From Macaulay’s Essay on Croker’s Edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson — (Edinburgh Review, September, 1831)
1. The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has 5 distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
2. We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. 10 Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality 15 by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and 20 begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then “binding it as a crown unto him,” not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself, at the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known 5 by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a tale-bearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know 10 every body who was talked about, that, Tory and high Churchman as he was, he manœuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish distinctions, that when he had been to court, he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned 15 all the printer’s devils to admire his new ruffles and sword; such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be. Every thing which another man would have hidden, every thing the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation 20 to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayerbook and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, 25 how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at Johnson’s ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at 30 Lady Cork’s one evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all 5 his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself. 10
3. That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was 15 very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being
“Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll.”
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But 20 these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without 25 the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled 30 to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
4. Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence 5 as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. 10 To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above 15 the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation 20 and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.
5. Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, 25 are most utterly worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of the character of the writer. Bad in themselves, they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of Justice Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced consonants of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is the most 30 candid. Other men who have pretended to lay open their own hearts, Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron, have evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be then most distrusted when they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely any man who would not rather accuse himself of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous passions, than proclaim all his little vanities and wild fancies. It would be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those of Cæsar Borgia or Danton, than one who would publish a 5 daydream like those of Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most secret places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of love, were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell paraded before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because 10 the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirits prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous. His book resembles nothing so much as the conversation of the inmates of the Palace of Truth.
6. His fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt, be 15 lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed marvellously resembles infamy. We remember no other case in which the world has made so great a distinction between a book and its author. In general, the book and the author are considered as one. To admire the book is to admire the 20 author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the only exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be interesting, instructive, eminently original: yet it has brought him nothing but contempt. All the world reads it: all the world delights in it: yet we do not remember ever to 25 have read or ever to have heard any expression of respect and admiration for the man to whom we owe so much instruction and amusement. While edition after edition of his book was coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of it, and hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural 30 and reasonable. Sir Alexander saw that, in proportion to the celebrity of the work, was the degradation of the author. The very editors of this unfortunate gentleman’s books have forgotten their allegiance, and, like those Puritan casuists who took arms by the authority of the king against his person, have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings. Mr. Croker, for example, has published two thousand five hundred notes on the life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever mentions the biographer whose performance he has taken such 5 pains to illustrate without some expression of contempt.
7. An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the malignity of the most malignant satirist could scarcely cut deeper than his thoughtless loquacity. Having himself no sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it for granted 10 that all others were equally callous. He was not ashamed to exhibit himself to the whole world as a common spy, a common tattler, a humble companion without the excuse of poverty, and to tell a hundred stories of his own pertness and folly, and of the insults which his pertness and folly brought 15 upon him. It was natural that he should show little discretion in cases in which the feelings or the honour of others might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such stories respecting persons whom he professed to love and revere. He would infallibly have made his hero as contemptible 20 as he has made himself, had not his hero really possessed some moral and intellectual qualities of a very high order. The best proof that Johnson was really an extraordinary man is that his character, instead of being degraded, has, on the whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all 25 his vices and weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than they ever were exposed by Churchill or by Kenrick.
8. Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Every thing about him, 30 his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus’s dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his 5 vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood. But we have no minute information respecting those years of 10 Johnson’s life during which his character and his manners became immutably fixed. We know him, not as he was known to the men of his own generation, but as he was known to men whose father he might have been. That celebrated club of which he was the most distinguished member contained few 15 persons who could remember a time when his fame was not fully established and his habits completely formed. He had made himself a name in literature while Reynolds and the Wartons were still boys. He was about twenty years older than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton, about thirty 20 years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton, and about forty years older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and Windham. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from whom we derive most of our knowledge respecting him, never saw him till long after he was fifty years old, till most of his 25 great works had become classical, and till the pension bestowed on him by the Crown had placed him above poverty. Of those eminent men who were his most intimate associates towards the close of his life, the only one, as far as we remember, who knew him during the first ten or twelve years of his residence in the 30 capital, was David Garrick; and it does not appear that, during those years, David Garrick saw much of his fellow-townsman.
9. Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when the condition of a man of letters was most miserable and degraded. It was a dark night between two sunny days. The age of patronage had passed away. The age of general curiosity and intelligence had not arrived. The number of readers is at present so great that a popular author may subsist in comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the 5 reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First, even such men as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have been able to live like gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the deficiency of the natural demand for literature was, at the close of the seventeenth and at the beginning 10 of the eighteenth century, more than made up by artificial encouragement, by a vast system of bounties and premiums. There was, perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of literary merit were so splendid, at which men who could write well found such easy admittance into the most distinguished 15 society, and to the highest honours of the state. The chiefs of both the great parties into which the kingdom was divided patronised literature with emulous munificence. Congreve, when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for his first comedy with places which made him independent for 20 life. Smith, though his Hippolytus and Phædra failed, would have been consoled with three hundred a year but for his own folly. Rowe was not only Poet Laureate, but also land-surveyor of the customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the 25 Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissions of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of the Board of Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint. Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity 30 and importance. Gay, who commenced life as an apprentice to a silk mercer, became a secretary of legation at five-and-twenty. It was to a poem on the Death of Charles the Second, and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his introduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his Auditorship of the Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable prejudice of the queen, would have been a bishop. Oxford, with his white staff in his hand, passed through the crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that ingenious 5 writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of stamps and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was a commissioner of the customs, and auditor of the imprest. Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison was secretary of state. 10
10. This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it seems, by the magnificent Dorset, almost the only noble versifier in the court of Charles the Second who possessed talents for composition which were independent of the aid of a coronet. Montague owed his elevation to the favour of Dorset, and 15 imitated through the whole course of his life the liberality to which he was himself so greatly indebted. The Tory leaders, Harley and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs of the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. But soon after the accession of the House of Hanover a change 20 took place. The supreme power passed to a man who cared little for poetry or eloquence. The importance of the House of Commons was constantly on the increase. The government was under the necessity of bartering for Parliamentary support much of that patronage which had been employed in fostering 25 literary merit; and Walpole was by no means inclined to divert any part of the fund of corruption to purposes which he considered as idle. He had eminent talents for government and for debate. But he had paid little attention to books, and felt little respect for authors. One of the coarse jokes of 30 his friend, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, was far more pleasing to him than Thomson’s Seasons or Richardson’s Pamela. He had observed that some of the distinguished writers whom the favour of Halifax had turned into statesmen had been mere encumbrances to their party, dawdlers in office, and mutes in Parliament. During the whole course of his administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended a single man of genius. The best writers of the age gave all their support to the opposition, and contributed to excite that discontent 5 which, after plunging the nation into a foolish and unjust war, overthrew the minister to make room for men less able and equally immoral. The opposition could reward its eulogists with little more than promises and caresses. St. James’s would give nothing: Leicester House had nothing to give. 10
11. Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his literary career, a writer had little to hope from the patronage of powerful individuals. The patronage of the public did not yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of 15 considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more than provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvests was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is 20 squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow, familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King’s Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel 25 in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and they well might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to 30 translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George’s Fields, and from St. George’s Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin’s church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in a hospital and to be buried in a parish vault, was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, 5 and would have been intrusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row.
12. As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk 10 of life has its peculiar temptations. The literary character, assuredly, has always had its share of faults, vanity, jealousy, morbid sensibility. To these faults were now superadded the faults which are commonly found in men whose livelihood is precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the trial of 15 severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely less ruinous than the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a manner that it was almost certain to be abused. After months of 20 starvation and despair, a full third night or a well-received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with the images of which his mind had been haunted while he was sleeping amidst the cinders and eating potatoes at the 25 Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week of taverns soon qualified him for another year of night-cellars. Such was the life of Savage, of Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper 30 cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking Champagne and Tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house in Porridge island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste; they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a regular and frugal life with the same aversion which an old gipsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a stationary abode, and for the restraints and securities of civilised communities. They 5 were as untameable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom, as the wild ass. They could no more be broken in to the offices of social man than the unicorn could be trained to serve and abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered 10 to their necessities. To assist them was impossible; and the most benevolent of mankind at length became weary of giving relief which was dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon as it had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might 15 have supplied him for six months, it was instantly spent in strange freaks of sensuality, and before forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet was again pestering all his acquaintance for twopence to get a plate of shin of beef at a subterraneous cook-shop. If his friends gave him an asylum in their houses, 20 those houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and taverns. All order was destroyed; all business was suspended. The most good-natured host began to repent of his eagerness to serve a man of genius in distress when he heard his guest roaring for fresh punch at five o’clock in the morning. 25
13. A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had been raised above poverty by the active patronage which, in his youth, both the great political parties had extended to his Homer. Young had received the only pension ever bestowed, to the best of our recollection, by Sir Robert Walpole, as the 30 reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the many poets who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson in particular and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the means of subsistence from their political friends. Richardson, like a man of sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him, which his novels, admirable as they are, would scarcely have done. But nothing could be more deplorable than the state even of the ablest men, who at that time depended for subsistence on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding, and 5 Thomson, were certainly four of the most distinguished persons that England produced during the eighteenth century. It is well known that they were all four arrested for debt.
14. Into calamities and difficulties such as these Johnson plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that time till he was 10 three or four and fifty, we have little information respecting him; little, we mean, compared with the full and accurate information which we possess respecting his proceedings and habits towards the close of his life. He emerged at length from cock-lofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the 15 polished and the opulent. His fame was established. A pension sufficient for his wants had been conferred on him: and he came forth to astonish a generation with which he had almost as little in common as with Frenchmen or Spaniards.
15. In his early years he had occasionally seen the great; 20 but he had seen them as a beggar. He now came among them as a companion. The demand for amusement and instruction had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually increasing. The price of literary labour had risen; and those rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth 25 to associate were for the most part persons widely different from those who had walked about with him all night in the streets for want of a lodging. Burke, Robertson, the Wartons, Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir William Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill, were the most distinguished 30 writers of what may be called the second generation of the Johnsonian age. Of these men Churchill was the only one in whom we can trace the stronger lineaments of that character which, when Johnson first came up to London, was common among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt the pressure of severe poverty. Almost all had been early admitted into the most respectable society on an equal footing. They were men of quite a different species from the dependents of Curll and Osborne. 5
16. Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of a past age, the last survivor of the genuine race of Grub Street hacks; the last of that generation of authors whose abject misery and whose dissolute manners had furnished inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of Pope. From 10 nature he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution, and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings who were the companions 15 of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours, the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion, interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence, and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence, contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional 20 ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of his life, a complete original. An original he was, undoubtedly, in some respects. But if we possessed full information concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should 25 probably find that what we call his singularities of manner were, for the most part, failings which he had in common with the class to which he belonged. He ate at Streatham Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at St. John’s Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged 30 clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead, and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it, he drank it 5 greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The roughness and violence which he showed in society were to be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, 10 had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors, by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools, by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome 15 of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse, ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power, he should be “eo immitior, quia toleraverat,” that, though his 20 heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent relief. But for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts upon a delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of 25 suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary 30 out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that every body ought to be as much hardened to those vexations as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in 5 his phrase, “foppish lamentations,” which people ought to be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow. Goldsmith crying because the Good-natured Man had failed, inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary 10 losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary, moved him very little. People whose hearts had been softened by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh. He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady 15 Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord. Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small children, would not have sobbed herself to death.
17. A person who troubled himself so little about small 20 or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very attentive to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society. He could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand could make any man really unhappy. “My dear doctor,” said he to Goldsmith, “what harm does it do to a man to call 25 him Holofernes?” “Pooh, ma’am,” he exclaimed to Mrs. Carter, “who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?” Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things. Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence, but because small things appeared smaller to him than 30 to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence halfpenny a day.
18. The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the union of great powers with low prejudices. If we judged of him by the best parts of his mind, we should place him almost as high as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell; if by the worst parts of his mind, we should place him even below Boswell himself. Where he was not under the influence of some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless slave of the charm of Solomon.
19. Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity the evidence for all stories which were merely odd. But when they were not only odd but miraculous, his severity relaxed. 25 He began to be credulous precisely at the point where the most credulous people begin to be sceptical. It is curious to observe, both in his writings and in his conversation, the contrast between the disdainful manner in which he rejects unauthenticated anecdotes, even when they are consistent with the 30 general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he mentions the wildest stories relating to the invisible world. A man who told him of a waterspout or a meteoric stone generally had the lie direct given him for his pains. A man who told him of a prediction or a dream wonderfully accomplished was sure of a courteous hearing. “Johnson,” observed Hogarth, “like king David, says in his haste that all men are liars.” “His incredulity,” says Mrs. Thrale, “amounted almost to disease.” She tells us how he browbeat a gentleman, who 5 gave him an account of a hurricane in the West Indies, and a poor quaker who related some strange circumstance about the red-hot balls fired at the siege of Gibraltar. “It is not so. It cannot be true. Don’t tell that story again. You cannot think how poor a figure you make in telling it.” He once said, 10 half jestingly we suppose, that for six months he refused to credit the fact of the earthquake at Lisbon, and that he still believed the extent of the calamity to be greatly exaggerated. Yet he related with a grave face how old Mr. Cave of St. John’s Gate saw a ghost, and how this ghost was something of a shadowy 15 being. He went himself on a ghost hunt to Cock Lane, and was angry with John Wesley for not following up another scent of the same kind with proper spirit and perseverance. He rejects the Celtic genealogies and poems without the least hesitation; yet he declares himself willing to believe the stories of 20 the second sight. If he had examined the claims of the Highland seers with half the severity with which he sifted the evidence for the genuineness of Fingal, he would, we suspect, have come away from Scotland with a mind fully made up. In his Lives of the Poets, we find that he is unwilling to give credit 25 to the accounts of Lord Roscommon’s early proficiency in his studies; but he tells with great solemnity an absurd romance about some intelligence preternaturally impressed on the mind of that nobleman. He avows himself to be in great doubt about the truth of the story, and ends by warning his readers 30 not wholly to slight such impressions.
20. Many of his sentiments on religious subjects are worthy of a liberal and enlarged mind. He could discern clearly enough the folly and meanness of all bigotry except his own. When he spoke of the scruples of the Puritans, he spoke like a person who had really obtained an insight into the divine philosophy of the New Testament, and who considered Christianity as a noble scheme of government, tending to promote the happiness and to elevate the moral nature of man. The 5 horror which the sectaries felt for cards, Christmas ale, plum-porridge, mince-pies, and dancing-bears, excited his contempt. To the arguments urged by some very worthy people against showy dress he replied with admirable sense and spirit, “Let us not be found, when our Master calls us, stripping the lace 10 off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues. Alas! sir, the man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a grey one.” Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho, and carried his 15 zeal for ceremonies and for ecclesiastical dignities to lengths altogether inconsistent with reason or with Christian charity. He has gravely noted down in his diary that he once committed the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. In Scotland, he thought it his duty to pass several months without joining in 20 public worship, solely because the ministers of the kirk had not been ordained by bishops. His mode of estimating the piety of his neighbours was somewhat singular. “Campbell,” said he, “is a good man, a pious man. I am afraid he has not been in the inside of a church for many years; but he never 25 passes a church without pulling off his hat: this shows he has good principles.” Spain and Sicily must surely contain many pious robbers and well-principled assassins. Johnson could easily see that a Roundhead who named all his children after Solomon’s singers, and talked in the House of Commons about 30 seeking the Lord, might be an unprincipled villain whose religious mummeries only aggravated his guilt. But a man who took off his hat when he passed a church episcopally consecrated must be a good man, a pious man, a man of good principles. Johnson could easily see that those persons who looked on a dance or a laced waistcoat as sinful, deemed most ignobly of the attributes of God and of the ends of revelation. But with what a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for celebrating the redemption 5 of mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns.
21. Nobody spoke more contemptuously of the cant of patriotism. Nobody saw more clearly the error of those who regarded liberty, not as a means, but as an end, and who proposed to themselves, as the object of their pursuit, the 10 prosperity of the state as distinct from the prosperity of the individuals who compose the state. His calm and settled opinion seems to have been that forms of government have little or no influence on the happiness of society. This opinion, erroneous as it is, ought at least to have preserved him from all 15 intemperance on political questions. It did not, however, preserve him from the lowest, fiercest, and most absurd extravagances of party-spirit, from rants which, in every thing but the diction, resembled those of Squire Western. He was, as a politician, half ice and half fire. On the side of his intellect he was a 20 mere Pococurante, far too apathetic about public affairs, far too sceptical as to the good or evil tendency of any form of polity. His passions, on the contrary, were violent even to slaying against all who leaned to Whiggish principles. The well-known lines which he inserted in Goldsmith’s Traveller express 25 what seems to have been his deliberate judgment:
“How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!”
He had previously put expressions very similar into the mouth of Rasselas. It is amusing to contrast these passages with the 30 torrents of raving abuse which he poured forth against the Long Parliament and the American Congress. In one of the conversations reported by Boswell this inconsistency displays itself in the most ludicrous manner.
22. “Sir Adam Ferguson,” says Boswell, “suggested that luxury corrupts a people, and destroys the spirit of liberty. Johnson: ‘Sir, that is all visionary. I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. 5 Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman is prevented passing his life as he pleases?’ Sir Adam: ‘But, sir, in the British constitution it is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as to preserve a balance against the crown.’ Johnson: ‘Sir, I 10 perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough.’”
23. One of the old philosophers, Lord Bacon tells us, used to say that life and death were just the same to him. “Why, then,” said an objector, “do you not kill yourself?” The 15 philosopher answered, “Because it is just the same.” If the difference between two forms of government be not worth half a guinea, it is not easy to see how Whiggism can be viler than Toryism, or how the crown can have too little power. If the happiness of individuals is not affected by 20 political abuses, zeal for liberty is doubtless ridiculous. But zeal for monarchy must be equally so. No person would have been more quick-sighted than Johnson to such a contradiction as this in the logic of an antagonist.
24. The judgments which Johnson passed on books were, 25 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, 30 he displayed a vigour and an activity which ought to have enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him.
25. 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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 25 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. 30
26. 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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, 25 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, 30 just by chance. He despised the Fingal for the very reason which led many men of genius to admire it. He despised it, not because it was essentially commonplace, but because it had a superficial air of originality.
27. 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 criticised 5 Pope’s Epitaphs excellently. But his observations on Shakespeare’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. 10
28. 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 15 said, would disgrace Smollett. He declared that he would not pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English epitaph on Goldsmith. What reason there can be for celebrating a British writer in Latin, which there was not for covering the Roman arches of triumph with Greek inscriptions, or for 20 commemorating the deeds of the heroes of Thermopylæ in Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to imagine.
29. 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. 25 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 30 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. 5
30. 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 10 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 15 granted that every body who lived in the country was either stupid or miserable. “Country gentlemen,” said he, “must be unhappy; for they have not enough to keep their lives in motion”; as if all those peculiar habits and associations which made Fleet Street and Charing Cross the finest views in the 20 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 25 he used similar language. “The boasted Athenians,” he said, “were barbarians. The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing.” The fact was this: 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 30 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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.
31. Johnson’s friends have allowed that he carried to a 25 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 30 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 5 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 10 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 15 unjust. The French foot-guards are dressed in blue, and all the marching regiments in white, which has a very foolish appearance for soldiers; and as for blue regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the artillery.”
32. Johnson’s visit to the Hebrides introduced him to a 20 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 25 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. 30 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?” 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 5 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. 10
33. 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 15 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 20 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 25 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 30 Samuel Johnson in reality.
34. Johnson, as Mr. Burke most justly observed, appears far greater in Boswell’s books than in his own. His conversation appears to have been quite equal to his writings in matter, and far superior to them in manner. When he talked, he clothed his wit and his sense in forcible and natural expressions. As soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books are written in a learned language, in a language which 5 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 10 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. 15 “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 20 the forge.” Sometimes Johnson translated aloud. “The Rehearsal,” he said, very unjustly, “has not wit enough to keep it sweet”; then, after a pause, “it has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction.”
35. Mannerism is pardonable, and is sometimes even agreeable, 25 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 30 offensive. And such is the mannerism of Johnson.
36. 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 5 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, his antithetical forms of expression, 10 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 15 have been imitated by his admirers and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.
37. Goldsmith said to him, very wittily and very justly, “If you were to write a fable about little fishes, doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales.” No man surely 20 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 25 under every disguise. Euphelia and Rhodoclea talk as finely as Imlac the poet, or Seged, Emperor of Ethiopia. The gay Cornelia describes her reception at the 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 30 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, 5 and the vain, and had seen her regard solicited by the obsequiousness of gallantry, the gaiety of wit, and the timidity of love.” Surely Sir John Falstaff himself did not wear his petticoats with a worse grace. The reader may well cry out, with honest Sir Hugh Evans, “I like not when a ’oman has 10 a great peard: I spy a great peard under her muffler.”19
38. 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 15 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 20 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 25 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 30 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!”
39. What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man! To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and 5 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, 10 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 15 English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe.
Notes
Page 1. Line 4. Lichfield. Observe how near Lichfield comes to being in the exact center of England.
1 4–5. the midland counties. As you run your eye over the map, what counties should you naturally include under this head? In what county is Lichfield?
1 9. oracle. “Johnson, the Lichfield librarian, is now here; he propagates learning all over this diocese, and advanceth knowledge to its just height; all the clergy here are his pupils, and suck all they have from him.”—From a letter written by Rev. George Plaxton, quoted by Boswell.
1 10–11. a strong religious and political sympathy. Macaulay’s use of the article would lead us to think that the two kinds of sympathy were very closely connected. Michael Johnson was a member of the Established Church of England, and at heart a believer in the “divine right” kings. The student who is not familiar with the history of this period will do well to look up Jacobite in Brewer’s Historic Note-book and then to read in some brief history an account of the sovereigns in possession who followed James II,—William and Mary (1689–1702) and Anne (1702–1714). Boswell says, “He no doubt had an early attachment to the House of Stuart; but his zeal had cooled as his reason strengthened.”
1 16. In the child. Pause to take the glimpse ahead which this sentence gives. The construction helps one to remember the three kinds of peculiarities and the order in which they are mentioned.
2 26. Augustan delicacy of taste. You may read in Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities, in the article on Augustus Cæsar, how “the court of Augustus thus became a school of culture, where men of genius acquired that delicacy of taste, elevation of sentiment, and purity of expression which characterize the writers of the age.”
2 32. Petrarch. Does Macaulay imply that Petrarch is one of “the great restorers of learning”? See Renaissance in The Century Dictionary and Harper’s Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities. Note that Petrarch “may be said to have rediscovered Greek, which for some six centuries had been lost to the western world.” Keep in mind, too, that his friend and disciple, Boccaccio, translated Homer into Latin.
3 11. Pembroke College. The University of Oxford consists of twenty-one colleges which together form a corporate body. The colleges are “endowed by their founders and others with estates and benefices; out of the revenue arising from the estates, as well as other resources, the Heads and Senior and Junior Members on the foundation receive an income, and the expenses of the colleges are defrayed. Members not on the foundation, called ‘independent members,’ reside entirely at their own expense.” Among the members on the foundation are the Heads, Fellows, and Scholars.
3 17–18. Macrobius. A Roman grammarian who probably lived at the beginning of the fifth century.
3 20. about three years. Apparently Johnson remained at Oxford only fourteen months. See Dr. Hill’s Dr. Johnson, His Friends and His Critics.
4 1–2. “It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority.”—Johnson, quoted by Boswell. Although aware of what he considered the defects of his college, Johnson loved Pembroke as long as he lived. He delighted in boasting of its eminent graduates and would have left to it his house at Lichfield had not wiser friends induced him to bequeath it to some poor relatives.
4 15–16. his father died. “I now therefore see that I must make my own fortune. Meanwhile let me take care that the powers of my mind be not debilitated by poverty, and that indigence do not force me into any criminal act.”—Johnson, quoted by Boswell.
5 32. Walmesley. “I am not able to name a man of equal knowledge. His acquaintance with books was great, and what he did not immediately know, he could, at least, tell where to find.”—Johnson, quoted by Boswell.
6 13. Politian. Another of “the great restorers of learning” (see 2 31). His beginning of a translation of the Iliad into Latin attracted the attention of Lorenzo de’ Medici, under whose patronage he became one of the first scholars of Italy.
6 17. fell in love. Boswell says that Johnson’s early attachments to the fair sex were “very transient,” and considers it but natural that when the passion of love once seized him it should be exceedingly strong, concentrated as it was in one object.
6 22. Queensberrys and Lepels. Families of high rank in England.
7 3–4. half ludicrous. Carlyle says it is no matter for ridicule that the man “whose look all men both laughed at and shuddered at, should find any brave female heart, to acknowledge, at first sight and hearing of him, ‘This is the most sensible man I ever met with’; and then, with generous courage, to take him to itself, and say Be thou mine!... Johnson’s deathless affection for his Tetty was always venerable and noble.”
7 6–7. At Edial. Although this enterprise did not prosper, the man, as Carlyle says, “was to become a Teacher of grown gentlemen, in the most surprising way; a man of Letters, and Ruler of the British Nation for some time,—not of their bodies merely, but of their minds; not over them, but in them.”
7 13. David Garrick. The mere fact that this celebrated actor and successful manager brought out twenty-four of Shakspere’s plays is reason enough why we should look him up. A slight knowledge of his career enables one to enjoy all the more the frequent references to him in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. After reading the sketch in the Encyclopædia Britannica it would be a good plan to read Boswell’s references consecutively by means of the index.
8 9. Fielding. For an enjoyable short sketch of the first great English novelist, see Thackeray’s English Humourists.
8 10. The Beggar’s Opera, by John Gay, appeared in 1728.
8 19. knot. See The Century Dictionary.
8 34. Drury Lane. A street in the heart of the city, near the Strand,—one of the chief thoroughfares. It was beginning to lose its old-time respectability.
9 9. the sight of food. Once when Boswell was giving a dinner and one of the company was late, Boswell proposed to order dinner to be served, adding, “‘Ought six people to be kept waiting for one?’ ‘Why, yes,’ answered Johnson, with a delicate humanity, ‘if the one will suffer more by your sitting down than the six will do by waiting.’” Is it probable that Macaulay exaggerates?
9 27. Harleian Library. The library collected by Robert Harley, First Earl of Oxford. Osborne afterwards bought it and Johnson did some of the cataloguing for him. As to Osborne’s punishment, Boswell says: “The simple truth I had from Johnson himself. ‘Sir, he was impertinent to me, and I beat him. But it was not in his shop: it was in my own chamber.’”
10 6. Blefuscu, Mildendo. If Blefuscu and Mildendo look unfamiliar, go to Lilliput for them. (See Gulliver’s Travels.)
10 9. “Johnson told me, that as soon as he found that the speeches were thought genuine, he determined that he would write no more of them; for he ‘would not be accessory to the propagation of falsehood.’”—Boswell.
10 15. Cf. The Traveller. Do you suppose that either Johnson or Goldsmith really believed that one form of government is as good as another?
10 17. Montagues. See Shakspere’s Romeo and Juliet.
10 18. Greens. In Roman chariot races there was the bitterest rivalry between the different colors of the factions, and the betting often led to scenes of riot and bloodshed. Once in Justinian’s reign, in the great circus at Constantinople, the tumult was not suppressed till about thirty thousand of the rioters had been killed. See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Chapter XL.
10 22. Sacheverell. What do you gather from the context about this preacher? Was he high church? Did he preach resistance to the king?
10 31. Tom Tempest. See Johnson’s Idler, No. 10.
10 32. Laud. Read in Gardiner’s Student’s History of England the account of this archbishop who tried to enforce uniformity of worship.
11 2–4. Hampden, Falkland, Clarendon. In the case of these three statesmen, as well as in the case of Laud, the context shows which of them were supporters of Charles I and which resisted him. Does Macaulay imply that Johnson would have been excusable if he had sympathized with Hampden’s refusal to pay “ship money”?
11 5. Roundheads. If you do not know why they were so called, see The Century Dictionary.
11 20–21. Great Rebellion. If in doubt as to which rebellion Macaulay refers, see The Century Dictionary or Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
12 2, 8, 10. Juvenal. Dryden has translated five of the poems of this great Roman satirist. It is worth while to compare Johnson’s London, a free imitation of the Third Satire, with Dryden’s version. Johnson’s poem may be found in Hales’s Longer English Poems.
12 19. Boswell, too, asks us to remember Pope’s candor and liberal conduct on this occasion. Let us not forget it.
13 8. Psalmanazar. Pretending to be a Japanese, this Frenchman wrote what he called a History of Formosa. Although fabulous, it deceived the learned world.
13 14–15. blue ribands. Worn by members of the Order of the Garter.
13 16. Newgate. The notorious London prison.
13 26. Piazza here has its first meaning,—“an open square in a town surrounded by buildings or colonnades, a plaza.” This space was once the “convent” garden of the monks of Westminster. For a brief sketch of it down to the time its “coffee houses and taverns became the fashionable lounging-places for the authors, wits, and noted men of the kingdom,” see The Century Dictionary.
14 11–12. Grub Street. “Originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet.
‘I’d sooner ballads write, and grubstreet lays.’ Gay.”
—Johnson’s Dictionary, edition of 1773.
14 23. Warburton. Bishop Warburton thus praised Johnson in the Preface to his own edition of Shakspere, and Johnson showed his appreciation by saying to Boswell, “He praised me at a time when praise was of value to me.” On another occasion, when asked whether he considered Warburton a superior critic to Theobald, he replied, “He’d make two-and-fifty Theobalds, cut into slices!” Johnson’s sketch of him, in the Life of Pope, Boswell calls “the tribute due to him when he was no longer in ‘high place,’ but numbered with the dead.”
14 28–31. He employed six amanuenses, not a large number of assistants for a task of such magnitude. Nor was the sum of fifteen hundred guineas a generous one from which to pay these assistants.
14 33. Chesterfield. Every young man should read an abridged edition of Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son; for example, the volume in the Knickerbocker Nugget Series. It contains much that is worth remembering, and the style is entertaining.
15 17. It is hard to realize what a stupendous task Johnson undertook when he began his Dictionary. Other dictionaries, notably Bailey’s, were in existence, but they were mere beginnings of what he had in mind. As lists of words, with explanations of the meanings, they were useful, but none of them could reasonably be considered a standard. A standard Johnson’s certainly was. Although no etymologist, in general he not only gave full and clear definitions, but he chose remarkably happy illustrations of the meanings of words. By taking care, also, to select passages which were interesting and profitable reading as well as elegant English, he succeeded in making probably the most readable dictionary that has ever appeared.
15 23. For the Vanity of Human Wishes, see Hales’s Longer English Poems or Syle’s From Milton to Tennyson. As in the case of London, the student will wish to compare Dryden’s translation.
16 8–9. And this was eleven years after the London had appeared; as Boswell says, his fame was already established.
16 13. Goodman’s Fields. Garrick made this theater successful.
16 15. Drury Lane Theatre. Near Drury Lane. (See note to 8 34.) Other prominent actors in this famous old theatre were Kean, the Kembles, and Mrs. Siddons.
17 13. See page 7. The story on which Irene is based is as follows:—
Mahomet the Great, first emperor of the Turks, in the year 1453 laid siege to the city of Constantinople, then possessed by the Greeks, and, after an obstinate resistance, took and sacked it. Among the many young women whom the commanders thought fit to lay hands on and present to him was one named Irene, a Greek, of incomparable beauty and such rare perfection of body and mind, that the emperor, becoming enamored of her, neglected the care of his government and empire for two whole years, and thereby so exasperated the Janizaries, that they mutinied and threatened to dethrone him. To prevent this mischief, Mustapha Bassa, a person of great credit with him, undertook to represent to him the great danger to which he lay exposed by the indulgence of his passion: he called to his remembrance the character, actions, and achievements of his predecessors, and the state of his government; and, in short, so roused him from his lethargy, that he took a horrible resolution to silence the clamors of his people by the sacrifice of this admirable creature. Accordingly, he commanded her to be dressed and adorned in the richest manner that she and her attendants could devise, and against a certain hour issued orders for the nobility and leaders of his army to attend him in the great hall of his palace. When they were all assembled, himself appeared with great pomp and magnificence, leading his captive by the hand, unconscious of guilt and ignorant of his design. With a furious and menacing look, he gave the beholders to understand that he meant to remove the cause of their discontent; but bade them first view that lady, whom he held with his left hand, and say whether any of them, possessed of a jewel so rare and precious, would for any cause forego her; to which they answered that he had great reason for his affection toward her. To this the emperor replied that he would convince them that he was yet master of himself. And having so said, presently, with one of his hands catching the fair Greek by the hair of the head, and drawing his falchion with the other, he, at one blow, struck off her head, to the great terror of them all; and having so done, he said unto them, “Now by this judge whether your emperor is able to bridle his affections or not.”—Hawkins’s Life of Johnson.
17 20–21. Tatler, Spectator. It is to be hoped that the reader needs no introduction to these papers or to the account of them in Macaulay’s essay on Addison.
17 30. Rambler. A suitable title for a series of moral discourses? At the time of the undertaking he composed a prayer to the effect that he might in this way promote the glory of Almighty God and the salvation both of himself and others.—Prayers and Meditations, p. 9, quoted by Boswell.
17 31–32. Boswell considers it a strong confirmation of the truth of Johnson’s remark that “a man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it,” that “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.”
17 34. Richardson. Samuel Richardson. When he was a boy, the girls employed him to write love letters for them; and his novels, written in after life, also took the form of letters. He wrote Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded; Clarissa Harlowe, or the History of a Young Lady; and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (about 1750). Johnson called him “an author who has enlarged the knowledge of human nature and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.”
18 2. Young. Johnson held a high opinion of Edward Young’s most famous work, Night Thoughts, and Boswell writes, “No book whatever can be recommended to young persons, with better hopes of seasoning their minds with vital religion, than Young’s Night Thoughts.”—Hartley. David Hartley, prominent as a psychologist, and as a physician benevolent and studious. For intimate friends he chose such men as Warburton and Young.
18 3. Dodington. A member of Parliament who patronized men of letters and was complimented by Young and Fielding.
18 7. Frederic. When Frederick, Prince of Wales, became the center of the opposition to Walpole, in 1737, among the leaders of his political friends, called “the Leicester House Party,”—at that time Leicester House was the residence of the Prince of Wales,—were Chesterfield, William Pitt, and Bubb Dodington.
18 25. In regard to the use of antiquated and hard words, for which Johnson was censured, he says in Idler No. 90, “He that thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning.”
18 30–32. brilliancy... eloquence... humour. Johnson wrote many of these discourses so hastily, says Boswell, that he did not even read them over before they were printed. Boswell continues: “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.” One man who knew Johnson intimately observed “that he always talked as if he was talking upon oath.”
18 32–19 10. Cf. Johnson’s comment: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.”—Boswell, 1750.
19 1–2. Sir Roger, etc. These two sets of allusions offer a good excuse for handling complete editions of the Spectator and the Rambler.
19 21. the Gunnings. “The beautiful Misses Gunning,” two sisters, were born in Ireland. They went to London in 1751, were continually followed by crowds, and were called “the handsomest women alive.”—Lady Mary. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Let one of the encyclopædias introduce you to this relative of Fielding who laughed at Pope when he made love to her, and whose wit had full play in the brilliant letters from Constantinople which added greatly to her reputation as an independent thinker.
19 23–24. the Monthly Review. This Whig periodical would not appeal to Johnson as did its rival, the Critical Review. It was the Monthly that Goldsmith did hack work for. Smollett wrote for the other. See Irving’s Life of Goldsmith, Chapter VII.
19 31. It was published in 1755, price £4 10s., bound.
20 17. The letter, which needs no comment, is as follows:
February 7, 1755.
To the Right Honourable the Earl of Chesterfield.
My Lord,
I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the publick, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little accustomed to favours from the great, I know not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.
When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your address; and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself Le vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre;—that I might obtain that regard for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so little encouraged that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to continue it. When I had once addressed your Lordship in publick, I had exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly scholar can possess. I have done all that I could; and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.
Seven years, my Lord, have now past, since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a Patron before.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks.
Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron, which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.
Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with so much exultation,
My Lord,
Your Lordship’s most humble,
Most obedient servant,
Sam. Johnson.
20 24. Horne Tooke. A name assumed by John Horne, a politician and philologist whose career is briefly outlined in The Century Dictionary. The passage which so moved him follows.
In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the authour, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. It may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed, and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated knowledge, and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians, did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied criticks of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their work, were obliged to change its oeconomy, and give their second edition another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
This extract is taken from the fourth edition, London, MDCCLXXIII, the last to receive Johnson’s corrections. If you possibly can get the opportunity, turn these volumes over enough to find a few of the whimsical definitions, such, for example, as that of lexicographer, according to Johnson “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.” Other words worth looking up are excise, oats, and networks.
21 6. Junius and Skinner. Johnson frankly admitted that for etymologies he turned to the shelf which contained the etymological dictionaries of these seventeenth-century students of the Teutonic languages. This phase of dictionary making was not considered so deeply then as it is now.
21 13. spunging-houses. Johnson’s Dictionary says: “Spunging-house. A house to which debtors are taken before commitment to prison, where the bailiffs sponge upon them, or riot at their cost.”
21 26. Jenyns. This writer, who, according to Boswell, “could very happily play with a light subject,” ventured so far beyond his depth that it was easy for Johnson to expose him.
22 10. Rasselas. Had Johnson written nothing else, says Boswell, Rasselas “would have rendered his name immortal in the world of literature.... It has been translated into most, if not all, of the modern languages.”
22 12. Miss Lydia Languish. Of course plays are not necessarily written to be read, but Sheridan’s well-known comedy, The Rivals, is decidedly readable. Every one should be familiar with Miss Languish and Mrs. Malaprop.
23 8. Bruce. The Dictionary of National Biography says that James Bruce—whose Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile, five volumes, appeared in 1790—“will always remain the poet, and his work the epic, of African travel.”
23 13. Mrs. Lennox. A woman whose literary efforts Johnson encouraged so much as he did Mrs. Lennox’s is certainly worth looking up in the index to Boswell’s Johnson.—Mrs. Sheridan, the dramatist’s mother, gave Johnson many an entertaining evening in her home. She and her son entered heartily into the lively, stimulating conversations he loved.
23 25. Hector... Aristotle. The sacking of Troy is generally assigned to the twelfth century B.C. Aristotle lived eight centuries later.—Julio Romano. An Italian painter of the fifteenth century.
24 5. the Lord Privy Seal. Some documents require only the privy seal; others must have the great seal too. For Johnson’s admission that the printer was wise in striking out the reference alluded to, see the index to Boswell’s Johnson, under Gower.
24 14. Oxford. By recalling what Macaulay said in the early part of the essay (10 26, 27) about Oxford, and by bearing in mind what House [of Stuart? of Hanover?] George the Third belonged to, one sees point to “was becoming loyal.”
24 14–18. Study these four short sentences in connection with the preceding sentence beginning “George the Third.” To what extent are they a repetition? To what extent an explanation?
24 22. accepted. When, in answer to Johnson’s question to Lord Bute, “Pray, my Lord, what am I expected to do for this pension?” he received the ready reply, “It is not given you for anything you are to do, but for what you have done,” he hesitated no longer.
Three hundred a year was a large sum in Johnson’s eyes at that time. Whether he wrote less than he would have written without it may be questioned, says Mr. Hill, but he adds that probably “without the pension he would not have lived to write the second greatest of his works—the Lives of the Poets.”
25 19. a ghost... Cock Lane. If you will read Boswell’s account of the affair, you will probably conclude that Johnson was not quite so “weak” as Macaulay implies.
25 26. Churchill. One of the reigning wits of the day, Boswell says.
26 3. The preface. Other critics speak with more enthusiasm of the good sense and the clear expression of the preface, and find that these qualities are not altogether lacking in the notes.
26 8. Wilhelm Meister. The hero of Goethe’s novel of the same name. You may have read this passage on Hamlet in Rolfe’s edition (p. 14), quoted from Furness’s Hamlet, Vol. II, pp. 272 ff. Sprague also quotes it in his edition, p. 13.
26 26. Ben. The eighteenth-century Johnson has been followed by the nineteenth-century critics in putting a high estimate on the Jonson who wrote Every Man in His Humor. We are told that Shakspere took one of the parts in this play, acted in 1598. If you are not satisfied with the account in The Century Dictionary, or with any encyclopædia article, see The English Poets, edited by T. H. Ward, Vol. II (The Macmillan Company).
26 33–34. Æschylus, Euripides, Sophocles. Three great contemporary Greek tragedians.
27 3. Fletcher. Point out why an editor of Shakspere’s plays should be familiar with the work of this group of Elizabethan dramatists.
27 11. Royal Academy. “His Majesty having the preceding year [1768] instituted the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Johnson had won the honour of being appointed Professor in Ancient Literature.”—Boswell. Goldsmith was Professor in Ancient History in the same institution, and Boswell was Secretary for Foreign Correspondence. Look in The Century Dictionary under academy, the third meaning, and recall whatever you may have heard or read about the French Academy.
27 12. the King. “His Majesty expressed a desire to have the literary biography of this country ably executed, and proposed to Dr. Johnson to undertake it.”—Boswell. Read Boswell’s account of the interview. In consulting the index look under George III.
27 22. colloquial talents. Madame d’Arblay once said that Johnson had about him more “fun, and comical humour, and love of nonsense” than almost anybody else she ever saw.
28 23. Goldsmith. Macaulay’s article on Goldsmith in The Encyclopædia Britannica is short, and so thoroughly readable that there is no excuse for not being familiar with it. Boswell is continually giving interesting glimpses of Dr. Oliver Goldsmith, and by taking advantage of the index in the Life of Johnson one may in half an hour learn a great deal about this remarkable man. According to Boswell, “he had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged by the contemplation of such a model.”
28 24. Reynolds. We can learn from short articles about Sir Joshua’s career, but the index to Boswell’s Johnson will introduce us to the good times the great portrait painter had with the great conversationalist whom we are studying. Reynolds was the first proposer of the Club, and “there seems to have been hardly a day,” says Robina Napier, “when these friends did not meet in the painting room or in general society.” Ruskin says, “Titian paints nobler pictures and Vandyke had nobler subjects, but neither of them entered so subtly as Sir Joshua did into the minor varieties of human heart and temper.” The business of his art “was not to criticise, but to observe,” and for this purpose the hours he spent at the Club might be as profitable as those spent in his painting room. It will be interesting to make a list of some of the most notable “subjects” Reynolds painted.—Burke. Be sure to read Boswell’s account of the famous Round Robin. It will make you feel better acquainted with Burke, Johnson, Reynolds, and Goldsmith. The student will find valuable material in Professor Lamont’s edition of Burke’s Speech on Conciliation with America, published by Ginn & Company.
28 25. Gibbon. You noticed on the Round Robin the autograph of the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?
28 26. Jones. Sir William Henry Rich Jones was “the first English scholar to master Sanskrit, and to recognize its importance for comparative philology,” says The Century Dictionary.
29 9. Johnson’s Club. The Club still flourishes. Both Scott and Macaulay belonged to it.
29 14. James Boswell. “Out of the fifteen millions that then lived, and had bed and board, in the British Islands, this man has provided us a greater pleasure than any other individual, at whose cost we now enjoy ourselves; perhaps has done us a greater service than can be specially attributed to more than two or three: yet, ungrateful that we are, no written or spoken eulogy of James Boswell anywhere exists; his recompense in solid pudding (so far as copyright went) was not excessive; and as for the empty praise, it has altogether been denied him. Men are unwiser than children; they do not know the hand that feeds.”
So Carlyle writes of the man; the book, he says, is “beyond any other product of the eighteenth century”; it draws aside the curtains of the Past and gives us a picture which changeful Time cannot harm or hide. The picture charms generation after generation because it is true. “It is not speaking with exaggeration, but with strict measured sobriety, to say that this Book of Boswell’s will give us more real insight into the History of England during those days than twenty other Books, falsely entitled ‘Histories,’ which take to themselves that special aim.... The thing I want to see is not Redbook Lists, and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers, but the Life of Man in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its inward principle; how and what it was; whence it proceeded, whither it was tending....
“Hence, indeed, comes it that History, which should be ‘the essence of innumerable Biographies,’ will tell us, question it as we like, less than one genuine Biography may do, pleasantly and of its own accord!”
Mr. Leslie Stephen says that “Macaulay’s graphic description of his absurdities, and Carlyle’s more penetrating appreciation of his higher qualities, contain all that can be said”; but the more recent testimony of Dr. George B. Hill, in Dr. Johnson, His Friends and His Critics, should count for something. Dr. Hill points out that while Macaulay grants Boswell immortality he refuses him greatness, and calls attention to what he considers elements of greatness. In regard to the accuracy of a biographer who would “run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly,” he says: “That love, I might almost say that passion for accuracy, that distinguished Boswell in so high a degree does not belong to a mind that is either mean or feeble. Mean minds are indifferent to truth, and feeble minds can see no importance in a date.”
29 27. Wilkes. John Wilkes, a notorious politician, was imprisoned for writing an article in which he attacked George the Third. The liberty of the press was involved and Wilkes was released, much to the delight of the people. For a brief summary of the Bill of Rights, see Brewer’s Historic Note-book or A Handbook of English Political History, by Acland and Ransome.
29 29. Whitfield. Macaulay’s short sentence implies, does it not, that Whitfield (or Whitefield) was a noisy, open-air preacher among the Calvinistic Methodists? In testing the accuracy of this inference in The Encyclopædia Britannica or in Franklin’s Autobiography, note in what countries Whitefield preached, and where he died. Boswell quotes Johnson’s opinion of Whitefield in two places.
29 30. In a happy hour. May 16, 1763. By all means read Boswell’s account of the rough reception he received and the persistence necessary to secure the fastening.
31 14. pity... esteem. The Thrales were not alone in overlooking these oddities. “His tricks and contortions, a subject for pity not ridicule,” says Mr. Hoste, “were ignored by the celebrated wits and beauties who visited him in his gloomy ‘den,’ and by the duchesses and other distinguished ladies who gathered ‘four and five deep’ around him at fashionable assemblies, hanging on his sentences, and contended for the nearest places to his chair.”
31 15. Southwark. South of the commercial center of London and across the Thames.
31 16. Streatham. About five miles southwest of London City. The Southwark apartment was in a commercial district; the Streatham apartment in a thinly settled residential suburb.
31 34. Maccaroni. See The Century Dictionary or Brewer’s Handbook of Phrase and Fable.
32 21. Levett. Of Levett, Goldsmith said to Boswell, “He is poor and honest, which is recommendation enough to Johnson.”
32 30. the Mitre Tavern. “The Mitre Tavern still stands in Fleet Street: but where now is its Scot-and-lot paying, beef-and-ale loving, cock-hatted, potbellied Landlord; its rosy-faced, assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-pans, waxed tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and bootjacks, and errand-boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-on? Gone! Gone! The becking waiter, that with wreathed smiles was wont to spread for Samuel and Bozzy their ‘supper of the gods,’ has long since pocketed his last sixpence; and vanished, six-pences and all, like a ghost at cockcrowing.” Yet, Carlyle goes on to say, thanks to this book of Boswell’s, “they who are gone are still here; though hidden they are revealed, though dead they yet speak.”
33 27. Hebrides. Locate these picturesque islands on the map.
34 10. Lord Mansfield. William Murray, chief justice of the King’s Bench from 1756 to 1788, has been called “the founder of English commercial law.”
34 23. Macpherson. In 1760 James Macpherson published what purported to be fragments of Gaelic verse with translations. These were so interesting that he was sent to the Highlands to hunt for more, and within three years he published the Poems of Ossian, consisting of two epics, “Fingal” and “Temora.” Their genuineness has been discussed ever since. Evidently Johnson settled the matter to his own satisfaction and to Macaulay’s, and you may be interested in what Boswell has to say. At the same time it seems clear that Johnson went too far in his charge of forgery. Macpherson probably did not find a complete epic, yet he undoubtedly found some Gaelic poetry.
34 27. contemptuous terms. Boswell gives the following letter:
Mr. James Macpherson,
I received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall not be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian.
What would you have me retract? I thought your book an imposture; I think it an imposture still. For this opinion I have given my reasons to the publick, which I here dare you to refute. Your rage I defy. Your abilities, since your Homer, are not so formidable; and what I hear of your morals, inclines me to pay regard not to what you shall say, but to what you shall prove. You may print this if you will.
Sam. Johnson.
35 11–12. The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, and Hendersons. If Johnson and Macaulay do not tell enough about these men, Boswell does.
35 30. Bentley. Richard Bentley (1662–1742), a well-known English classical scholar and critic.
36 13. Taxation no Tyranny. The rest of the title is An Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress.
37 6. Wilson. Richard Wilson was one of the greatest English landscape painters, says The Dictionary of National Biography.
37 14. Cowley. The man who wrote
God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.
37 18. Restoration. The International Dictionary offers a brief explanation in case you are not absolutely certain of the exact meaning.
37 23. Walmesley. See note to 5 32.—Button’s. Button’s coffeehouse flourished earlier in the century. Do you remember any other reference to it? to Will’s? to Child’s?—Cibber. Colley Cibber, actor and dramatist, altered and adapted some of Shakspere’s plays. Both Johnson and Boswell express their opinions of him frankly enough. He was appointed poet laureate in 1730.
37 25. Orrery. Orrery did more than enjoy this privilege,—he wrote a book entitled Remarks on the Life and Writings of Jonathan Swift. Boswell records Johnson’s opinion of it. What other great literary men enjoyed the society of Swift? The Century Dictionary gives a column to Swift, and Johnson has a sketch in his Lives of the Poets.
37 26. services of no very honourable kind. By supplying Pope with private intelligence for his Dunciad he “gained the esteem of Pope and the enmity of his victims.”
38 32. Malone. Edmund Malone was a friend of Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds. He wrote a supplement to Johnson’s edition of Shakspere, published an edition of Reynolds’s works, and after bringing out his own edition of Shakspere, left material for another edition, which was published by James Boswell the younger in 1821. Boswell’s Malone, the “third variorum” edition, is generally considered the best. To Boswell the elder, an intimate friend, he was of much assistance in preparing the Life of Johnson, and he edited with valuable notes the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth reissues of the work.
40 21–22. In a solemn and tender prayer.
Almighty God, Father of all mercy, help me by thy grace, that I may, with humble and sincere thankfulness, remember the comforts and conveniences which I have enjoyed at this place; and that I may resign them with holy submission, equally trusting in thy protection when thou givest, and when thou takest away. Have mercy upon me, O Lord, have mercy upon me.
To thy fatherly protection, O Lord, I commend this family. Bless, guide, and defend them, that they may so pass through this world, as finally to enjoy in thy presence everlasting happiness, for Jesus Christ’s sake, Amen.—Boswell’s Johnson.
41 1. Italian fiddler. A violinist of much talent. Piozzi was the music master from Brescia who, a little over three years after Mr. Thrale’s death, married the widow. After learning what you can from Boswell, you will enjoy some such account as the Encyclopædia Britannica offers. While doing your reading it may be well to keep in mind what two or three critics have said. Mr. Mowbray Morris writes: “After all the abuse showered on the unfortunate woman it is pleasant to know that the marriage proved a happy one in every respect. Piozzi, who was really a well-mannered, amiable man, took every care of his wife’s fortune, and on their return to England her family and friends were soon reconciled to him.” Mr. Leslie Stephen says: “Her love of Piozzi, which was both warm and permanent, is the most amiable feature of her character.” Mr. Herbert Paul, after praising Macaulay’s Life of Johnson, adds, “Yet, if I may say so, I can never forgive Macaulay for his cruel and unaccountable injustice to Mrs. Thrale.”
41 3. the Ephesian matron. She cared so much for her husband that she went into the vault to die with him, and there, in the midst of her violent grief, fell in love with a soldier who was guarding some dead bodies near by. For the story (told by a Latin writer, Petronius), see Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, Chapter V, section 8.—the two pictures. In Act III.
42 2. Burke parted from him. After twenty-seven years of uninterrupted friendship with Johnson, says Robina Napier.—Windham. The Right Hon. William Windham, a member of the Club, a friend of Malone, Burke, Fox, and Pitt; in 1794 Secretary at War (Pitt’s ministry), in 1806 War and Colonial Secretary (Lord Grenville’s ministry); in the words of Macaulay, “the first gentleman of his age, the ingenious, the chivalrous, the high-souled Windham.” Johnson wrote him appreciative letters in August and October, 1784. See Boswell.
42 4. Frances Burney. In Macaulay’s essay on Madame d’Arblay, he says: “Her appearance is an important epoch in our literary history. Evelina was the first tale written by a woman, and purporting to be a picture of life and manners, that lived or deserved to live.” Read this account of the “timid and obscure girl” who suddenly “found herself on the highest pinnacle of fame,” eulogized by such men as Burke, Windham, Gibbon, Reynolds, and Sheridan.
42 6. Langton. See page 30.
42 10–11. his temper. In connection with this closing sentence let us remember a paragraph from Boswell (1776):
“That he was occasionally remarkable for violence of temper may be granted: but let us ascertain the degree, and not let it be supposed that he was in a perpetual rage, and never without a club in his hand to knock down every one who approached him. On the contrary, the truth is, that by much the greatest part of his time he was civil, obliging, nay, polite in the true sense of the word; so much so, that many gentlemen who were long acquainted with him never received, or even heard a strong expression from him.”
Footnotes
1 Trevelyan, Life and Letters, I, 41.
2 Trevelyan, I, 47.
3 The entire letter is interesting. See Trevelyan, I, 56. The letters of this period are particularly attractive.
4 Ibid. I, 91.
5 Trevelyan, I, 102. The letters from college are well worth reading.
6 Trevelyan, I, 136.
7 Ibid., 179.
8 Trevelyan, I, 249–253.
9 Trevelyan, I, 368.
10 Ibid., II, 68.
11 Trevelyan, II, 89.
12 Carlyle’s Essay on Burns, p. 5, Ginn’s edition.
13 Trevelyan, II. 96.
14 For Trevelyan’s evidence, see II, 191.
15 Trevelyan, II, 244.
16 Ibid., 321.
17 Trevelyan, II, 15.
18 The Quarterly Review, July, 1876.
19 It is proper to observe that this passage bears a very close resemblance to a passage in the Rambler (No. 20). The resemblance may possibly be the effect of unconscious plagiarism.—Macaulay.