of others with too much roughness; and was then desirous to discover more gentleness of temper, and to communicate information with more suavity of manners. When not under the influence of personal pique, of pride, or of religious or political prejudices, he seems to have had great ardour of benevolence; and, on some occasions, he gave very signal proofs of generosity and humanity.

He was naturally melancholy, and his views of human life appear to have been habitually gloomy. This appears in his Rasselas, and in many passages of his writings. It was also a striking part of the character of Dr. Johnson, that with powers of mind that did honour to human nature, he had weaknesses and prejudices that seemed suited only to the lowest of the species. His piety was strongly tinctured with superstition; and we are astonished to find the author of the Rambler expressing serious concern, because he had put milk into his tea on a Good Friday.¹¹ His custom of praying for the dead, though unsupported by reason or by scripture, was a less irrational superstition. Indeed, one of the great features of Johnson’s character, was a degree of bigotry, both in politics and in religion, which is now seldom to be met with in persons of a cultivated understanding. Few other men could have been found, in the present age, whose political bigotry would have led them to style the celebrated JOHN HAMPDEN ‘the zealot of rebellion;’¹² and the religious bigotry of the man, who, when at Edinburgh, would not go to hear Dr. Robertson preach, because he would not be present at a Presbyterian assembly, is not easily to be paralleled in this age, and in this country. His habitual incredulity with respect to facts, of which there was no reasonable ground for doubt, as stated by Mrs. Piozzi,¹³ and which was remarked by Hogarth,¹⁴ was also a singular trait in his character; and especially when contrasted with his superstitious credulity on other occasions. To the close of life, he was not only occupied in forming schemes of religious reformation, but even to a very late period of it, he seems to have been solicitous to apply himself to study with renewed diligence and vigour. It is remarkable, that, in his sixty-fourth year, he attempted to learn the Low Dutch language;¹⁵ and, in his sixty-seventh year, he made a resolution to apply himself ‘vigorously to study, particularly of the Greek and Italian tongues.’¹⁶

The faults and foibles of JOHNSON, whatever they were, are now descended with him to the grave; but his virtues should be the object of our imitation. His works, with all their defects, are a most valuable and important accession to the literature of England. His political writings will probably be little read, on any other account than for the dignity and energy of his style; but his Dictionary, his moral essays, and his productions in polite literature, will convey useful instruction, and elegant entertainment, as long as the language in which they are written shall be understood; and give him a just claim to a distinguished rank among the best and ablest writers that England has produced.

75. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D.

16 May 1791

Extracts from the Life, third edition, 1799 (see edition by G. Birkbeck Hill and L.F.Powell, 1934, i. 25–6, 192–204, 208–9, 213–24, 255, 291–6, 340–2, 496–8; ii. 111–3, 300–8, 311–7; iv. 34–9, 63–5, 424–30).
Boswell undoubtedly exercised the major formative influence on Johnson’s posthumous reputation. 1,200 copies of the Life were sold in three months; a second edition was published in 1793; others followed in 1799, 1804, 1807 and 1811. Many were alarmed and shocked by the avid desire shown by Boswell and scores of others to record the minutiae of Johnson’s career. Burke’s remark vividly registers their view: ‘How many maggots have crawled out of that great body’ (W.Roberts, Memoirs of Hannah More, 1834, ii. 101). But Burke also expressed what was to become the dominant nineteenth-century attitude: that Boswell’s Life ‘was a greater monument to Johnson’s fame, than all his writings put together’ (Life, i. 10 n.1).
The extracts direct attention almost exclusively to Boswell’s comments on Johnson’s writings; they thus provide only a partial view of the influence he exerted on Johnson’s reputation. It was his presentation of the man ‘equalled by few in any age’ which mainly caught the interest of later generations. See Introduction, pp. 8, 32–5.

To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.

Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself;¹ had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited. But although he at different times, in a desultory manner, committed to writing many particulars of the progress of his mind and fortunes, he never had persevering diligence enough to form them into a regular composition. Of these memorials a few have been preserved; but the greater part was consigned by him to the flames, a few days before his death.

As I had the honour and happiness of enjoying his friendship for upwards of twenty years; as I had the scheme of writing his life constantly in view; as he was well apprised of this circumstance, and from time to time obligingly satisfied my inquiries, by communicating to me the incidents of his early years; as I acquired a facility in recollecting, and was very assiduous in recording, his conversation, of which the extraordinary vigour and vivacity constituted one of the first features of his character; and as I have spared no pains in obtaining materials concerning him, from every quarter where I could discover that they were to be found, and have been favoured with the most liberal communications by his friends; I flatter myself that few biographers have entered upon such a work as this, with more advantages; independent of literary abilities, in which I am not vain enough to compare myself with some great names who have gone before me in this kind of writing….

1749: ÆTAT. 40.]—In January, 1749, he published The Vanity of Human Wishes, being the Tenth Satire of Juvenal imitated. He, I believe, composed it the preceding year. Mrs. Johnson, for the sake of country air, had lodgings at Hampstead, to which he resorted occasionally, and there the greatest part, if not the whole, of this Imitation was written. The fervid rapidity with which it was produced, is scarcely credible. I have heard him say, that he composed seventy lines of it in one day, without putting one of them upon paper till they were finished. I remember when I once regretted to him that he had not given us more of Juvenal’s Satires, he said he probably should give more, for he had them all in his head; by which I understood, that he had the originals and correspondent allusions floating in his mind, which he could, when he pleased, embody and render permanent without much labour. Some of them, however, he observed were too gross for imitation.

The profits of a single poem, however excellent, appear to have been

very small in the last reign, compared with what a publication of the same size has since been known to yield. I have mentioned, upon Johnson’s own authority, that for his London he had only ten guineas; and now, after his fame was established, he got for his Vanity of Human Wishes but five guineas more, as is proved by an authentick document in my possession.

It will be observed, that he reserves to himself the right of printing one edition of this satire, which was his practice upon occasion of the sale of all his writings; it being his fixed intention to publish at some period, for his own profit, a complete collection of his works.²

His Vanity of Human Wishes has less of common life, but more of a philosophick dignity than his London. More readers, therefore, will be delighted with the pointed spirit of London, than with the profound reflection of The Vanity of Human Wishes. Garrick, for instance, observed in his sprightly manner, with more vivacity than regard to just discrimination, as is usual with wits, ‘When Johnson lived much with the Herveys, and saw a good deal of what was passing in life, he wrote his London, which is lively and easy. When he became more retired, he gave us his Vanity of Human Wishes, which is as hard as Greek. Had he gone on to imitate another satire, it would have been as hard as Hebrew.’

But The Vanity of Human Wishes is, in the opinion of the best judges, as high an effort of ethick poetry as any language can shew. The instances of variety of disappointment are chosen so judiciously, and painted so strongly, that, the moment they are read, they bring conviction to every thinking mind. That of the scholar must have depressed the too sanguine expectations of many an ambitious student. That of the warrior, Charles of Sweden is, I think, as highly finished a picture as can possibly be conceived.

Were all the other excellencies of this poem annihilated, it must ever have our grateful reverence from its noble conclusion; in which we are consoled with the assurance that happiness may be attained, if we ‘apply our hearts’³ to piety:

[quotes ll. 343–68.]

Garrick being now vested with theatrical power by being manager of Drury-lane theatre, he kindly and generously made use of it to bring out Johnson’s tragedy, which had been long kept back for want of encouragement. But in this benevolent purpose he met with no small difficulty from the temper of Johnson, which could not brook that a drama which

he had formed with much study, and had been obliged to keep more than the nine years of Horace,⁴ should be revised and altered at the pleasure of an actor. Yet Garrick knew well, that without some alterations it would not be fit for the stage. A violent dispute having ensued between them, Garrick applied to the Reverend Dr. Taylor to interpose. Johnson was at first very obstinate. ‘Sir, (said he) the fellow wants me to make Mahomet run mad, that he may have an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his heels.’ He was, however, at last, with difficulty, prevailed on to comply with Garrick’s wishes, so as to allow of some changes; but still there were not enough.

Dr. Adams was present the first night of the representation of Irene, and gave me the following account: ‘Before the curtain drew up, there were catcalls whistling, which alarmed Johnson’s friends. The Prologue, which was written by himself in a manly strain, soothed the audience, and the play went off tolerably, till it came to the conclusion, when Mrs. Pritchard, the heroine of the piece, was to be strangled upon the stage, and was to speak two lines with the bow-string round her neck. The audience cried out “Murder! Murder!” She several times attempted to speak; but in vain. At last she was obliged to go off the stage alive.’ This passage was afterwards struck out, and she was carried off to be put to death behind the scenes, as the play now has it. The Epilogue, as Johnson informed me, was written by Sir William Yonge. I know not how his play came to be thus graced by the pen of a person then so eminent in the political world.⁵

Notwithstanding all the support of such performers as Garrick, Barry, Mrs. Cibber, Mrs. Pritchard, and every advantage of dress and decoration, the tragedy of Irene did not please the publick. Mr. Garrick’s zeal carried it through for nine nights, so that the author had his three nights’ profits; and from a receipt signed by him, now in the hands of Mr. James Dodsley, it appears that his friend Mr. Robert Dodsley gave him one hundred pounds for the copy, with his usual reservation of the right of one edition.

Irene, considered as a poem, is intitled to the praise of superiour excellence. Analysed into parts, it will furnish a rich store of noble sentiments, fine imagery, and beautiful language; but it is deficient in pathos, in that delicate power of touching the human feelings, which is the principal end of the drama. Indeed Garrick has complained to me, that Johnson not only had not the faculty of producing the impressions

of tragedy, but that he had not the sensibility to perceive them. His great friend Mr. Walmsley’s prediction, that he would ‘turn out a fine tragedy-writer,’⁶ was, therefore, ill-founded. Johnson was wise enough to be convinced that he had not the talents necessary to write successfully for the stage, and never made another attempt in that species of composition.

When asked how he felt upon the ill success of his tragedy, he replied, ‘Like the Monument;’ meaning that he continued firm and unmoved as that column. And let it be remembered, as an admonition to the genus irritabile⁷ of dramatick writers, that this great man, instead of peevishly complaining of the bad taste of the town, submitted to its decision without a murmur. He had, indeed, upon all occasions, a great deference for the general opinion: ‘A man (said he) who writes a book, thinks himself wiser or wittier than the rest of mankind; he supposes that he can instruct or amuse them, and the publick to whom he appeals, must, after all, be the judges of his pretensions.’…

1750: ÆTAT. 41.]—In 1750 he came forth in the character for which he was eminently qualified, a majestick teacher of moral and religious wisdom. The vehicle which he chose was that of a periodical paper, which he knew had been, upon former occasions, employed with great success. The Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian, were the last of the kind published in England, which had stood the test of a long trial; and such an interval had now elapsed since their publication, as made him justly think that, to many of his readers, this form of instruction would, in some degree, have the advantage of novelty. A few days before the first of his Essays came out, there started another competitor for fame in the same form, under the title of The Tatler Revived, which I believe was ‘born but to die’.⁸ Johnson was, I think, not very happy in the choice of his title, The Rambler, which certainly is not suited to a series of grave and moral discourses; which the Italians have literally, but ludicrously, translated by Il Vagabondo; and which has been lately assumed as the denomination of a vehicle of licentious tales, The Rambler’s Magazine. He gave Sir Joshua Reynolds the following account of its getting this name: ‘What must be done, Sir, will be done. When I was to begin publishing that paper, I was at a loss how to name it. I sat down at night upon my bedside, and resolved that I would not go to sleep till I had fixed its title. The Rambler seemed the best that occurred, and I took it.’

With what devout and conscientious sentiments this paper was undertaken, is evidenced by the following prayer, which he composed and

offered up on the occasion: ‘Almighty GOD, the giver of all good things, without whose help all labour is ineffectual, and without whose grace all wisdom is folly; grant, I beseech Thee, that in this undertaking thy Holy Spirit may not be with-held from me, but that I may promote thy glory, and the salvation of myself and others: grant this, O LORD, for the sake of thy son JESUS CHRIST. Amen.’

The first paper of the Rambler was published on Tuesday the 20th of March, 1750; and its authour was enabled to continue it, without interruption, every Tuesday and Friday, till Saturday the [14]th of March, 1752, on which day it closed. This is a strong confirmation of the truth of a remark of his, which I have had occasion to quote elsewhere,⁹ that ‘a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it;’ for, notwithstanding his constitutional indolence, his depression of spirits, and his labour in carrying on his Dictionary, he answered the stated calls of the press twice a week from the stores of his mind, during all that time; having received no assistance, except four billets in No. 10, by Miss Mulso, now Mrs. Chapone; No. 30, by Mrs. Catharine Talbot; No. 97, by Mr. Samuel Richardson, whom he describes in an introductory note as ‘An author who has enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue;’ and Numbers 44 and 100, by Mrs. Elizabeth Carter.

Posterity will be astonished when they are told, upon the authority of Johnson himself, that many of these discourses, which we should suppose had been laboured with all the slow attention of literary leisure, were written in haste as the moment pressed, without even being read over by him before they were printed. It can be accounted for only in this way; that by reading and meditation, and a very close inspection of life, he had accumulated a great fund of miscellaneous knowledge, which, by a peculiar promptitude of mind, was ever ready at his call, and which he had constantly accustomed himself to clothe in the most apt and energetick expression. Sir Joshua Reynolds once asked him by what means he had attained his extraordinary accuracy and flow of language. He told him, that he had early laid it down as a fixed rule to do his best on every occasion, and in every company; to impart whatever he knew in the most forcible language he could put it in; and that by constant practice, and never suffering any careless expressions to escape him, or attempting to deliver his thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner, it became habitual to him….

As the Rambler was entirely the work of one man, there was, of course,

such a uniformity in its texture, as very much to exclude the charm of variety; and the grave and often solemn cast of thinking, which distinguished it from other periodical papers, made it, for some time, not generally liked. So slowly did this excellent work, of which twelve editions have now issued from the press, gain upon the world at large, that even in the closing number the authour says, ‘I have never been much a favourite of the publick.’

Yet, very soon after its commencement, there were who felt and acknowledged its uncommon excellence. Verses in its praise appeared in the newspapers; and the editor of the Gentlemans Magazine mentions, in October, his having received several letters to the same purpose from the learned.¹⁰ The Student, or Oxford and Cambridge Miscellany, in which Mr. Bonnell Thornton and Mr. Colman were the principal writers, describes it as ‘a work that exceeds any thing of the kind ever published in this kingdom, some of the Spectators excepted, —if indeed they may be excepted.’ And afterwards, ‘May the publick favours crown his merits, and may not the English, under the auspicious reign of GEORGE the Second, neglect a man, who, had he lived in the first century, would have been one of the greatest favourites of AUGUSTUS.’¹¹ This flattery of the monarch had no effect. It is too well known, that the second George never was an Augustus to learning or genius….

I profess myself to have ever entertained a profound veneration for the astonishing force and vivacity of mind, which the Rambler exhibits. That Johnson had penetration enough to see, and seeing would not disguise the general misery of man in this state of being, may have given rise to the superficial notion of his being too stern a philosopher. But men of reflection will be sensible that he has given a true representation of human existence, and that he has, at the same time, with a generous benevolence displayed every consolation which our state affords us; not only those arising from the hopes of futurity, but such as may be attained in the immediate progress through life. He has not depressed the soul to despondency and indifference. He has every where inculcated study, labour, and exertion. Nay, he has shewn, in a very odious light, a man whose practice is to go about darkening the views of others, by perpetual complaints of evil, and awakening those considerations of danger and distress, which are, for the most part, lulled into a quiet oblivion. This he has done very strongly in his character of Suspirius,¹² from which Goldsmith took that of Croaker, in his comedy of The Good-natured

Man, as Johnson told me he acknowledged to him, and which is, indeed, very obvious.

To point out the numerous subjects which the Rambler treats, with a dignity and perspicuity, which are there united in a manner which we shall in vain look for anywhere else, would take up too large a portion of my book, and would, I trust, be superfluous, considering how universally those volumes are now disseminated. Even the most condensed and brilliant sentences which they contain, and which have very properly been selected under the name of Beauties,¹³ are of considerable bulk. But I may shortly observe, that the Rambler furnishes such an assemblage of discourses on practical religion and moral duty, of critical investigations, and allegorical and oriental tales, that no mind can be thought very deficient that has, by constant study and meditation, assimilated to itself all that may be found there. No. 7, written in Passion-week on abstraction and self-examination, and No. 110, on penitence and the placability of the Divine Nature, cannot be too often read. No. 54, on the effect which the death of a friend should have upon us, though rather too dispiriting, may be occasionally very medicinal to the mind. Every one must suppose the writer to have been deeply impressed by a real scene; but he told me that was not the case; which shews how well his fancy could conduct him to the ‘house of mourning.’¹⁴ Some of these more solemn papers, I doubt not, particularly attracted the notice of Dr. Young, the authour of The Night Thoughts, of whom my estimation is such, as to reckon his applause an honour even to Johnson. I have seen some volumes of Dr. Young’s copy of the Rambler, in which he has marked the passages which he thought particularly excellent, by folding down a corner of the page; and such as he rated in a super-eminent degree, are marked by double folds. I am sorry that some of the volumes are lost. Johnson was pleased when told of the minute attention with which Young had signified his approbation of his Essays.

I will venture to say, that in no writings whatever can be found more bark and steel for the mind, if I may use the expression; more that can brace and invigorate every manly and noble sentiment. No. 32 on patience, even under extreme misery, is wonderfully lofty, and as much above the rant of stoicism, as the Sun of Revelation is brighter than the twilight of Pagan philosophy. I never read the following sentence without feeling my frame thrill: ‘I think there is some reason for questioning whether the body and mind are not so proportioned, that the one can bear all

which can be inflicted on the other; whether virtue cannot stand its ground as long as life, and whether a soul well principled will not be sooner separated than subdued.’

Though instruction be the predominant purpose of the Rambler, yet it is enlivened with a considerable portion of amusement. Nothing can be more erroneous than the notion which some persons have entertained, that Johnson was then a retired author, ignorant of the world; and, of consequence, that he wrote only from his imagination when he described characters and manners. He said to me, that before he wrote that work, he had been ‘running about the world,’ as he expressed it, more than almost any body; and I have heard him relate, with much satisfaction, that several of the characters in the Rambler were drawn so naturally, that when it first circulated in numbers, a club in one of the towns in Essex imagined themselves to be severally exhibited in it, and were much incensed against a person who, they suspected, had thus made them objects of publick notice; nor were they quieted till authentick assurance was given them, that the Rambler was written by a person who had never heard of any one of them. Some of the characters are believed to have been actually drawn from the life, particularly that of Prospero¹⁵ from Garrick, who never entirely forgave its pointed satire. For instances of fertility of fancy, and accurate description of real life, I appeal to No. 19, a man who wanders from one profession to another, with most plausible reasons for every change. No. 34, female fastidiousness and timorous refinement. No. 82, a Virtuoso who has collected curiosities. No. [98], petty modes of entertaining a company, and conciliating kindness. No. 182, fortune-hunting. No. 194–195, a tutor’s account of the follies of his pupil. No. 197–198, legacy-hunting. He has given a specimen of his nice observation of the mere external appearances of life, in the following passage in No. 179, against affectation, that frequent and most disgusting quality:

[quotes ‘He that stands’ to ‘evidences of importance’.]

Every page of the Rambler shews a mind teeming with classical allusion and poetical imagery: illustrations from other writers are, upon all occasions, so ready, and mingle so easily in his periods, that the whole appears of one uniform vivid texture.

The style of this work has been censured by some shallow criticks as involved and turgid, and abounding with antiquated and hard words.

So ill-founded is the first part of this objection, that I will challenge all who may honour this book with a perusal, to point out any English writer whose language conveys his meaning with equal force and perspicuity. It must, indeed, be allowed, that the structure of his sentences is expanded, and often has somewhat of the inversion of Latin; and that he delighted to express familiar thoughts in philosophical language; being in this the reverse of Socrates, who, it was said, reduced philosophy to the simplicity of common life. But let us attend to what he himself says in his concluding paper: ‘When common words were less pleasing to the ear, or less distinct in their signification, I have familiarised the terms of philosophy, by applying them to popular ideas.’ And, as to the second part of this objection, upon a late careful revision of the work, I can with confidence say, that it is amazing how few of those words, for which it has been unjustly characterised, are actually to be found in it; I am sure, not the proportion of one to each paper. This idle charge has been echoed from one babbler to another, who have confounded Johnson’s Essays with Johnson’s Dictionary; and because he thought it right in a Lexicon of our language to collect many words which had fallen into disuse, but were supported by great authorities, it has been imagined that all of these have been interwoven into his own compositions. That some of them have been adopted by him unnecessarily, may, perhaps, be allowed; but, in general they are evidently an advantage, for without them his stately ideas would be confined and cramped. ‘He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning.’¹⁶ He once told me, that he had formed his style upon that of Sir William Temple,¹⁷ and upon Chambers’s Proposal for his Dictionary.¹⁸ He certainly was mistaken; or if he imagined at first that he was imitating Temple, he was very unsuccessful; for nothing can be more unlike than the simplicity of Temple, and the richness of Johnson. Their styles differ as plain cloth and brocade. Temple, indeed, seems equally erroneous in supposing that he himself had formed his style upon Sandys’s View of the State of Religion in the Western parts of the World.

The style of Johnson was, undoubtedly, much formed upon that of the great writers in the last century, Hooker, Bacon, Sanderson, Hakewell,¹⁹ and others; those ‘GIANTS,’ as they were well characterised by

A GREAT PERSONAGE,²⁰ whose authority, were I to name him, would stamp a reverence on the opinion….

Yet Johnson assured me, that he had not taken upon him to add more than four or five words to the English language, of his own formation; and he was very much offended at the general licence, by no means ‘modestly taken’ in his time, not only to coin new words, but to use many words in senses quite different from their established meaning, and those frequently very fantastical.

Sir Thomas Brown, whose life Johnson wrote, was remarkably fond of Anglo-Latian diction; and to his example we are to ascribe Johnson’s sometimes indulging himself in this kind of phraseology. Johnson’s comprehension of mind was the mould for his language. Had his conceptions been narrower, his expression would have been easier. His sentences have a dignified march; and, it is certain, that his example has given a general elevation to the language of his country, for many of our best writers have approached very near to him; and, from the influence which he has had upon our composition, scarcely any thing is written now that is not better expressed than was usual before he appeared to lead the national taste.

This circumstance, the truth of which must strike every critical reader, has been so happily enforced by Mr. Courtenay, in his Moral and Literary Character of Dr. Johnson, that I cannot prevail on myself to withhold it, notwithstanding his, perhaps, too great partiality for one of his friends:

[quotes ‘By nature’s gifts’ to ‘fertilise the land’; see above, pp. 369–70.]

Johnson’s language, however, must be allowed to be too masculine for the delicate gentleness of female writing. His ladies, therefore, seem strangely formal, even to ridicule; and are well denominated by the names which he has given them, as Misella, Zozima, Properantia, Rhodoclia.²¹

It has of late been the fashion to compare the style of Addison and Johnson, and to depreciate, I think very unjustly, the style of Addison as nerveless and feeble, because it has not the strength and energy of that of Johnson. Their prose may be balanced like the poetry of Dryden and Pope. Both are excellent, though in different ways. Addison writes with the ease of a gentleman. His readers fancy that a wise and accomplished companion is talking to them; so that he insinuates his sentiments and taste into their minds by an imperceptible influence. Johnson writes like a teacher. He dictates to his readers as if from an academical chair. They

attend with awe and admiration; and his precepts are impressed upon them by his commanding eloquence. Addison’s style, like a light wine, pleases every body from the first. Johnson’s, like a liquor of more body, seems too strong at first, but, by degrees, is highly relished; and such is the melody of his periods, so much do they captivate the ear, and seize upon the attention, that there is scarcely any writer, however inconsiderable, who does not aim, in some degree, at the same species of excellence. But let us not ungratefully undervalue that beautiful style, which has pleasingly conveyed to us much instruction and entertainment. Though comparatively weak, opposed to Johnson’s Herculean vigour, let us not call it positively feeble. Let us remember the character of his style, as given by Johnson himself:

[quotes last three sentences from Johnson’s Life of Addison.]

Johnson’s papers in the Adventurer are very similar to those of the Rambler; but being rather more varied in their subjects, and being mixed with essays by other writers, upon topicks more generally attractive than even the most elegant ethical discourses, the sale of the work, at first, was more extensive. Without meaning, however, to depreciate the Adventurer, I must observe that as the value of the Rambler came, in the progress of time, to be better known, it grew upon the publick estimation, and that its sale has far exceeded that of any other periodical papers since the reign of Queen Anne….

The Dictionary, with a Grammar and History of the English Language, being now at length published, in two volumes folio, the world contemplated with wonder so stupendous a work atchieved by one man, while other countries had thought such undertakings fit only for whole academies. Vast as his powers were, I cannot but think that his imagination deceived him, when he supposed that by constant application he might have performed the task in three years. Let the Preface be attentively perused, in which is given, in a clear, strong, and glowing style, a comprehensive, yet particular view of what he had done; and it will be evident, that the time he employed upon it was comparatively short. I am unwilling to swell my book with long quotations from what is in every body’s hands; and I believe there are few prose compositions in the English language that are read with more delight, or are more impressed upon the memory, than that preliminary discourse. One of its excellencies has always struck me with peculiar admiration; I mean the perspicuity with which he has expressed abstract scientifick notions. As an instance of this, I shall quote the following sentence: ‘When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive series be formed of senses in their own nature collateral?’ We have here an example of what has been often said, and I believe with justice, that there is for every thought a certain nice adaptation of words which none other could equal, and which, when a man has been so fortunate as to hit, he has attained, in that particular case, the perfection of language.

The extensive reading which was absolutely necessary for the accumulation of authorities, and which alone may account for Johnson’s retentive mind being enriched with a very large and various store of knowledge and imagery, must have occupied several years. The Preface furnishes an eminent instance of a double talent, of which Johnson was fully conscious. Sir Joshua Reynolds heard him say, ‘There are two things which I am confident I can do very well: one is an introduction to any literary work, stating what it is to contain, and how it should be executed in the most perfect manner; the other is a conclusion, shewing from various causes why the execution has not been equal to what the authour promised to himself and to the publick.’

How should puny scribblers be abashed and disappointed, when they find him displaying a perfect theory of lexicographical excellence, yet at the same time candidly and modestly allowing that he ‘had not satisfied his own expectations.’ Here was a fair occasion for the exercise of Johnson’s modesty, when he was called upon to compare his own arduous performance, not with those of other individuals, (in which case his inflexible regard to truth would have been violated, had he affected diffidence,) but with speculative perfection; as he, who can outstrip all his competitors in the race, may yet be sensible of his deficiency when he runs against time. Well might he say, that ‘the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned;’²² for he told me, that the only aid which he received was a paper containing twenty etymologies, sent to him by a person then unknown, who he was afterwards informed was Dr. Pearce, Bishop of Rochester. The etymologies, though they exhibit learning and judgement, are not, I think, entitled to the first praise amongst the various parts of this immense work. The definitions have always appeared to me such astonishing proofs of acuteness of intellect and precision of language, as indicate a genius of the highest rank. This it is which marks the superiour excellence of Johnson’s Dictionary over others equally or even more voluminous, and must have made it a work of much greater mental labour than mere Lexicons, or Word-Books, as the Dutch call them. They, who will make the experiment of trying how

they can define a few words of whatever nature, will soon be satisfied of the unquestionable justice of this observation, which I can assure my readers is founded upon much study, and upon communication with more minds than my own.

A few of his definitions must be admitted to be erroneous. Thus, Windward and Leeward, though directly of opposite meaning, are defined identically the same way;²³ as to which inconsiderable specks it is enough to observe, that his Preface announces that he was aware there might be many such in so immense a work; nor was he at all disconcerted when an instance was pointed out to him. A lady once asked him how he came to define Pastern the knee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defence, as she expected, he at once answered, ‘Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.’ His definition of Network has been often quoted with sportive malignity, as obscuring a thing in itself very plain. But to these frivolous censures no other answer is necessary than that with which we are furnished by his own Preface.

[quotes ‘To explain requires the use’ to ‘admit or definition’, and ‘sometimes easier words’ to ‘one more easy’. See above, No. 18.]

His introducing his own opinions, and even prejudices, under general definitions of words, while at the same time the original meaning of the words is not explained, as his Tory, Whig, Pension, Oats, Excise, and a few more, cannot be fully defended, and must be placed to the account of capricious and humourous indulgence. Talking to me upon this subject when we were at Ashbourne in 1777, he mentioned a still stronger instance of the predominance of his private feelings in the composition of this work, than any now to be found in it. ‘You know, Sir, Lord Gower forsook the old Jacobite interest. When I came to the word Renegado, after telling that it meant “one who deserts to the enemy, a revolter,” I added, Sometimes we say a GOWER. Thus it went to the press; but the printer had more wit than I, and struck it out.’

Let it, however, be remembered, that this indulgence does not display itself only in sarcasm towards others, but sometimes in playful allusion to the notions commonly entertained of his own laborious task. Thus: ‘Grub-street, the name of a street in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called Grub-street.’ —‘Lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.’…

I have been told that he regretted much his not having gone to visit his

mother for several years, previous to her death. But he was constantly engaged in literary labours which confined him to London; and though he had not the comfort of seeing his aged parent, he contributed liberally to her support.

Soon after this event, he wrote his Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia; concerning the publication of which Sir John Hawkins guesses vaguely and idly, instead of having taken the trouble to inform himself with authentick precision. Not to trouble my readers with a repetition of the Knight’s reveries, I have to mention, that the late Mr. Strahan the printer told me, that Johnson wrote it, that with the profits he might defray the expence of his mother’s funeral, and pay some little debts which she had left. He told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he composed it in the evenings of one week, sent it to the press in portions as it was written, and had never since read it over. Mr. Strahan, Mr. Johnston, and Mr. Dodsley purchased it for a hundred pounds, but afterwards paid him twenty-five pounds more, when it came to a second edition.

Considering the large sums which have been received for compilations, and works requiring not much more genius than compilations, we cannot but wonder at the very low price which he was content to receive for this admirable performance; which, though he had written nothing else, would have rendered his name immortal in the world of literature. None of his writings has been so extensively diffused over Europe; for it has been translated into most, if not all, of the modern languages. This Tale, with all the charms of oriental imagery, and all the force and beauty of which the English language is capable, leads us through the most important scenes of human life, and shews us that this stage of our being is full of ‘vanity and vexation of spirit.’²⁴ To those who look no further than the present life, or who maintain that human nature has not fallen from the state in which it was created, the instruction of this sublime story will be of no avail. But they who think justly, and feel with strong sensibility, will listen with eagerness and admiration to its truth and wisdom. Voltaire’s Candide, written to refute the system of Optimism, which it has accomplished with brilliant success, is wonderfully similar in its plan and conduct to Johnson’s Rasselas; insomuch, that I have heard Johnson say, that if they had not been published so closely one after the other that there was not time for imitation, it would have been in vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other.²⁵ Though the proposition illustrated by both these works was the

same, namely, that in our present state there is more evil than good, the intention of the writers was very different. Voltaire, I am afraid, meant only by wanton profaneness to obtain a sportive victory over religion, and to discredit the belief of a superintending Providence: Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal. Rasselas, as was observed to me by a very accomplished lady, may be considered as a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon the interesting truth, which in his Vanity of Human Wishes he had so successfully enforced in verse.

The fund of thinking which this work contains is such, that almost every sentence of it may furnish a subject of long meditation. I am not satisfied if a year passes without my having read it through; and at every perusal, my admiration of the mind which produced it is so highly raised, that I can scarcely believe that I had the honour of enjoying the intimacy of such a man….

In the October of this year [1765] he at length gave to the world his edition of Shakspeare, which, if it had no other merit but that of producing his Preface, in which the excellencies and defects of that immortal bard are displayed with a masterly hand, the nation would have had no reason to complain. A blind indiscriminate admiration of Shakspeare had exposed the British nation to the ridicule of foreigners. Johnson, by candidly admitting the faults of his poet, had the more credit in bestowing on him deserved and indisputable praise; and doubtless none of all his panegyrists have done him half so much honour. Their praise was, like that of a counsel, upon his own side of the cause: Johnson’s was like the grave, well considered, and impartial opinion of the judge, which falls from his lips with weight, and is received with reverence. What he did as a commentator has no small share of merit, though his researches were not so ample, and his investigations so acute as they might have been, which we now certainly know from the labours of other able and ingenious criticks who have followed him. He has enriched his edition with a concise account of each play, and of its characteristick excellence. Many of his notes have illustrated obscurities in the text, and placed passages eminent for beauty in a more conspicuous light; and he has in general, exhibited such a mode of annotation, as may be beneficial to all subsequent editors.

His Shakspeare was virulently attacked by Mr. William Kenrick,²⁶ who obtained the degree of LL.D. from a Scotch University, and wrote for the booksellers in a great variety of branches. Though he certainly

was not without considerable merit, he wrote with so little regard to decency and principles, and decorum, and in so hasty a manner, that his reputation was neither extensive nor lasting. I remember one evening, when some of his works were mentioned, Dr. Goldsmith said, he had never heard of them; upon which Dr. Johnson observed, ‘Sir, he is one of the many who have made themselves publick, without making themselves known.’

A young student of Oxford, of the name of Barclay, wrote an answer to Kenrick’s review of Johnson’s Shakspeare.²⁷ Johnson was at first angry that Kenrick’s attack should have the credit of an answer. But afterwards, considering the young man’s good intention, he kindly noticed him, and probably would have done more, had not the young man died….

1770: ÆTAT. 61.] —In 1770 he published a political pamphlet, entitled The False Alarm, intended to justify the conduct of ministry and their majority in the House of Commons, for having virtually assumed it as an axiom, that the expulsion of a Member of Parliament was equivalent to exclusion, and thus having declared Colonel Lutterel to be duly elected for the county of Middlesex, notwithstanding Mr. Wilkes had a great majority of votes.²⁸ This being justly considered as a gross violation of the right of election, an alarm for the constitution extended itself all over the kingdom. To prove this alarm to be false, was the purpose of Johnson’s pamphlet; but even his vast powers were inadequate to cope with constitutional truth and reason, and his argument failed of effect; and the House of Commons have since expunged the offensive resolution from their Journals.²⁹ That the House of Commons might have expelled Mr. Wilkes repeatedly, and as often as he should be re-chosen, was not denied; but incapacitation cannot be but by an act of the whole legislature. It was wonderful to see how a prejudice in favour of government in general, and an aversion to popular clamour, could blind and contract such an understanding as Johnson’s, in this particular case; yet the wit, the sarcasm, the eloquent vivacity which this pamphlet displayed, made it be read with great avidity at the time, and it will ever be read with pleasure, for the sake of its composition. That it endeavoured to infuse a a narcotick indifference, as to publick concerns, into the minds of the people, and that it broke out sometimes into an extreme coarseness of contemptuous abuse, is but too evident.

It must not, however, be omitted, that when the storm of his violence

subsides, he takes a fair opportunity to pay a grateful compliment to the King, who had rewarded his merit: ‘These low-born railers have endeavoured, surely without effect, to alienate the affections of the people from the only King who for almost a century has much appeared to desire, or much endeavoured to deserve them.’ And, ‘Every honest man must lament, that the faction has been regarded with frigid neutrality by the Tories, who being long accustomed to signalise their principles by opposition to the Court, do not yet consider, that they have at last a King who knows not the name of party, and who wishes to be the common father of all his people.’

To this pamphlet, which was at once discovered to be Johnson’s, several answers came out, in which, care was taken to remind the publick of his former attacks upon government, and of his now being a pensioner, without allowing for the honourable terms upon which Johnson’s pension was granted and accepted, or the change of system which the British court had undergone upon the accession of his present Majesty. He was, however, soothed in the highest strain of panegyrick, in a poem called The Remonstrance, by the Rev. Mr. Stockdale, to whom he was, upon many occasions, a kind protector….³⁰

His Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland is a most valuable performance. It abounds in extensive philosophical views of society, and in ingenious sentiments and lively description. A considerable part of it, indeed, consists of speculations, which many years before he saw the wild regions which we visited together, probably had employed his attention, though the actual sight of those scenes undoubtedly quickened and augmented them. Mr. Orme, the very able historian,³¹ agreed with me in this opinion, which he thus strongly expressed:— ‘There are in that book thoughts, which, by long revolution in the great mind of Johnson, have been formed and polished like pebbles rolled in the ocean!’

That he was to some degree of excess a true-born Englishman,³² so as to have entertained an undue prejudice against both the country and the people of Scotland, must be allowed. But it was a prejudice of the head, and not of the heart. He had no ill will to the Scotch; for, if he had been conscious of that, he would never have thrown himself into the bosom of their country, and trusted to the protection of its remote inhabitants with a fearless confidence. His remark upon the nakedness of the country, from its being denuded of trees, was made after having travelled two

hundred miles along the eastern coast, where certainly trees are not to be found near the road; and he said it was ‘a map of the road’ which he gave. His disbelief of the authenticity of the poems ascribed to Ossian, a Highland bard, was confirmed in the course of his journey, by a very strict examination of the evidence offered for it; and although their authenticity was made too much a national point by the Scotch, there were many respectable persons in that country, who did not concur in this; so that his judgement upon the question ought not to be decried, even by those who differ from him. As to myself, I can only say, upon a subject now become very uninteresting, that when the fragments of Highland poetry first came out, I was much pleased with their wild peculiarity, and was one of those who subscribed to enable their editor, Mr. Macpherson, then a young man, to make a search in the Highlands and Hebrides for a long poem in the Erse language, which was reported to be preserved somewhere in those regions. But when there came forth an Epick Poem in six books, with all the common circumstances of former compositions of that nature; and when, upon an attentive examination of it, there was found a perpetual recurrence of the same images which appear in the fragments; and when no ancient manuscript, to authenticate the work, was deposited in any publick library, though that was insisted on as a reasonable proof, who could forbear to doubt?

Johnson’s grateful acknowledgements of kindnesses received in the course of this tour, completely refute the brutal reflections which have been thrown out against him, as if he had made an ungrateful return; and his delicacy in sparing in his book those who we find from his letters to Mrs. Thrale, were just objects of censure, is much to be admired. His candour and amiable disposition is conspicuous from his conduct, when informed by Mr. Macleod, of Rasay, that he had committed a mistake, which gave that gentleman some uneasiness. He wrote him a courteous and kind letter, and inserted in the news-papers an advertisement, correcting the mistake.

The observations of my friend Mr. Dempster³³ in a letter written to me, soon after he had read Dr. Johnson’s book, are so just and liberal, that they cannot be too often repeated:

There is nothing in the book, from beginning to end, that a Scotchman need to take amiss. What he says of the country is true; and his observations on the people are what must naturally occur to a sensible, observing, and reflecting inhabitant of a convenient metropolis, where a man on thirty pounds a year may be better accommodated with all the little wants of life, than Col or Sir Allan.

I am charmed with his researches concerning the Erse language, and the antiquity of their manuscripts. I am quite convinced; and I shall rank Ossian, and his Fingals and Oscars, amongst the nursery tales, not the true history of our country, in all time to come.

Upon the whole, the book cannot displease, for it has no pretensions. The author neither says he is a geographer, nor an antiquarian, nor very learned in the history of Scotland, nor a naturalist, nor a fossilist. The manners of the people, and the face of the country, are all he attempts to describe, or seems to have thought of. Much were it to be wished, that they who have travelled into more remote, and of course more curious regions, had all possessed his good sense. Of the state of learning, his observations on Glasgow University show he has formed a very sound judgement. He understands our climate too: and he has accurately observed the changes, however slow and imperceptible to us, which Scotland has undergone, in consequence of the blessings of liberty and internal peace.

Mr. Knox, another native of Scotland, who has since made the same tour, and published an account of it, is equally liberal.

I have read (says he,) his book again and again, travelled with him from Berwick to Glenelg, through countries with which I am well acquainted; sailed with him from Glenelg to Rasay, Sky, Rum, Col, Mull, and Icolmkill, but have not been able to correct him in any matter of consequence. I have often admired the accuracy, the precision, and the justness of what he advances, respecting both the country and the people.

The Doctor has every where delivered his sentiments with freedom, and in many instances with a seeming regard for the benefit of the inhabitants, and the ornament of the country. His remarks on the want of trees and hedges for shade, as well as for shelter to the cattle, are well founded, and merit the thanks, not the illiberal censure of the natives. He also felt for the distresses of the Highlanders, and explodes with great propriety the bad management of the grounds, and the neglect of timber in the Hebrides.

Having quoted Johnson’s just compliments on the Rasay family, he says,

On the other hand, I found this family equally lavish in their encomiums upon the Doctor’s conversation, and his subsequent civilities to a young gentleman of that country, who, upon waiting upon him at London, was well received, and experienced all the attention and regard that a warm friend could bestow. Mr. Macleod having also been in London, waited upon the Doctor, who provided a magnificent and expensive entertainment in honour of his old Hebridean acquaintance.

And talking of the military road by Fort Augustus, he says,

By this road, though one of the most rugged in Great Britain, the celebrated Dr. Johnson passed from Inverness to the Hebride Isles. His observations on the country and people are extremely correct, judicious, and instructive.³⁴

Mr. Tytler,³⁵ the acute and able vindicator of Mary Queen of Scots, in one of his letters to Mr. James Elphinstone, published in that gentleman’s Forty Years^’ Correspondence, says,

I read Dr. Johnson’s Tour with very great pleasure. Some few errours he has fallen into, but of no great importance, and those are lost in the numberless beauties of his work.

If I had leisure, I could perhaps point out the most exceptionable places; but at present I am in the country, and have not his book at hand. It is plain he meant to speak well of Scotland; and he has in my apprehension done us great honour in the most capital article, the character of the inhabitants.

His private letters to Mrs. Thrale, written during the course of his journey, which therefore may be supposed to convey his genuine feelings at the time, abound in such benignant sentiments towards the people who showed him civilities, that no man whose temper is not very harsh and sour, can retain a doubt of the goodness of his heart.

It is painful to recollect with what rancour he was assailed by numbers of shallow irritable North Britons, on account of his supposed injurious treatment of their country and countrymen, in his Journey. Had there been any just ground for such a charge, would the virtuous and candid Dempster have given his opinion of the book, in the terms which I have quoted? Would the patriotick Knox have spoken of it as he has done? Would Mr. Tytler, surely

—a Scot, if ever Scot there were,

have expressed himself thus? And let me add that, citizen of the world as I hold myself to be, I have that degree of predilection for my natale solum, nay, I have that just sense of the merit of an ancient nation, which has been ever renowned for its valour, which in former times maintained its independence against a powerful neighbour, and in modern times has been equally distinguished for its ingenuity and industry in civilized life, that I should have felt a generous indignation at any injustice done to it. Johnson treated Scotland no worse than he did even his best friends, whose characters he used to give as they appeared to him, both in light and shade. Some people, who had not exercised their minds sufficiently,

condemned him for censuring his friends. But Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose philosophical penetration and justness of thinking were not less known to those who lived with him, than his genius in his art is admired by the world, explained his conduct thus: ‘He was fond of discrimination, which he could not show without pointing out the bad as well as the good in every character; and as his friends were those whose characters he knew best, they afforded him the best opportunity for showing the acuteness of his judgement.’

He expressed to his friend Mr. Windham of Norfolk,³⁶ his wonder at the extreme jealousy of the Scotch, and their resentment at having their country described by him as it really was; when, to say that it was a country as good as England, would have been a gross falsehood. ‘None of us, (said he,) would be offended if a foreigner who has travelled here should say, that vines and olives don’t grow in England.’ And as to his prejudice against the Scotch, which I always ascribed to that nationality which he observed in them, he said to the same gentleman, ‘When I find a Scotchman, to whom an Englishman is as a Scotchman, that Scotchman shall be as an Englishman to me.’ His intimacy with many gentlemen of Scotland, and his employing so many natives of that country as his amanuenses,³⁷ prove that his prejudice was not virulent; and I have deposited in the British Museum, amongst other pieces of his writing, the following note in answer to one from me, asking if he would meet me at dinner at the Mitre, though a friend of mine, a Scotchman, was to be there:—

Mr. Johnson does not see why Mr. Boswell should suppose a Scotchman less acceptable than any other man. He will be at the Mitre.

My much-valued friend Dr. Barnard, now Bishop of Killaloe, having once expressed to him an apprehension, that if he should visit Ireland he might treat the people of that country more unfavourably than he had done the Scotch, he answered, with strong pointed double-edged wit, ‘Sir, you have no reason to be afraid of me. The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir; the Irish are a FAIR PEOPLE; —they never speak well of one another.’

Johnson told me an instance of Scottish nationality, which made a very unfavourable impression upon his mind. A Scotchman, of some consideration in London, solicited him to recommend, by the weight of

his learned authority, to be master of an English school, a person of whom he who recommended him confessed he knew no more but that he was his countryman. Johnson was shocked at this unconscientious conduct.

All the miserable cavillings against his Journey, in newspapers, magazines, and other fugitive publications, I can speak from certain knowledge, only furnished him with sport. At last there came out a scurrilous volume,³⁸ larger than Johnson’s own, filled with malignant abuse, under a name, real or fictitious, of some low man in an obscure corner of Scotland, though supposed to be the work of another Scotchman,³⁹ who has found means to make himself well known both in Scotland and England. The effect which it had upon Johnson was, to produce this pleasant observation to Mr. Seward, to whom he lent the book: ‘This fellow must be a blockhead. They don’t know how to go about their abuse. Who will read a five shilling book against me? No, Sir, if they had wit, they should have kept pelting me with pamphlets.’…

The doubts which, in my correspondence with him, I had ventured to state as to the justice and wisdom of the conduct of Great-Britain towards the American colonies, while I at the same time requested that he would enable me to inform myself upon that momentous subject, he had altogether disregarded; and had recently published a pamphlet, entitled, Taxation no Tyranny; an Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress [1775].

He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769, I was told by Dr. John Campbell, that he had said of them, ‘Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.’

Of this performance I avoided to talk with him; for I had now formed a clear and settled opinion, that the people of America were well warranted to resist a claim that their fellow-subjects in the mother-country should have the entire command of their fortunes, by taxing them without their own consent; and the extreme violence which it breathed, appeared to me so unsuitable to the mildness of a Christian philosopher, and so directly opposite to the principles of peace which he had so beautifully recommended in his pamphlet respecting Falkland’s Islands, that I was sorry to see him appear in so unfavourable a light. Besides, I could not perceive in it that ability of argument, or that felicity of expression, for which he was, upon other occasions, so eminent. Positive

assertion, sarcastical severity, and extravagant ridicule, which he himself reprobated as a test of truth, were united in this rhapsody….

His pamphlets in support of the measures of administration were published on his own account, and he afterwards collected them into a volume, with the title of Political Tracts, by the Authour of the Rambler [1776], with this motto:

Fallitur egregio quisquis sub Principe credit
Servitium; nunquam libertas gratior extat
Quam sub Rege pio. CLAUDIANUS.⁴⁰

These pamphlets drew upon him numerous attacks. Against the common weapons of literary warfare he was hardened; but there were two instances of animadversion which I communicated to him, and from what I could judge, both from his silence and his looks, appeared to me to impress him much.

One was, A Letter to Dr. Samuel Johnson, occasioned by his late political Publications. It appeared previous to his Taxation no Tyranny, and was written by Dr. Joseph Towers.⁴¹ In that performance, Dr. Johnson was treated with the respect due to so eminent a man, while his conduct as a political writer was boldly and pointedly arraigned, as inconsistent with the character of one, who, if he did employ his pen upon politicks,

It might reasonably be expected should distinguish himself, not by party violence and rancour, but by moderation and by wisdom.

It concluded thus:

[quotes ‘I would, however, wish’ to ‘the Patriot’. See above, pp. 224–5.]

I am willing to do justice to the merit of Dr. Towers, of whom I will say, that although I abhor his Whiggish democratical notions and propensities, (for I will not call them principles,) I esteem him as an ingenious, knowing, and very convivial man.

The other instance was a paragraph of a letter to me, from my old and most intimate friend, the Reverend Mr. Temple,⁴² who wrote the character of Gray, which has had the honour to be adopted both by Mr. Mason and Dr. Johnson in their accounts of that poet. The words were,

How can your great, I will not say your pious, but your moral friend, support the barbarous measures of administration, which they have not the face to ask even their infidel pensioner Hume to defend.

However confident of the rectitude of his own mind, Johnson may have felt sincere uneasiness that his conduct should be erroneously imputed to unworthy motives, by good men; and that the influence of his valuable writings should on that account be in any degree obstructed or lessened….

1781: ÆTAT. 72.] —In 1781 Johnson at last completed his Lives of the Poets, of which he gives this account: ‘Some time in March I finished the Lives of the Poets, which I wrote in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste.’ In a memorandum previous to this, he says of them: ‘Written, I hope, in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety.’

This is the work which of all Dr. Johnson’s writings will perhaps be read most generally, and with most pleasure. Philology and biography were his favourite pursuits, and those who lived most in intimacy with him, heard him upon all occasions, when there was a proper opportunity, take delight in expatiating upon the various merits of the English Poets: upon the niceties of their characters, and the events of their progress through the world which they contributed to illuminate. His mind was so full of that kind of information, and it was so well arranged in his memory, that in performing what he had undertaken in this way, he had little more to do than to put his thoughts upon paper, exhibiting first each Poet’s life, and then subjoining a critical examination of his genius and works. But when he began to write, the subject swelled in such a manner, that instead of prefaces to each poet, of no more than a few pages, as he had originally intended, he produced an ample, rich, and most entertaining view of them in every respect. In this he resembled Quintilian, who tells us, that in the composition of his Institutions of Oratory, ‘Latiùs se tamen aperiente materiâ, plus quàm imponebatur oneris sponte suscepi.’⁴³ The booksellers, justly sensible of the great additional value of the copy-right, presented him with another hundred pounds, over and above two hundred, for which his agreement was to furnish such prefaces as he thought fit.

This was, however, but a small recompence for such a collection of biography, and such principles and illustrations of criticism, as, if digested and arranged in one system, by some modern Aristotle or Longinus, might form a code upon that subject, such as no other nation can shew. As he was so good as to make me a present of the greatest part of the original, and indeed only manuscript of this admirable work, I have an

opportunity of observing with wonder the correctness with which he rapidly struck off such glowing composition….

The Life of Cowley he himself considered as the best of the whole, on account of the dissertation which it contains on the Metaphysical Poets. Dryden, whose critical abilities were equal to his poetical, had mentioned them in his excellent Dedication of his Juvenal, but had barely mentioned them. Johnson has exhibited them at large, with such happy illustration from their writings, and in so luminous a manner, that indeed he may be allowed the full merit of novelty, and to have discovered to us, as it were, a new planet in the poetical hemisphere….

So easy is his style in these Lives, that I do not recollect more than three uncommon or learned words;⁴⁴ one, when giving an account of the approach of Waller’s mortal disease, he says, ‘he found his legs grow tumid;’ by using the expression his legs swelled, he would have avoided this; and there would have been no impropriety in its being followed by the interesting question to his physician, ‘What that swelling meant?’ Another, when he mentions that Pope had emitted proposals; when published or issued would have been more readily understood; and a third, when he calls Orrery and Dr. Delany, writers both undoubtedly veracious; when true, honest, or faithful, might have been used. Yet, it must be owned, that none of these are hard or too big words; that custom would make them seem as easy as any others; and that a language is richer and capable of more beauty of expression, by having a greater variety of synonimes….

While the world in general was filled with admiration of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, there were narrow circles in which prejudice and resentment were fostered, and from which attacks of different sorts issued against him. By some violent Whigs he was arraigned of injustice to Milton; by some Cambridge men of depreciating Gray; and his expressing with a dignified freedom what he really thought of George, Lord Lyttelton, gave offence to some of the friends of that nobleman, and particularly produced a declaration of war against him from Mrs. Montagu, the ingenious Essayist on Shakspeare,⁴⁵ between whom and his Lordship a commerce of reciprocal compliments had long been carried on. In this war the smaller powers in alliance with him were of course led to engage, at least on the defensive, and thus I for one was excluded from the enjoyment of ‘A Feast of Reason,’ such as Mr.

Cumberland⁴⁶ has described, with a keen, yet just and delicate pen, in his Observer. These minute inconveniences gave not the least disturbance to Johnson. He nobly said, when I talked to him of the feeble, though shrill outcry which had been raised, ‘Sir, I considered myself as entrusted with a certain portion of truth. I have given my opinion sincerely; let them shew where they think me wrong.’…

The character of SAMUEL JOHNSON has, I trust, been so developed in the course of this work, that they who have honoured it with a perusal, may be considered as well acquainted with him. As, however, it may be expected that I should collect into one view the capital and distinguishing features of this extraordinary man, I shall endeavour to acquit myself of that part of my biographical undertaking, however difficult it may be to do that which many of my readers will do better for themselves.

His figure was large and well formed, and his countenance of the cast of an ancient statue; yet his appearance was rendered strange and somewhat uncouth, by convulsive cramps, by the scars of that distemper which it was once imagined the royal touch could cure, and by a slovenly mode of dress. He had the use only of one eye; yet so much does mind govern and even supply the deficiency of organs, that his visual perceptions, as far as they extended, were uncommonly quick and accurate. So morbid was his temperament, that he never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs: when he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters; when he rode, he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon. That with his constitution and habits of life he should have lived seventy-five years, is a proof that an inherent vivida vis⁴⁷ is a powerful preservative of the human frame.

Man is, in general, made up of contradictory qualities; and these will ever shew themselves in strange succession, where a consistency in appearance at least, if not in reality, has not been attained by long habits of philosophical discipline. In proportion to the native vigour of the mind, the contradictory qualities will be the more prominent, and more difficult to be adjusted; and, therefore, we are not to wonder, that Johnson exhibited an eminent example of this remark which I have made upon human nature. At different times, he seemed a different man, in some respects; not, however, in any great or essential article, upon which he had fully employed his mind, and settled certain principles of duty,

but only in his manners, and in the display of argument and fancy in his talk. He was prone to superstition, but not to credulity. Though his imagination might incline him to a belief of the marvellous and the mysterious, his vigorous reason examined the evidence with jealousy. He was a sincere and zealous Christian, of high Church-of-England and monarchial principles, which he would not tamely suffer to be questioned; and had, perhaps, at an early period, narrowed his mind somewhat too much, both as to religion and politicks. His being impressed with the danger of extreme latitude in either, though he was of a very independent spirit, occasioned his appearing somewhat unfavourable to the prevalence of that noble freedom of sentiment which is the best possession of man. Nor can it be denied, that he had many prejudices; which, however, frequently suggested many of his pointed sayings, that rather shew a playfulness of fancy than any settled malignity. He was steady and inflexible in maintaining the obligations of religion and morality; both from a regard for the order of society, and from a veneration for the GREAT SOURCE of all order; correct, nay stern in his taste; hard to please, and easily offended; impetuous and irritable in his temper, but of a most humane and benevolent heart, which shewed itself not only in a most liberal charity, as far as his circumstances would allow, but in a thousand instances of active benevolence. He was afflicted with a bodily disease, which made him often restless and fretful; and with a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking: we, therefore, ought not to wonder at his sallies of impatience and passion at any time; especially when provoked by obtrusive ignorance, or presuming petulance; and allowance must be made for his uttering hasty and satirical sallies even against his best friends. And, surely, when it is considered, that, ‘amidst sickness and sorrow,’⁴⁸ he exerted his faculties in so many works for the benefit of mankind, and particularly that he atchieved the great and admirable Dictionary of our language, we must be astonished at his resolution. The solemn text, ‘of him to whom so much is given, much will be required,’⁴⁹ seems to have been ever present to his mind, in a rigorous sense, and to have made him dissatisfied with his labours and acts of goodness, however comparatively great; so that the unavoidable consciousness of his superiority was, in that respect, a cause of disquiet. He suffered so much from this, and from the gloom which perpetually haunted him, and made solitude frightful, that it may be said of him, ‘If in

this life only he had hope, he was of all men most miserable.’⁵⁰ He loved praise, when it was brought to him; but was too proud to seek for it. He was somewhat susceptible of flattery. As he was general and unconfined in his studies, he cannot be considered as master of any one particular science; but he had accumulated a vast and various collection of learning and knowledge, which was so arranged in his mind, as to be ever in readiness to be brought forth. But his superiority over other learned men consisted chiefly in what may be called the art of thinking, the art of using his mind; a certain continual power of seizing the useful substance of all that he knew, and exhibiting it in a clear and forcible manner; so that knowledge, which we often see to be no better than lumber in men of dull understanding, was, in him, true, evident, and actual wisdom. His moral precepts are practical; for they are drawn from an intimate acquaintance with human nature. His maxims carry convictions; for they are founded on the basis of common sense, and a very attentive and minute survey of real life. His mind was so full of imagery, that he might have been perpetually a poet; yet it is remarkable, that, however rich his prose is in this respect, his poetical pieces, in general, have not much of that splendour, but are rather distinguished by strong sentiment, and acute observation, conveyed in harmonious and energetick verse, particularly in heroick couplets. Though usually grave, and even aweful, in his deportment, he possessed uncommon and peculiar powers of wit and humour; he frequently indulged himself in colloquial pleasantry; and the heartiest merriment was often enjoyed in his company; with this great advantage, that as it was entirely free from any poisonous tincture of vice or impiety, it was salutary to those who shared in it. He had accustomed himself to such accuracy in his common conversation, that he at all times expressed his thoughts with great force, and an elegant choice of language, the effect of which was aided by his having a loud voice, and a slow deliberate utterance. In him were united a most logical head with a most fertile imagination, which gave him an extraordinary advantage in arguing: for he could reason close or wide, as he saw best for the moment. Exulting in his intellectual strength and dexterity, he could, when he pleased, be the greatest sophist that ever contended in the lists of declamation; and, from a spirit of contradiction, and a delight in shewing his powers, he would often maintain the wrong side with equal warmth and ingenuity; so that, when there was an audience, his real opinions could seldom be gathered from his talk; though when he was in company with a single friend, he would discuss a subject with genuine

fairness: but he was too conscientious to make errour permanent and pernicious, by deliberately writing it; and, in all his numerous works, he earnestly inculcated what appeared to him to be the truth; his piety being constant, and the ruling principle of all his conduct.

Such was SAMUEL JOHNSON, a man whose talents, acquirements, and virtues, were so extraordinary, that the more his character is considered, the more he will be regarded by the present age, and by posterity, with admiration and reverence.

76. Anna Seward’s general estimate of Johnson

14 February 1796

Text from Letters, 1811, iv. 155–60.

14 February 1796, to ‘Mr. Laugh of the Dewar Club’:*

Sir,

THE majority are certainly right in this dispute about the meaning of the epitaph on Johnson. Dazzled by the splendour of his talents, admiration of a stupendous but imperfect Being has misled you; —has warped the judgment of a man of genius to put a forced construction upon a very obvious sense. If it was possible to construe, ‘he knew envy,’ as importing

his experience of it in others, yet how could the envy of others stain his spirit? If it had been written, ‘and though you vex’d his spirit, spare his dust,’ the meaning might have been equivocal; but with the word stained, dubious meaning cannot exist.

I have had frequent opportunities of conversing with that wonderful man. Seldom did I listen to him without admiring the great powers of his mind, and feeling concern and pain at the malignance of his disposition. He would sometimes be just to the virtues and literary fame of others, if they had not been praised in the conversation before his opinion was asked: —If they had been previously praised, never. His truth, so needlessly precise in common-life trifles, always yielded to the darkest jealousy I ever knew to exist in the bosom of genius. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and all the records of his own life and conversation, prove that envy did deeply stain his spirit.

Frank in avowing my sentiments, it has been my fate equally to contend with the prejudiced for and against Dr Johnson; with those who attest their faith in the moral and religious perfection of that sublime teacher of perfect morality, I allege proofs from my own experience, and the anecdotes of him which are before the world, that he had overbearing haughtiness of temper, uncharitable prejudices, and envy, which betrayed him into injustice concerning the lettered fame of the celebrated, and the virtues of those who differed from him in politics and religion; all which are incompatible with a uniformly good and noble mind.

With those who deem his writings turgid, elaborate, stiff, and pedantic; —who, as a serious essayist, exalt above him the comparatively feeble Addison; —who deny all degree of excellence to his poetry, and pronounce his taste for the art grovelling and undiscerning; —in short, who deny him every thing intellectually but memory and learning:— against these, I have always maintained, that his powers, and style, in moral declamation, are far superior to Addison’s, and indeed to that of every other essayist; —that his compositions are luminous, impressive, and harmonious; —that to them may be fairly imputed the immense improvement in English prose-writing within the last half-century; — that, by Latinizing our language, he has expanded its powers, and harmonized its sound. I have, indeed, granted that his style has no versatility; —that when he attempts to write in the character of others, he always fails; —that in the Lady Pekuah of Rasselas, and the Flavia and Flirtilla of the Rambler,¹ we always, as Mr Burke has observed, see the

enormous Johnson in petticoats; —yet have I asserted, that the dignity and grace with which he declaims, when writing on abstract themes, and in his own character—the happiness with which he unites efflorescence and strength in his diction, give him an high place on the list of genius; —that his poetry, if not quite first-rate, is very beautiful; — particularly, that the Vanity of Human Wishes, in which he is only indebted to Juvenal for the general idea, is an exquisite ethic poem, for I can hardly term it a satire, so gracefully does it seem to commiserate the presumptuous desires and rash pursuits of mankind.

To your question, Whom could Johnson envy? I answer, all his superiors in genius, all his equals; in short, at times, every celebrated author, living or dead.

You seem to think he has no superiors. —Great as I deem him, I cannot help feeling that he has superiors, and that in a very large degree, though they will not be found amongst our essayists, where I acknowledge his pre-eminence. Johnson was a very bright star; yet, to Shakespeare and Milton, he was but as a star to the sun.

Reflect, Sir, coolly, what are the constituent powers of superlative genius, and you will better appreciate its claims, than to assert that Johnson had no superiors. You will confess those powers to be creative fancy, —intuitive discernment into the subtlest recesses of the human heart; —exhaustless variety of style; —the Proteus ability of speaking the sentiments and language of every character, whether belonging to real or to imaginary existence; and that so naturally, as to make the reader feel that so must have spoken every man or woman, angel or fiend, fairy or monster, whose shape is assumed.

If these are the constituent powers of superlative genius, how fades the dazzling lustre of Johnson’s talents before that of Shakespeare’s and Milton’s!

Gray was indolent, and wrote but little; —yet that little proves him the first Genius of the period in which he lived. I have been assured that he had more learning than Johnson, and he certainly was a very superior poet. Johnson felt the superiority, and for that he hated him. It was that consciousness, I verily believe, which impelled him to speak with such audacious contempt of the first lyric compositions the world has seen, of loftier subjects than Pindar’s. Grander in point of imagery and language no odes can be than the odes of Gray.

Johnson’s first ambition was to be distinguished as a poet, and as a poet he was first celebrated. His fine satire, London, had considerable reputation; yet it neither eclipsed, nor had power to eclipse, the satires of Pope. As a dramatic poet he failed—the cold Irene, all whose personages speak the same spiritless, unnatural, though polished language, met almost total neglect. Hence originated his spleen to poets; that disappointment laid the train to his indignancy against those, who, in his primeval pursuit, had higher celebrity.

77. George Mason, Epitaph on Johnson

1796

Text from the Gentleman’s Magazine, lxvi (1796), 758–9.
The Gentleman’s Magazine—which, only two years before, published Thomas Tyers’s laudatory Biographical Sketch— reprinted this abusive epitaph from Mason’s edition of Poems of Thomas Hoccleve, 1796.

Here, peaceable at last
are deposited the remains
of Dr. Samuel Johnson,
the Poet
the Critic
the Periodical Essayist
the Novellist
the Politico-polemic,
the Lexicographer,
Topographer,
Biographer.
The Public taste
Patron of every novelty,
Cherished his writings for a while,
as most extraordinary specimens
of pedantic verbosity;
even the matchless insipidity of Rasselas
was tolerated.
His political and poetical talents
differed widely from each other.
A bigoted education
had taught him to maintain
long-exploded absurdities
in maxims of government.
His own failures in poetry
made him a perfect leveler
throughout the region of the Muses.
Incompetent critic from hebetude,
Credulous retailer of calumnies;
illiberal in his censures;
Cynical in his expressions;
he acquired the literary title of
Snarler General.
To the manes of poets
whom Johnson slandered in their graves,
be this an expiatory offering.

78. Richard Cumberland, Memoirs

1807

Extracts from Memoirs, 1807, i. 353–6, 360–4.
Cumberland (1732–1811) was dramatist, novelist, and translator of Aristophanes.

Who will say that Johnson himself would have been such a champion in literature, such a front-rank soldier in the fields of fame, if he had not been pressed into the service, and driven on to glory with the bayonet of sharp necessity pointed at his back? If fortune had turned him into a field of clover, he would have laid down and rolled in it. The mere manual labour of writing would not have allowed his lassitude and love of ease to have taken the pen out of the inkhorn, unless the cravings of hunger had reminded him that he must fill the sheet before he saw the table cloth. He might indeed have knocked down Osbourne for a blockhead, but he would not have knocked him down with a folio of his own writing.¹ He would perhaps have been the dictator of a club, and wherever he sate down to conversation, there must have been that splash of strong bold thought about him, that we might still have had a collectanea after his death; but of prose I guess not much, of works of labour none, of fancy perhaps something more, especially of poetry, which under favour I conceive was not his tower of strength. I think we should have had his Rasselas at all events, for he was likely enough to have written at Voltaire, and brought the question to the test, if infidelity is any aid to wit. An orator he must have been; not improbably a parliamentarian, and, if such, certainly an oppositionist, for he preferred to talk against the tide. He would indubitably have been no member of the Whig Club, no partisan of Wilkes, no friend of Hume, no believer in Macpherson; he would have put up prayers for early rising, and laid in bed all day, and with the most active resolutions possible been the most indolent mortal living. He was a good man by nature, a great man by genius, we are now to enquire what he was by compulsion.

Johnson’s first style was naturally energetic, his middle style was turgid to a fault, his latter style was softened down and harmonized into periods, more tuneful and more intelligible. His execution was rapid, yet his mind was not easily provoked into exertion; the variety we find in his writings was not the variety of choice arising from the impulse of his proper genius, but tasks imposed upon him by the dealers in ink, and contracts on his part submitted to in satisfaction of the pressing calls of hungry want; for, painful as it is to relate, I have heard that illustrious scholar assert (and he never varied from the truth of fact) that he subsisted himself for a considerable space of time upon the scanty pittance of four-pence halfpenny per day. How melancholy to reflect that his vast trunk and stimulating appetite were to be supported by what will barely feed the weaned infant! Less, much less, than Master Betty² has earned in one night, would have cheered the mighty mind, and maintained the athletic body of Samuel Johnson in comfort and abundance for a twelvemonth. Alas! I am not fit to paint his character; nor is there need of it; Etiam

mortuus loquitur:³ every man, who can buy a book, has bought a Boswell; Johnson is known to all the reading world….

The expanse of matter, which Johnson had found room for in his intellectual storehouse, the correctness with which he had assorted it, and the readiness with which he could turn to any article that he wanted to make present use of, were the properties in him, which I contemplated with the most admiration. Some have called him a savage; they were only so far right in the resemblance, as that, like the savage, he never came into suspicious company without his spear in his hand and his bow and quiver at his back. In quickness of intellect few ever equalled him, in profundity of erudition many have surpassed him. I do not think he had a pure and classical taste, nor was apt to be best pleased with the best authors, but as a general scholar he ranks very high. When I would have consulted him upon certain points of literature, whilst I was making my collections from the Greek dramatists for my essays in The Observer, he candidly acknowledged that his studies had not lain amongst them, and certain it is there is very little shew of literature in his Ramblers, and in the passage, where he quotes Aristotle,⁴ he has not correctly given the meaning of the original. But this was merely the result of haste and inattention, neither is he so to be measured, for he had so many parts and properties of scholarship about him, that you can only fairly review him as a man of general knowledge. As a poet his translations of Juvenal gave him a name in the world, and gained him the applause of Pope. He was a writer of tragedy, but his Irene gives him no conspicuous rank in that department. As an essayist he merits more consideration; his Ramblers are in every body’s hands; about them opinions vary, and I rather believe the style of these essays is not now considered as a good model; this he corrected in his more advanced age, as may be seen in his Lives of the Poets, where his diction, though occasionally elaborate and highly metaphorical, is not nearly so inflated and ponderous, as in the Ramblers. He was an acute and able critic; the enthusiastic admirers of Milton and the friends of Gray will have something to complain of, but criticism is a task, which no man executes to all men’s satisfaction. His selection of a certain passage in the Mourning Bride of Congreve, which he extols so rapturously,⁵ is certainly a most unfortunate sample; but unless the oversights of a critic are less pardonable than those of other men, we may pass this over in a work of merit, which abounds in

beauties far more prominent than its defects, and much more pleasing to contemplate. In works professedly of fancy he is not very copious; yet in his Rasselas we have much to admire, and enough to make us wish for more. It is the work of an illuminated mind, and offers many wise and deep reflections, cloathed in beautiful and harmonious diction. We are not indeed familiar with such personages as Johnson has imagined for the characters of his fable, but if we are not exceedingly interested in their story, we are infinitely gratified with their conversation and remarks. In conclusion, Johnson’s æra was not wanting in men to be distinguished for their talents, yet if one was to be selected out as the first great literary character of the time, I believe all voices would concur in naming him. Let me here insert the following lines, descriptive of his character, though not long since written by me and to be found in a public print——

On Samuel Johnson.
Herculean strength and a Stentorian voice,
Of wit a fund, of words a countless choice:
In learning rather various than profound,
In truth intrepid, in religion sound:
A trembling form and a distorted sight,
But firm in judgement and in genius bright;
In controversy seldom known to spare,
But humble as the Publican in prayer;
To more, than merited his kindness, kind,
And, though in manners, harsh, of friendly mind;
Deep ting’d with melancholy’s blackest shade,
And, though prepared to die, of death afraid—
Such Johnson was; of him with justice vain,
When will this nation see his like again?

79. Sir Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists

1821–4

Extracts from Lives of the Novelists, Paris, 1825, ii. 79–80, 86–90.
In the tradition of Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, Scott wrote a series of biographical and critical prefaces for Ballantyne’s ‘Novelists Library’. Johnson was included as the author of Rasselas. Scott’s opening paragraphs make it particularly clear that Boswell had provided spectacles through which succeeding generations viewed Johnson. See Introduction, p. 34.

Of all the men distinguished in this or any other age, Dr. Johnson has left upon posterity the strongest and most vivid impression, so far as person, manners, disposition, and conversation are concerned. We do but name him, or open a book which he has written, and the sound and action recall to the imagination at once his form, his merits, his peculiarities, nay, the very uncouthness of his gestures, and the deep impressive tone of his voice. We learn not only what he said, but how he said it; and have at the same time a shrewd guess of the secret motive why he did so, and whether he spoke in sport or in anger, in the desire of conviction, or for the love of debate. It was said of a noted wag that his bons-mots did not give full satisfaction when published because he could not print his face. But with respect to Dr. Johnson this has been in some degree accomplished; and although the greater part of the present generation never saw him, yet he is, in our mind’s eye, a personification as lively as that of Siddons in Lady Macbeth or Kemble in Cardinal Wolsey.

All this, as the world well knows, arises from Johnson having found in James Boswell such a biographer as no man but himself ever had or ever deserved to have. The performance which chiefly resembles it in structure is the life of the philosopher Demonax, in Lucian; but that slight sketch is far inferior in detail and in vivacity to Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which, considering the eminent persons to whom it relates, the quantity of miscellaneous information and entertaining gossip which it brings together, may be termed, without exception, the best parlour window book that ever was written….

When we consider the rank which Dr. Johnson held, not only in literature, but in society, we cannot help figuring him to ourselves as the benevolent giant of some fairy tale, whose kindnesses and courtesies are still mingled with a part of the rugged ferocity imputed to the fabulous sons of Anak, or rather, perhaps, like a Roman dictator, fetched from his farm, whose wisdom and heroism still relished of his rustic occupation. And there were times when, with all his wisdom, and all his wit, this rudeness of disposition, and the sacrifices and submissions which he unsparingly exacted, were so great that even Mrs. Thrale seems at length to have thought that the honour of being Johnson’s hostess was almost counter balanced by the tax which he exacted on her time and patience.

The cause of those deficiencies in temper and manners was no ignorance of what was fit to be done in society, or how far each individual ought to suppress his own wishes in favour of those with whom he associates; for, theoretically, no man understood the rules of good breeding better than Dr. Johnson, or could act more exactly in conformity with them, when the high rank of those with whom he was in company for the time required that he should do so. But during the greater part of his life he had been in a great measure a stranger to the higher society in which such restraint became necessary; and it may be fairly presumed that the indulgence of a variety of little selfish peculiarities, which it is the object of good breeding to suppress, became thus familiar to him. The consciousness of his own mental superiority in most companies which he frequented, contributed to his dogmatism; and when he had attained his eminence as a dictator in literature, like other potentates, he was not averse to a display of his authority: resembling, in this particular, Swift, and one or two other men of genius, who have had the bad taste to imagine that their talents elevated them above observance of the common rules of society. It must be also remarked that in Johnson’s time the literary society of London was much more confined than at present, and that he sat the Jupiter of a little circle, prompt, on the slightest contradiction, to launch the thunders of rebuke and sarcasm. He was, in a word, despotic, and despotism will occasionally lead the best dispositions into unbecoming abuse of power. It is not likely that any one will again enjoy, or have an opportunity of abusing, the singular degree of submission which was rendered to Johnson by all around him. The unreserved communications of friends, rather than the spleen of enemies, have occasioned his character being exposed in all its shadows, as well as its lights. But those, when summed and counted, amount only to a few narrow-minded prejudices concerning country and party, from which few ardent tempers remain entirely free, and some violences and solecisms in manners, which left his talents, morals, and benevolence, alike unimpeachable.

Of Rasselas, translated into so many languages, and so widely circulated through the literary world, the merits have been long justly appreciated. It was composed in solitude and sorrow; and the melancholy cast of feeling which it exhibits sufficiently evinces the temper of the author’s mind. The resemblance, in some respects, betwixt the tenor of the moral and that of Candide, is so striking, that Johnson himself admitted that if the authors could possibly have seen each other’s manuscript, they could not have escaped the charge of plagiarism. But they resemble each other like a wholesome and a poisonous fruit. The object of the witty Frenchman is to lead to a distrust of the wisdom of the Great Governor of the Universe, by presuming to arraign him of incapacity before the creatures of his will. Johnson uses arguments drawn from the same premises, with the benevolent view of encouraging men to look to another and a better world for the satisfaction of wishes which, in this, seem only to be awakened in order to be disappointed. The one is a fiend—a merry devil, we grant—who scoffs at and derides human miseries; the other, a friendly though grave philosopher, who shows us the nothingness of earthly hopes, to teach us that our affections ought to be placed elsewhere.

The work can scarce be termed a narrative, being in a great measure void of incident; it is rather a set of moral dialogues on the various vicissitudes of human life, its follies, its fears, its hopes, and its wishes, and the disappointment in which all terminate. The style is in Johnson’s best manner; enriched and rendered sonorous by the triads and quaternions which he so much loved, and balanced with an art which perhaps he derived from the learned Sir Thomas Browne. The reader may sometimes complain, with Boswell, that the unalleviated picture of human helplessness and misery leaves sadness upon the mind after perusal. But the moral is to be found in the conclusion of the Vanity of Human Wishes, a poem which treats of the same melancholy subject, and closes with this sublime strain of morality:—

[quotes final ten lines of the poem.]

80. Macaulay, review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Edinburgh Review

September 1831, liv, 1–38

Extracts from Critical and Historical Essays (second edition, 1843), i. 391–2, 396–407.
See Introduction, pp. 8, 34.

The characteristic peculiarity of [Johnson’s] 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 Genie, whose stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon.

[some contradictions among Johnson’s attitudes.]

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 vigour and an activity which ought to have 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 analyses and digests a vast mass of evidence, or reconciles a crowd of precedents which 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. He never examined foundations where a point was already ruled. His 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. He 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 than Virgil, he seems to have thought the Æneid 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 commendation, of 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 common-place, 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 criticized 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. He declared that he would not pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English epitaph on Goldsmith.¹ 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 Thermopylæ 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 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 defence 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;’² 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 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.’³ The fact was this: he 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 knowledge 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 Æschylus: he heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the street reciting the shield of Achilles, or the Death of Argus: he was a legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance, revenue, and war: he was a soldier, 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, 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 footguards 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.’⁴

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 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?’⁵ History was, in his opinion, to use the fine expression of Lord Plunkett, an old almanack: historians could, as he conceived, claim no higher dignity than that of almanack-makers; and his favourite 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.⁶

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 he saw no value in the shell. The real use of travelling to distant countries and of studying 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 neighbourhood, 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.⁷ 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. His letters from the Hebrides to Mrs. Thrale are the original of that work of which the Journey to the Hebrides 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.’⁸ 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.’⁹

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 Latin, and which, therefore, even when lawfully naturalised, 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,¹⁰ 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.’¹¹ 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.¹² Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the country-house of her relations, in such terms as these: ‘I was surprised, after the civilities of my first 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 gaiety 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 gaiety of

wit, and the timidity of love.’¹³ 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 humour 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 on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvass 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 snuff-box and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. 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 grey 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, 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.

81. Thomas Carlyle, review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Fraser’s Magazine

May 1832, v, 379–413

Extracts from Collected Works, 1869, iv. 42, 55–8, 77–81, 89–106.
Though he reinforced the myopic view of Johnson found in Macaulay’s review-essay, Carlyle (1795–1881) was more sensitive to the tragic depths in the English ‘Ulysses’. His was a highly subjective view; Johnson had been transformed into a Carlylean hero, as his appearance in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) later confirmed. Yet, despite the mannered style, there is a compelling force in the expression of Carlyle’s insights. See Introduction, pp. 8, 34

As for [Boswell’s Life] itself, questionless the universal favour entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century: all Johnson’s own Writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it; already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this generation; and for some future generation may be valuable chiefly as Prolegomena and expository Scholia to this Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which of us but remembers, as one of the sunny spots in his existence, the day when he opened these airy volumes, fascinating him by a true natural magic! It was as if the curtains of the Past were drawn aside, and we looked mysteriously into a kindred country, where dwelt our Fathers; inexpressibly dear to us, but which had seemed forever hidden from our eyes. For the dead Night had engulfed it; all was gone, vanished as if it had not been. Nevertheless, wondrously given back to us, there once more it lay; all bright, lucid, blooming; a little island of Creation amid the circumambient Void. There it still lies; like a thing stationary, imperishable, over which changeful Time were now accumulating itself in vain, and could not, any longer, harm it, or hide it….

Amid those dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and thither, whithersoever they are led; and seem all sightless and slavish, accomplishing, attempting little save what the animal instinct in its somewhat higher kind might teach, To keep themselves and their young ones alive, —are scattered here and there superior natures, whose eye is not destitute of free vision, nor their heart of free volition. These latter, therefore, examine and determine, not what others do, but what it is right to do; towards which, and which only, will they, with such force as is given them, resolutely endeavour: for if the Machine, living or inanimate, is merely fed, or desires to be fed, and so works; the Person can will, and so do. These are properly our Men, our Great Men; the guides of the dull host, —which follows them as by an irrevocable decree. They are the chosen of the world: they had this rare faculty not only of ‘supposing’ and ‘inclining to think,’ but of knowing and believing; the nature of their being was, that they lived not by Hearsay, but by clear Vision; while others hovered and swam along, in the grand Vanity-fair of the World, blinded by the mere Shows of things, these saw into the Things themselves, and could walk as men having an eternal loadstar, and with their feet on sure paths. Thus was there a Reality in their existence; something of a perennial character; in virtue of which indeed it is that the memory of them is perennial. Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or soot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it: though he have been crowned seven times in the Capitol, or seventy-and-seven times, and Rumour have blown his praises to all the four winds, deafening every ear therewith, —it avails not; there was nothing universal, nothing eternal in him; he must fade away, even as the Popinjay-gildings and Scarecrow-apparel, which he could not see through. The great man does, in good truth, belong to his own age; nay more so than any other man; being properly the synopsis and epitome of such age with its interests and influences: but belongs likewise to all ages, otherwise he is not great. What was transitory in him passes away; and an immortal part remains, the significance of which is in strict speech inexhaustible, —as that of every real object is. Aloft, conspicuous, on his enduring basis, he stands there, serene, unaltering; silently addresses to every new generation a new lesson and monition. Well is his Life worth writing, worth interpreting; and ever, in the new dialect of new times, of re-writing and re-interpreting.

Of such chosen men was Samuel Johnson: not ranking among the highest, or even the high, yet distinctly admitted into that sacred band; whose existence was no idle Dream, but a Reality which he transacted awake; nowise a Clothes-horse and Patent Digester, but a genuine Man. By nature he was gifted for the noblest of earthly tasks, that of Priesthood, and Guidance of mankind; by destiny, moreover, he was appointed to this task, and did actually, according to strength, fulfil the same: so that always the question, How; in what spirit; under what shape? remains for us to be asked and answered concerning him. For as the highest Gospel was a Biography, so is the Life of every good man still an indubitable Gospel, and preaches to the eye and heart and whole man, so that Devils even must believe and tremble, these gladdest tidings: ‘Man is heaven-born; not the thrall of Circumstances, of Necessity, but the victorious subduer thereof: behold how he can become the “Announcer of himself and of his Freedom;” and is ever what the Thinker has named him, “the Messias of Nature”.’ —Yes, Reader, all this that thou hast so often heard about ‘force of circumstances,’ ‘the creature of the time,’ ‘balancing of motives,’ and who knows what melancholy stuff to the like purport, wherein thou, as in a nightmare Dream, sittest paralysed, and hast no force left, —was in very truth, if Johnson and waking men are to be credited, little other than a hag-ridden vision of death-sleep; some half-fact, more fatal at times than a whole falsehood. Shake it off; awake; up and be doing, even as it is given thee!

The Contradiction which yawns wide enough in every Life, which it is the meaning and task of Life to reconcile, was in Johnson’s wider than in most. Seldom, for any man, has the contrast between the ethereal heavenward side of things, and the dark sordid earthward, been more glaring: whether we look at Nature’s work with him or Fortune’s, from first to last, heterogeneity, as of sunbeams and miry clay, is on all hands manifest. Whereby indeed, only this was declared, That much Life had been given him; many things to triumph over, a great work to do. Happily also he did it; better than the most.

Nature had given him a high, keen-visioned, almost poetic soul; yet withal imprisoned it in an inert, unsightly body: he that could never rest had not limbs that would move with him, but only roll and waddle: the inward eye, all-penetrating, all-embracing, must look through bodily windows that were dim, half-blinded; he so loved men, and ‘never once saw the human face divine’!¹ Not less did he prize the love of men; he was eminently social; the approbation of his fellows was dear to him, ‘valuable,’ as he owned, ‘if from the meanest of human beings:’ yet the first impression he produced on every man was to be one of aversion, almost of disgust. By Nature it was farther ordered that

the imperious Johnson should be born poor: the ruler-soul, strong in its native royalty, generous, uncontrollable, like the lion of the woods, was to be housed, then, in such a dwelling-place: of Disfigurement, Disease, and lastly of a Poverty which itself made him the servant of servants. Thus was the born king likewise a born slave: the divine spirit of Music must awake imprisoned amid dull-croaking universal Discords; the Ariel finds himself encased in the coarse hulls of a Caliban. So is it more or less, we know (and thou, O Reader, knowest and feelest even now), with all men: yet with the fewest men in any such degree as with Johnson.

[It was Johnson’s misfortune to encounter two major problems. First, with the decay of private patronage he had to become a professional writer and depend on public support. Second, his age was beset by ‘Hypocrisy and Atheism’, and traditional values both political and religions no longer commanded general acceptance.]

Such was that same ‘twofold Problem’ set before Samuel Johnson. Consider all these moral difficulties; and add to them the fearful aggravation, which lay in that other circumstance, that he needed a continual appeal to the Public, must continually produce a certain impression and conviction on the Public; that if he did not, he ceased to have ‘provision for the day that was passing over him,’ he could not any longer live! How a vulgar character, once launched into this wild element; driven onwards by Fear and Famine; without other aim than to clutch what Provender (of Enjoyment in any kind) he could get, always if possible keeping quite clear of the Gallows and Pillory, that is to say, minding heedfully both ‘person’ and ‘character,’ —would have floated hither and thither in it; and contrived to eat some three repasts daily, and wear some three suits yearly, and then to depart and disappear, having consumed his last ration: all this might be worth knowing, but were in itself a trivial knowledge. How a noble man, resolute for the Truth, to whom Shams and Lies were once for all an abomination, was to act in it: here lay the mystery. By what methods, by what gifts of eye and hand, does a heroic Samuel Johnson, now when cast forth into that waste Chaos of Authorship, maddest of things, a mingled Phlegethon and Fleet-ditch, with its floating lumber, and sea-krakens, and mud- spectres, —shape himself a voyage; of the transient drift-wood, and the enduring iron, build him a sea-worthy Life-boat, and sail therein, undrowned, unpolluted, through the roaring ‘mother of dead dogs,’ onwards to an eternal Landmark, and City that hath foundations? This high question is even the one answered in Boswell’s Book; which Book we therefore, not so falsely, have named a Heroic Poem; for in it there lies the whole argument of such. Glory to our brave Samuel! He accomplished this wonderful Problem; and now through long generations we point to him, and say: Here also was a Man; let the world once more have assurance of a Man!

Had there been in Johnson, now when afloat on that confusion worse confounded of grandeur and squalor, no light but an earthly outward one, he too must have made shipwreck. With his diseased body, and vehement voracious heart, how easy for him to become a carpe-diem² Philosopher, like the rest, and live and die as miserably as any Boyce³ of that Brotherhood! But happily there was a higher light for him; shining as a lamp to his path; which, in all paths, would teach him to act and walk not as a fool, but as wise, and in those evil days too ‘redeeming the time.’⁴ Under dimmer or clearer manifestations, a Truth had been revealed to him: I also am a Man; even in this unutterable element of Authorship, I may live as beseems a Man! That Wrong is not only different from Right, but that it is in strict scientific terms infinitely different; even as the gaining of the whole world set against the losing of one’s own soul, or (as Johnson had it) a Heaven set against a Hell; that in all situations out of the Pit of Tophet, wherein a living Man has stood or can stand, there is actually a Prize of quite infinite value placed within his reach, namely a Duty for him to do: this highest Gospel, which forms the basis and worth of all other Gospels whatsoever, had been revealed to Samuel Johnson; and the man had believed it, and laid it faithfully to heart. Such knowledge of the transcendental, immeasurable character of Duty we call the basis of all Gospels, the essence of all Religion: he who with his whole soul knows not this, as yet knows nothing, as yet is properly nothing.

This, happily for him, Johnson was one of those that knew: under a certain authentic Symbol it stood forever present to his eyes: a Symbol, indeed, waxing old as doth a garment; yet which had guided forward, as their Banner and celestial Pillar of Fire, innumerable saints and witnesses, the fathers of our modern world; and for him also had still a sacred significance. It does not appear that at any time Johnson was what we call irreligious: but in his sorrows and isolation, when hope died away, and only a long vista of suffering and toil lay before him to the

end, then first did Religion shine forth in its meek, everlasting clearness; even as the stars do in black night, which in the daytime and dusk were hidden by inferior lights. How a true man, in the midst of errors and uncertainties, shall work out for himself a sure Life-truth; and adjusting the transient to the eternal, amid the fragments of ruined Temples build up, with toil and pain, a little Altar for himself, and worship there; how Samuel Johnson, in the era of Voltaire, can purify and fortify his soul, and hold real communion with the Highest, ‘in the Church of St. Clement Danes:’⁵ this too stands all unfolded in his Biography, and is among the most touching and memorable things there; a thing to be looked at with pity, admiration, awe. Johnson’s Religion was as the light of life to him; without it his heart was all sick, dark and had no guidance left.

He is now enlisted, or impressed, into that unspeakable shoeblackseraph Army of Authors; but can feel hereby that he fights under a celestial flag, and will quit him like a man. The first grand requisite, an assured heart, he therefore has: what his outward equipments and accoutrements are, is the next question; an important, though inferior one. His intellectual stock, intrinsically viewed, is perhaps inconsiderable: the furnishings of an English School and English University; good knowledge of the Latin tongue, a more uncertain one of Greek: this is a rather slender stock of Education wherewith to front the world. But then it is to be remembered that his world was England; that such was the culture England commonly supplied and expected. Besides, Johnson has been a voracious reader, though a desultory one, and oftenest in strange scholastic, too obsolete Libraries; he has also rubbed shoulders with the press of Actual Life for some thirty years now: views or hallucinations of innumerable things are weltering to and fro in him. Above all, be his weapons what they may, he has an arm that can wield them. Nature has given him her choicest gift, —an open eye and heart. He will look on the world, wheresoever he can catch a glimpse of it, with eager curiosity: to the last, we find this a striking characteristic of him; for all human interests he has a sense; the meanest handicraftsman could interest him, even in extreme age, by speaking of his craft: the ways of men are all interesting to him; any human thing, that he did not know, he wished to know. Reflection, moreover, Meditation, was what he practised incessantly, with or without his will: for the mind of the man was earnest, deep as well as humane. Thus would the world, such fragments of it as he could survey, form itself, or continually tend

to form itself, into a coherent Whole; on any and on all phases of which, his vote and voice must be well worth listening to. As a Speaker of the Word, he will speak real words; no idle jargon or hollow triviality will issue from him. His aim too is clear, attainable; that of working for his wages: let him do this honestly, and all else will follow of its own accord.

With such omens, into such a warfare, did Johnson go forth. A rugged hungry Kerne or Gallowglass, as we called him: yet indomitable; in whom lay the true spirit of a Soldier.

[Further reflections on Johnson’s life as ‘a victorious Battle of a free, true Man’.]

To estimate the quantity of Work that Johnson performed, how much poorer the World were had it wanted him, can, as in all such cases, never be accurately done; cannot, till after some longer space, be approximately done. All work is as seed sown; it grows and spreads, and sows itself anew, and so, in endless palingenesia, lives and works. To Johnson’s Writings, good and solid, and still profitable as they are, we have already rated his Life and Conversation as superior. By the one and by the other, who shall compute what effects have been produced, and are still, and into deep Time, producing?

So much, however, we can already see: It is now some three quarters of a century that Johnson has been the Prophet of the English; the man by whose light the English people, in public and in private, more than by any other man’s, have guided their existence. Higher light than that immediately practical one; higher virtue than an honest PRUDENCE, he could not then communicate; nor perhaps could they have received: such light, such virtue, however, he did communicate. How to thread this labyrinthic Time, the fallen and falling Ruin of Times; to silence vain Scruples, hold firm to the last the fragments of old Belief, and with earnest eye still discern some glimpses of a true path, and go forward thereon, ‘in a world where there is much to be done, and little to be known:’⁶ this is what Samuel Johnson, by act and word, taught his Nation; what his Nation received and learned of him, more than of any other. We can view him as the preserver and transmitter of whatsoever was genuine in the spirit of Toryism; which genuine spirit, it is now becoming manifest, must again embody itself in all new forms of Society, be what they may, that are to exist, and have continuance— elsewhere than on Paper. The last in many things, Johnson was the last

genuine Tory; the last of Englishmen who, with strong voice and wholly-believing heart, preached the Doctrine of Standing-still; who, without selfishness or slavishness, reverenced the existing Powers, and could assert the privileges of rank, though himself poor, neglected and plebeian; who had heart-devoutness with heart-hatred of cant, was orthodox-religious with his eyes open; and in all things and everywhere spoke out in plain English, from a soul wherein jesuitism could find no harbour, and with the front and tone not of a diplomatist but of a man.

This last of the Tories was Johnson: not Burke, as is often said; Burke was essentially a Whig, and only, on reaching the verge of the chasm towards which Whiggism from the first was inevitably leading, recoiled; and, like a man vehement rather than earnest, a resplendent farsighted Rhetorician rather than a deep sure Thinker, recoiled with no measure, convulsively, and damaging what he drove back with him.

In a world which exists by the balance of Antagonisms, the respective merit of the Conservator and the Innovator must ever remain debatable. Great, in the mean while, and undoubted for both sides, is the merit of him who, in a day of Change, walks wisely, honestly. Johnson’s aim was in itself an impossible one: this of stemming the eternal Flood of Time; of clutching all things, and anchoring them down, and saying, Move not! —how could it, or should it, ever have success? The strongest man can but retard the current partially and for a short hour. Yet even in such shortest retardation may not an inestimable value lie? If England has escaped the blood-bath of a French Revolution; and may yet, in virtue of this delay and of the experience it has given, work out her deliverance calmly into a new Era, let Samuel Johnson, beyond all contemporary or succeeding men, have the praise for it. We said above that he was appointed to be Ruler of the British Nation for a season: whoso will look beyond the surface, into the heart of the world’s movements, may find that all Pitt Administrations, and Continental Subsidies, and Waterloo victories, rested on the possibility of making England, yet a little while, Toryish, Loyal to the Old; and this again on the anterior reality, that the Wise had found such Loyalty still practicable, and recommendable. England had its Hume, as France had its Voltaires and Diderots; but the Johnson was peculiar to us.

If we ask now, by what endowment it mainly was that Johnson realised such a Life for himself and others; what quality of character the main phenomena of his Life may be most naturally deduced from, and his other qualities most naturally subordinated to, in our conception of him, perhaps the answer were: The quality of Courage, of Valour; that Johnson was a Brave Man….

The Courage we desire and prize is not the Courage to die decently, but to live manfully. This, when by God’s grace it has been given, lies deep in the soul; like genial heat, fosters all other virtues and gifts; without it they could not live. In spite of our innumerable Waterloos and Peterloos, and such campaigning as there has been, this Courage we allude to, and call the only true one, is perhaps rarer in these last ages than it has been in any other since the Saxon Invasion under Hengist. Altogether extinct it can never be among men; otherwise the species Man were no longer for this world: here and there, in all times, under various guises, men are sent hither not only to demonstrate but exhibit it, and testify, as from heart to heart, that it is still possible, still practicable.

Johnson, in the eighteenth century, and as Man of Letters, was one of such; and, in good truth, ‘the bravest of the brave.’ What mortal could have more to war with? Yet, as we saw, he yielded not, faltered not; he fought, and even, such was his blessedness, prevailed. Whoso will understand what it is to have a man’s heart may find that, since the time of John Milton, no braver heart had beat in any English bosom than Samuel Johnson now bore. Observe too that he never called himself brave, never felt himself to be so; the more completely was so. No Giant Despair, no Golgotha Death-dance or Sorcerer’s-Sabbath of ‘Literary-Life in London,’ appals this pilgrim; he works resolutely for deliverance; in still defiance steps stoutly along. The thing that is given him to do, he can make himself do; what is to be endured, he can endure in silence.

[Johnson’s capacity for endurance.]

Closely connected with this quality of Valour, partly as springing from it, partly as protected by it, are the more recognisable qualities of Truthfulness in word and thought, and Honesty in action. There is a reciprocity of influence here: for as the realising of Truthfulness and Honesty is the life-light and great aim of Valour, so without Valour they cannot, in anywise, be realised. Now, in spite of all practical short-comings, no one that sees into the significance of Johnson will say that his prime object was not Truth. In conversation, doubtless, you may observe him, on occasion, fighting as if for victory; —and must pardon these ebulliences of a careless hour, which were not without temptation and provocation. Remark likewise two things: that such prize-arguings were ever on merely superficial debatable questions; and then that they were argued generally by the fair laws of battle and logic-fence, by one cunning in that same. If their purpose was excusable, their effect was harmless, perhaps beneficial: that of taming noisy mediocrity, and showing it another side of a debatable matter; to see both sides of which was, for the first time, to see the Truth of it. In his Writings themselves are errors enough, crabbed prepossessions enough; yet these also of a quite extraneous and accidental nature, nowhere a wilful shutting of the eyes to the Truth. Nay, is there not everywhere a heartfelt discernment, singular, almost admirable, if we consider through what confused conflicting lights and hallucinations it had to be attained, of the highest everlasting Truth, and beginning of all Truths: this namely, that man is ever, and even in the age of Wilkes and Whitefield, a Revelation of God to man; and lives, moves and has his being in Truth only; is either true, or, in strict speech, is not at all?

Quite spotless, on the other hand, is Johnson’s love of Truth, if we look at it as expressed in Practice, as what we have named Honesty of action. ‘Clear your mind of Cant;’⁷ clear it, throw Cant utterly away: such was his emphatic, repeated precept; and did not he himself faithfully conform to it? The Life of this man has been, as it were, turned inside out, and examined with microscopes by friend and foe; yet was there no Lie found in him. His Doings and Writings are not shows but performances: you may weigh them in the balance, and they will stand weight. Not a line, not a sentence is dishonestly done, is other than it pretends to be. Alas! and he wrote not out of inward inspiration, but to earn his wages: and with that grand perennial tide of ‘popular delusion’ flowing by; in whose waters he nevertheless refused to fish, to whose rich oyster-beds the dive was too muddy for him. Observe, again, with what innate hatred of Cant, he takes for himself, and offers to others, the lowest possible view of his business, which he followed with such nobleness. Motive for writing he had none, as he often said, but money; and yet he wrote so. Into the region of Poetic Art he indeed never rose; there was no ideal without him avowing itself in his work: the nobler was that unavowed ideal which lay within him, and commanded saying, Work out thy Artisanship in the spirit of an Artist! They who talk loudest about the dignity of Art, and fancy that they too are Artistic guild-brethren, and of the Celestials, —let them consider well what manner of man this was, who felt himself to be only a hired day-labourer. A labourer that was worthy of his hire; that has laboured not as an eye-servant but as one found faithful! Neither was Johnson in those days perhaps wholly a unique. Time was when, for money, you might have

ware: and needed not, in all departments, in that of the Epic Poem, in that of the Blacking-bottle, to rest content with the mere persuasion that you had ware. It was a happier time. But as yet the seventh Apocalyptic Bladder (of PUFFERY) had not been rent open, —to whirl and grind, as in a West-Indian Tornado, all earthly trades and things into wreck, and dust, and consummation, —and regeneration. Be it quickly, since it must be!—

That Mercy can dwell only with Valour, is an old sentiment or proposition; which in Johnson again receives confirmation. Few men on record have had a more merciful, tenderly affectionate nature than old Samuel. He was called the Bear;⁸ and did indeed too often look, and roar, like one; being forced to it in his own defence: yet within that shaggy exterior of his there beat a heart warm as a mother’s, soft as a little child’s. Nay generally, his very roaring was but the anger of affection: the rage of a Bear, if you will; but of a Bear bereaved of her whelps. Touch his Religion, glance at the Church of England, or the Divine Right; and he was upon you! These things were his Symbols of all that was good and precious for men; his very Ark of the Covenant: whoso laid hand on them tore asunder his heart of hearts. Not out of hatred to the opponent, but of love to the thing opposed, did Johnson grow cruel, fiercely contradictory: this is an important distinction; never to be forgotten in our censure of his conversational outrages. But observe also with what humanity, what openness of love, he can attach himself to all things: to a blind old woman, to a Doctor Levett, to a cat ‘Hodge.’ ‘His thoughts in the latter part of his life were frequently employed on his deceased friends; he often muttered these or suchlike sentences: “Poor man! and then he died.”’ How he patiently converts his poor home into a Lazaretto; endures, for long years, the contradiction of the miserable and unreasonable; with him unconnected, save that they had no other to yield them refuge! Generous old man! Worldly possession he has little; yet of this he gives freely; from his own hard-earned shilling, the half-pence for the poor, that ‘waited his coming out,’ are not withheld: the poor ‘waited the coming out’ of one not quite so poor! A Sterne can write sentimentalities on Dead Asses: Johnson has a rough voice; but he finds the wretched Daughter of Vice fallen down in the streets; carries her home on his own shoulders, and like a good Samaritan gives help to the help-needing, worthy or unworthy.⁹ Ought not Charity, even in that sense, to cover a multitude of sins? No Penny-a-

week Committee-Lady, no manager of Soup-Kitchens, dancer at Charity-Balls, was this rugged, stern-visaged man: but where, in all England, could there have been found another soul so full of Pity, a hand so heavenlike bounteous as his? The widow’s mite, we know, was greater than all the other gifts.

Perhaps it is this divine feeling of Affection, throughout manifested, that principally attracts us towards Johnson. A true brother of men is he; and filial lover of the Earth; who, with little bright spots of Attachment, ‘where lives and works some loved one,’ has beautified ‘this rough solitary Earth into a peopled garden.’ Lichfield, with its mostly dull and limited inhabitants, is to the last one of the sunny islets for him: Salve magna parens!¹⁰ Or read those Letters on his Mother’s death: what a genuine solemn grief and pity lies recorded there; a looking back into the Past, unspeakably mournful, unspeakably tender. And yet calm, sublime; for he must now act, not look; his venerated Mother has been taken from him; but he must now write a Rasselas to defray her funeral! Again in this little incident, recorded in his Book of Devotion, are not the tones of sacred Sorrow and Greatness deeper than in many a blank-verse Tragedy; —as, indeed, ‘the fifth act of a Tragedy,’ though unrhymed, does ‘lie in every death-bed, were it a peasant’s, and of straw’:

Sunday, October 18, 1767. Yesterday, at about ten in the morning, I took my leave forever of my dear old friend, Catherine Chambers, who came to live with my mother about 1724, and has been but little parted from us since. She buried my father, my brother and my mother. She is now fifty-eight years old.

I desired all to withdraw; then told her that we were to part forever; that as Christians, we should part with prayer; and that I would, if she was willing, say a short prayer beside her. She expressed great desire to hear me; and held up her poor hands as she lay in bed with great fervour, while I prayed kneeling by her.

I then kissed her. She told me that to part was the greatest pain she had ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet again in a better place. I expressed, with swelled eyes and great emotion of tenderness, the same hopes. We kissed and parted; I humbly hope, to meet again, and to part no more.¹¹

Tears trickling down the granite rock: a soft well of Pity springs within! —Still more tragical is this other scene: ‘Johnson mentioned that he could not in general accuse himself of having been an undutiful son. “Once, indeed,” said he, “I was disobedient: I refused to attend my father to Uttoxeter market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remembrance of it was painful. A few years ago I desired to atone for

this fault.”’¹² —But by what method? —What method was now possible? Hear it; the words are again given as his own, though here evidently by a less capable reporter:

Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure in the morning, but I was compelled to it by conscience. Fifty years ago, Madam, on this day, I committed a breach of filial piety. My father had been in the habit of attending Uttoxeter market, and opening a stall there for the sale of his Books. Confined by indisposition, he desired me, that day, to go and attend the stall in his place. My pride prevented me; I gave my father a refusal. —And now today I have been at Uttoxeter; I went into the market at the time of business, uncovered my head, and stood with it bare, for an hour, on the spot where my father’s stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory.¹³

Who does not figure to himself this spectacle, amid the ‘rainy weather, and the sneers,’ or wonder, ‘of the bystanders’? The memory of old Michael Johnson, rising from the far distance; sad-beckoning in the ‘moonlight of memory:’ how he had toiled faithfully hither and thither; patiently among the lowest of the low; been buffeted and beaten down, yet ever risen again, ever tried it anew—And oh, when the wearied old man, as Bookseller, or Hawker, or Tinker, or whatsoever it was that Fate had reduced him to, begged help of thee for one day, —how savage, diabolic, was that mean Vanity, which answered, No! He sleeps now; after life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well:¹⁴ but thou, O Merciless, how now wilt thou still the sting of that remembrance? —The picture of Samuel Johnson standing bareheaded in the market there, is one of the grandest and saddest we can paint. Repentance! Repentance! he proclaims, as with passionate sobs: but only to the ear of Heaven, if Heaven will give him audience: the earthly ear and heart, that should have heard it, are now closed, unresponsive forever.

That this so keen-loving, soft-trembling Affectionateness, the inmost essence of his being, must have looked forth, in one form or another, through Johnson’s whole character, practical and intellectual, modifying both, is not to be doubted. Yet through what singular distortions and superstitions, moping melancholies, blind habits, whims about ‘entering with the right foot,’ and ‘touching every post as he walked along;’¹⁵ and all the other mad chaotic lumber of a brain that, with sun-clear intellect, hovered forever on the verge of insanity, —must that same inmost essence have looked forth; unrecognisable to all but the most observant! Accordingly it was not recognised; Johnson passed not for a fine nature,

but for a dull, almost brutal one. Might not, for example, the first-fruit of such a Lovingness, coupled with his quick Insight, have been expected to be a peculiarly courteous demeanour as man among men? In Johnson’s ‘Politeness,’ which he often, to the wonder of some, asserted to be great,¹⁶ there was indeed somewhat that needed explanation. Nevertheless, if he insisted always on handing lady-visitors to their carriage; though with the certainty of collecting a mob of gazers in Fleet Street, — as might well be, the beau having on, by way of court-dress, ‘his rusty brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes for slippers, a little shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose:’¹⁷ —in all this we can see the spirit of true Politeness, only shining through a strange medium. Thus again, in his apartments, at one time, there were unfortunately no chairs. ‘A gentleman who frequently visited him whilst writing his Idlers, constantly found him at his desk, sitting on one with three legs; and on rising from it, he remarked that Johnson never forgot its defect; but would either hold it in his hand, or place it with great composure against some support; taking no notice of its imperfection to his visitor,’ —who meanwhile, we suppose, sat upon folios, or in the sartorial fashion. ‘It was remarkable in Johnson,’ continues Miss Reynolds (Renny dear), ‘that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence. Whether this was the effect of philosophic pride, or of some partial notion of his respecting high-breeding, is doubtful.’¹⁸ That it was, for one thing, the effect of genuine Politeness, is nowise doubtful. Not of the Pharisaical Brummellean Politeness, which would suffer crucifixion rather than ask twice for soup: but the noble universal Politeness of a man that knows the dignity of men, and feels his own; such as may be seen in the patriarchal bearing of an Indian Sachem; such as Johnson himself exhibited, when a sudden chance brought him into dialogue with his King.¹⁹ To us, with our view of the man, it nowise appears ‘strange’ that he should have boasted himself cunning in the laws of Politeness; nor ‘stranger still,’ habitually attentive to practise them.

More legibly is this influence of the Loving heart to be traced in his intellectual character. What, indeed, is the beginning of intellect, the first inducement to the exercise thereof, but attraction towards somewhat, affection for it? Thus too, who ever saw, or will see, any true talent, not to speak of genius, the foundation of which is not goodness, love? From Johnson’s strength of Affection, we deduce many of his intellectual

peculiarities; especially that threatening array of perversions, known under the name of ‘Johnson’s Prejudices.’ Looking well into the root from which these sprang, we have long ceased to view them with hostility, can pardon and reverently pity them. Consider with what force early-imbibed opinions must have clung to a soul of this Affection. Those evil-famed Prejudices of his, that Jacobitism, Church-of-Englandism, hatred of the Scotch, belief in Witches, and suchlike, what were they but the ordinary beliefs of well-doing, well-meaning provincial Englishmen in that day? First gathered by his Father’s hearth; round the kind ‘country fires’ of native Staffordshire; they grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength: they were hallowed by fondest sacred recollections; to part with them was parting with his heart’s blood. If the man who has no strength of Affection, strength of Belief, have no strength of Prejudice, let him thank Heaven for it, but to himself take small thanks.

Melancholy it was, indeed, that the noble Johnson could not work himself loose from these adhesions; that he could only purify them, and wear them with some nobleness. Yet let us understand how they grew out from the very centre of his being: nay moreover, how they came to cohere in him with what formed the business and worth of his Life, the sum of his whole Spiritual Endeavour. For it is on the same ground that he became throughout an Edifier and Repairer, not, as the others of his make were, a Puller-down; that in an age of universal Scepticism, England was still to produce its Believer. Mark too his candour even here; while a Dr. Adams, with placid surprise, asks, ‘Have we not evidence enough of the soul’s immortality?’ Johnson answers, ‘I wish for more.’²⁰

But the truth is, in Prejudice, as in all things, Johnson was the product of England; one of those good yeomen whose limbs were made in England: alas, the last of such Invincibles, their day being now done! His culture is wholly English; that not of a Thinker but of a ‘Scholar:’ his interests are wholly English; he sees and knows nothing but England; he is the John Bull of Spiritual Europe: let him live, love him, as he was and could not but be! Pitiable it is, no doubt, that a Samuel Johnson must confute Hume’s irreligious Philosophy by some ‘story from a Clergyman of the Bishoprick of Durham;’ should see nothing in the great Frederick but ‘Voltaire’s lackey;’ in Voltaire himself but a man acerrimi ingenii, paucarum literarum; in Rousseau but one worthy to be hanged; and in the universal, long-prepared, inevitable Tendency of European Thought but a green-sick milkmaid’s crotchet of, for variety’s sake, ‘milking the

Bull.’²¹ Our good, dear John! Observe too what it is that he sees in the city of Paris: no feeblest glimpse of those D’Alemberts and Diderots, or of the strange questionable work they did; solely some Benedictine Priests, to talk kitchen-latin with them about Editiones Principes.²² ‘Monsheer Nongtongpaw!’ —Our dear, foolish John: yet is there a lion’s heart within him! —Pitiable all these things were, we say; yet nowise inexcusable; nay, as basis or as foil to much else that was in Johnson, almost venerable. Ought we not, indeed, to honour England, and English Institutions and Way of Life, that they could still equip such a man; could furnish him in heart and head to be a Samuel Johnson, and yet to love them, and unyieldingly fight for them? What truth and living vigour must such Institutions once have had, when, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, there was still enough left in them for this!

It is worthy of note that, in our little British Isle, the two grand Antagonisms of Europe should have stood embodied, under their very highest concentration, in two men produced simultaneously among ourselves. Samuel Johnson and David Hume, as was observed, were children nearly of the same year: through life they were spectators of the same Life-movement; often inhabitants of the same city. Greater contrast, in all things, between two great men, could not be. Hume, well-born, competently provided for, whole in body and mind, of his own determination forces a way into Literature: Johnson, poor, moonstruck, diseased, forlorn, is forced into it ‘with the bayonet of necessity at his back.’ And what a part did they severally play there! As Johnson became the father of all succeeding Tories; so was Hume the father of all succeeding Whigs, for his own Jacobitism was but an accident, as worthy to be named Prejudice as any of Johnson’s. Again, if Johnson’s culture was exclusively English; Hume’s, in Scotland, became European; —for which reason too we find his influence spread deeply over all quarters of Europe, traceable deeply in all speculation, French, German, as well as domestic; while Johnson’s name, out of England, is hardly anywhere to be met with. In spiritual stature they are almost equal; both great, among the greatest: yet how unlike in likeness! Hume has the widest, methodising, comprehensive eye; Johnson the keenest for perspicacity and minute detail: so had, perhaps chiefly, their education ordered it. Neither of the two rose into Poetry; yet both to some approximation thereof; Hume to something of an Epic clearness and method, as in his delineation of the

Commonwealth Wars; Johnson to many a deep Lyric tone of plaintiveness and impetuous graceful power, scattered over his fugitive compositions. Both, rather to the general surprise, had a certain rugged Humour shining through their earnestness: the indication, indeed, that they were earnest men, and had subdued their wild world into a kind of temporary home and safe dwelling. Both were, by principle and habit, Stoics: yet Johnson with the greater merit, for he alone had very much to triumph over; farther, he alone ennobled his Stoicism into Devotion. To Johnson Life was as a Prison, to be endured with heroic faith: to Hume it was little more than a foolish Bartholomew-Fair Show-booth, with the foolish crowdings and elbowings of which it was not worth while to quarrel; the whole would break up, and be at liberty, so soon. Both realised the highest task of Manhood, that of living like men; each died not unfitly, in his way: Hume as one, with factitious, half-false gaiety, taking leave of what was itself wholly but a Lie: Johnson as one, with awe-struck, yet resolute and piously expectant heart, taking leave of a Reality, to enter a Reality still higher. Johnson had the harder problem of it, from first to last: whether, with some hesitation, we can admit that he was intrinsically the better-gifted, may remain undecided. These two men now rest; the one in Westminster Abbey here; the other in the Calton-Hill Churchyard of Edinburgh. Through Life they did not meet: as contrasts, ‘like in unlike,’ love each other; so might they two have loved, and communed kindly, —had not the terrestrial dross and darkness that was in them withstood! One day, their spirits, what Truth was in each, will be found working, living in harmony and free union, even here below. They were the two half-men of their time: whoso should combine the intrepid Candour and decisive scientific Clearness of Hume, with the Reverence, the Love and devout Humility of Johnson, were the whole man of a new time. Till such whole man arrive for us, and the distracted time admit of such, might the Heavens but bless poor England with half-men worthy to tie the shoe-latchets of these, resembling these even from afar! Be both attentively regarded, let the true Effort of both prosper; —and for the present, both take our affectionate farewell!