1709, Sept. 18, Johnson born at Lichfield. 1728, goes to Oxford. 1735, translates Lobo’s “Abyssinia;” Marries. 1737, goes to London with Garrick. 1738, publishes “London.” 1739, publishes two political pamphlets: “The Complete Vindication and Marmor Norfolciense.” 1740–3, writes Debates in Magna Lilliputia for “Gentleman’s Magazine.” 1744, “Life of Mr. Richard Savage.” 1745, “Miscellaneous Observations on Macbeth.” 1747, “Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language.” 1748, writes “Vanity of Human Wishes.” 1749, “Vanity of Human Wishes” published, “Irene” (written 1736) acted. 1750–2, “The Rambler.” 1752, his wife dies. 1752–3, contributes to Hawkesworth’s “Adventurer.” 1755, publishes “The Dictionary.” 1756, issues “Proposals for an Edition of Shakespeare.” 1758–60, writes “The Idler” for the “Universal Chronicle.” 1759, his mother dies; publishes “The Prince of Abyssinia.” 1762, granted a pension. 1763, meets Boswell. 1764, the Literary club is founded; Johnson meets the Thrales. 1765, “Edition of Shakespeare.” 1770, “The False Alarm.” 1771, “Thoughts on the Late Transactions respecting the Falkland Islands.” 1773, tour to Scotland and the Hebrides. 1774, “The Patriot;” tour to North Wales. 1775, “Taxation no Tyranny;” “Journey to the Western Islands.” 1776, “Political Tracts.” 1777, begins “Lives of Poets.” 1779, publishes four volumes of “Lives;” 1781, last six volumes of “Lives;” Thrale dies. 1784, Mrs. Thrale becomes Mrs. Piozzi; Dec. 13, Johnson dies. 1785, Johnson’s “Prayers and Meditations” published; Boswell publishes “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides;” 1788–9, Johnson’s “Sermons.” 1791, Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” 1816, Johnson’s “Diary in North Wales.”

Personal

  He and another neighbour of mine, one Mr. Johnson, set out this morning for London together: Davy Garrick to be with you early the next week; and Mr. Johnson to try his fate with a tragedy, and to see to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French. Johnson is a very good scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a fine tragedy writer.

  That great CHAM of literature.

  I hope Johnson is a writer of reputation, because, as a writer, he has just got a pension of 300l. per annum. I hope, too, that he has become a friend to this constitution and the family on the throne, now he is thus nobly provided for; but I know he has much to unwrite, more to unsay, before he will be forgiven by the true friends of the present illustrious family for what he has been writing and saying for many years.

  The day after I wrote my last letter to you I was introduced to Mr. Johnson by a friend: we passed through three very dirty rooms to a little one that looked like an old counting-house, where this great man was sat at his breakfast. The furniture of this room was a very large deal writing-desk, an old walnut-tree table, and five ragged chairs of four different sets. I was very much struck with Mr. Johnson’s appearance, and could hardly help thinking him a madman for some time, as he sat waving over his breakfast like a lunatic. He is a very large man, and was dressed in a dirty brown coat and waistcoat, with breeches that were brown also (though they had been crimson), and an old black wig: his shirt collar and sleeves were unbuttoned; his stockings were down about his feet, which had on them, by way of slippers, an old pair of shoes. He had not been up long when we called on him, which was near one o’clock: he seldom goes to bed till near two in the morning; and Mr. Reynolds tells me he generally drinks tea about an hour after he has supped. We had been some time with him before he began to talk, but at length he began, and, faith, to some purpose! everything he says is as correct as a second edition: ’tis almost impossible to argue with him, he is so sententious and so knowing.

	Here Johnson comes—unblest with outward grace,
	His rigid morals stamped upon his face;
	While strong conceptions struggle in his brain,
	(For even wit is brought to bed with pain).
	To view him porters with their loads would rest,
	And babes cling, frightened, to the nurses’ breast;
	With looks convuls’d he roars in pompous strain,
	And like an angry lion shakes his mane.
	Thy Nine, with terror struck, who ne’er had seen
	Aught human with so terrible a mien,
	Debating, whether they should stay or run—
	Virtue steps forth and claims him for her son.

  Johnson, you are the very man Lord Chesterfield describes:—a Hottentot indeed, and tho’ your abilities are respectable, you never can be respected yourself. He has the aspect of an Idiot, without the faintest ray of sense gleaming from any one feature—with the most awkward garb, and unpowdered grey wig, on one side only of his head—he is for ever dancing the devil’s jig, and sometimes he makes the most driveling effort to whistle some thought in his absent paroxysms. He came up to me and took me by the hand, then sat down on a sofa, and mumbled out that he had heard two papers had appeared against him in the course of this week—one of which was—that he was to go to Ireland next summer in order to abuse the hospitality of that place also. His awkwardness at table is just what Chesterfield described, and his roughness of manners kept pace with that. When Mrs. Thrale quoted something from Foster’s Sermons, he flew in a passion and said that Foster was a man of mean ability, and of no original thinking. All which tho’ I took to be most true, yet I held it not meet to have it so set down.

  The time is again at which, since the death of my poor dear Tetty, on whom God have mercy, I have annually commemorated the mystery of Redemption, and annually purposed to amend my life. My reigning sin, to which perhaps many others are appendant, is waste of time, and general sluggishness, to which I was always inclined, and in part of my life have been almost compelled by morbid melancholy and disturbance of mind. Melancholy has had in me its paroxysms and remissions, but I have not improved the intervals, nor sufficiently resisted my natural inclination, or sickly habits. I will resolve henceforth to rise at eight in the morning, so far as resolution is proper, and will pray that God will strengthen me. I have begun this morning.

  He is, indeed, very ill-favoured; is tall and stout; but stoops terribly; he is almost bent double. His mouth is almost [constantly opening and shutting], as if he was chewing. He has a strange method of frequently twirling his fingers, and twisting his hands. His body is in continual agitation, sea-sawing up and down; his feet are never a moment quiet; and, in short, his whole person is in perpetual motion. His dress, too, considering the times, and that he had meant to put on his best becomes, being engaged to dine in a large company, was as much out of the common road as his figure; he had a large wig, snuff-coloured coat, and gold buttons; but no ruffles to his [shirt] doughty fists, and black worsted stockings. He is shockingly near-sighted, and did not, till she held out her hand to him, even know Mrs. Thrale.

  Dr. Johnson is as correct and elegant in his common conversation as in his writings. He never seems to study either for thoughts or words; and is on all occasions so fluent, so well-informed, so accurate, and even eloquent, that I never left his company without regret. Sir Josh. Reynolds told me that from his first outset in life, he had always had this character; and by what means he had attained it. He told him he had early laid it down, as a fixed rule, always to do his best, on every occasion and in every company, to impart whatever he knew in the best language he could put it in; and that by constant practice, and never suffering any careless expression to escape him, or attempting to deliver his thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner he could, it was now become habitual to him. I have observed, in my various visits to him, that he never relaxes in this respect. When first introduced I was very young; yet he was as accurate in his conversation as if he had been talking with the first scholar in England. I have always found him very communicative; ready to give his opinion on any subject that was mentioned. He seldom however starts a subject himself; but it is very easy to lead him into one.

  I have lately been in the almost daily habit of contemplating a very melancholy spectacle. The great Johnson is here, labouring under the paroxysms of a disease which must speedily be fatal. He shrinks from the consciousness with the extremest horror. It is by his repeatedly expressed desire that I visit him often: yet I am sure he neither does, nor ever did, feel much regard for me; but he would fain escape, for a time, in any society, from the terrible idea of his approaching dissolution. I never would be awed, by his sarcasm or his frowns, into acquiescence with his general injustice to the merits of other writers, with his national or party aversions; but I feel the truest compassion for his present sufferings, and fervently wish I had power to relieve them…. His memory is considerably impaired, but his eloquence rolls on in its customary majestic torrent, when he speaks at all. My heart aches to see him labour for his breath, which he draws with great effort. It is not improbable that this literary comet may set where it rose, and Lichfield receives his pale and stern remains.

  Poor dear Johnson! he is past all hope. The dropsy has brought him to the point of death; his legs are scarified: but nothing will do. I have, however, the comfort to hear that his dread of dying is in a great measure subdued; and now he says “the bitterness of death is past.” He sent the other day for Sir Joshua; and after much serious conversation told him he had three favours to beg of him, and he hoped he would not refuse a dying friend, be they what they would. Sir Joshua promised. The first was that he would never paint on a Sunday; the second that he would forgive him thirty pounds that he had lent him, as he wanted to leave them to a distressed family; the third was that he would read the bible whenever he had an opportunity; and that he would never omit it on a Sunday. There was no difficulty but upon the first point; but at length Sir Joshua promised to gratify him in all. How delighted should I be to hear the dying discourse of this great and good man, especially now that faith has subdued his fears. I wish I could see him.

  45 minutes past 10 P.M.—While I was writing the adjoining articles I received the fatal account, so long dreaded, that Dr. Johnson was no more! May those prayers which he incessantly poured from a heart fraught with the deepest devotion, find that acceptance with Him to whom they were addressed, which piety, so humble and so fervent, may seem to promise!

  Went to Bolt Court at eleven o’clock in the morning; met a young lady coming down stairs from the Doctor, whom, upon inquiry, I found to be Miss Morris (a sister to Miss Morris, formerly on the stage). Mrs. DeMoulins told me that she had seen the Doctor; that by her desire he had been told she came to ask his blessing, and that he said, “God bless you!” I then went up into his chamber, and found him lying very composed in a kind of doze: he spoke to nobody. Sir John Hawkins, Mr. Langton, Mrs. Gardiner, Rev. Mr. Strahan and Mrs. Strahan, Doctors Brocklesby and Butter, Mr. Steevens, and Mr. Nichols the printer, came; but no one chose to disturb him by speaking to him, and he seemed to take no notice of any person. While Mrs. Gardiner and I were there, before the rest came, he took a little warm milk in a cup, when he said something upon its not being properly given into his hand: he breathed very regular, though short, and appeared to be mostly in a calm sleep or dozing. I left him in this state, and never more saw him alive. In the evening I supped with Mrs. Hoole and my son at Mr. Braithwaite’s, and at night my servant brought me word that my dearest friend died that evening about seven o’clock: and next morning I went to the house, where I met Mr. Seward; we went together into the chamber, and there saw the most awful sight of Dr. Johnson laid out in his bed, without life!

  Yesterday, my dear Sir, I followed our ever-lamented friend Dr. Johnson to his last mansion…. He was followed to the Abbey by a large troop of friends. Ten mourning-coaches were ordered by the executors for those invited. Besides these, eight of his friends or admirers clubbed for two more carriages, in one of which I had a seat. But the executor, Sir John Hawkins, did not manage things well; for there was no anthem or choir service performed, no lesson, but merely what is read over every old woman that is buried by the parish. Surely, surely, my dear Sir, this was wrong, very wrong. Dr. Taylor read the service, but so-so. He lies nearly under Shakspere’s monument, with Garrick at his right hand, just opposite to the monument erected not long ago for Goldsmith by him and some of his friends.

  In the name of God. Amen. I SAMUEL JOHNSON, being in full possession of my faculties, but fearing this night may put an end to my life, do ordain this my last will and testament. I bequeath to God a soul polluted with many sins, but I hope purified by repentance, and I trust redeemed by Jesus Christ. I leave seven hundred and fifty pounds in the hands of Bennet Langton, Esq.; three hundred pounds in the hands of Mr. Barclay and Mr. Perkins, brewers; one hundred and fifty pounds in the hands of Dr. Percy, bishop of Dromore; one thousand pounds, three per cent. annuities in the public funds, and one hundred pounds now lying by me in ready money; all these before-mentioned sums and property I leave, I say to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir John Hawkins, and Dr. Wm. Scott, of Doctors Commons, in trust for the following uses; That is to say, to pay to the representatives of the late William Innys, bookseller, in St. Paul’s Church Yard, the sum of two hundred pounds; to Mrs. White, my female servant, one hundred pounds stock in the three per cent. annuities aforesaid. The rest of the aforesaid sums of money and property, together with my books, plate, and house-hold furniture, I leave to the before-mentioned Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir John Hawkins, and Dr. William Scott, also in trust, to be applied, after paying my debts, to the use of Francis Barber, my man-servant, a negro, in such manner as they shall judge most fit and available to his benefit. And I appoint the aforesaid Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir John Hawkins, and Dr. William Scott, sole executors of this my last will and testament, hereby revoking all former wills and testaments whatsoever. In witness whereof I hereunto subscribe my name, and affix my seal, this eighth day of December, 1784.

Signed, sealed, published, declared, and delivered by the said testator, as his last will and testament, in the presence of us, the word two being first inserted in the opposite page.

	Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
	obiit xiii die Decembris,
	Anno Domini MDCCLXXXVI.
	Ætatis suæ LXXV.

  At this time, having survived the tempest by which the capital and the court had been so long agitated, expired Dr. Samuel Johnson, a name which cannot be pronounced without veneration. I consider him as the most illustrious and universal man of letters whom I have personally known in my time; because I contemplate Burke more as an orator than an author, whatever fame he may have acquired by his writings. Gibbon’s reputation, however deservedly high, is limited to a single branch of composition, and to a single work. With Hume and Robertson, I was not acquainted. Adam Smith, Jacob Bryant, and Horace Walpole—all of whom I knew—eminent as were their talents, could not, on the whole sustain a competition with Johnson.

  He was born with a scrophulous habit, for which he was touched, as he acknowledged, by good Queen Anne, whose piece of gold he carefully preserved…. Though he seemed to be athletic as Milo himself, and in his younger days performed several feats of activity, he was to the last a convulsionary. He has often stept aside, to let nature do what she would with him. His gestures, which were a degree of St. Vitus’s dance, in the street, attracted the notice of many: the stare of the vulgar, but the compassion of the better sort. This writer has often looked another way, as the companions of Peter the Great were used to do, while he was under the short paroxysm. He was perpetually taking opening medicines. He could only keep his ailments from gaining ground. He thought he was worse for the agitation of active exercise. He was afraid of his disorders seizing his head, and took all possible care that his understanding should not be deranged. Orandum est, ut sit mens sana in corpore sano. When his knowledge from books, and he knew all that books could tell him, is considered; when his compositions in verse and prose are enumerated to the reader (and a complete list of them wherever dispersed is desirable) it must appear extraordinary he could abstract himself so much from his feelings, and that he could pursue with ardour the plan he laid down of establishing a great reputation.

  Dr. Johnson was a pious man; attached, I confess, to established system, but it was from principle. In company I neither found him austere nor dogmatical; he certainly was not polite, but he was not rude; he was familiar with suitable company; but his language in conversation was sententious; he was sometimes jocular, but you felt as if you were playing with a lion’s paw. His body was large, his features strong, his face scarred and furrowed with the scrophula; he had a heavy look; but when he spoke it was like lightning out of a dark cloud.

  At one period of the Doctor’s life, he was reconciled to the bottle. Sweet wines, however, were his chief favourites. When none of these were before him, he would sometimes drink Port, with a lump of sugar in every glass. The strongest liquors, and in very large quantities, produced no other effect on him than moderate exhilaration. Once, and but once, he is known to have had his dose; a circumstance which he himself discovered, on finding one of his sesquipedalion words hang fire. He then started up, and gravely observed—“I think it time we should go to bed.” After a ten years’ forbearance of every fluid, except tea and sherbet, “I drank,” said he, “one glass of wine the health of Sir Joshua Reynolds, on the evening of the day on which he was knighted. I never swallowed another drop till old Madeira was prescribed to me as a cordial during my present indisposition, but this liquor did not relish as formerly, and I therefore discontinued it.”… His knowledge in manufactures was extensive.

  As Johnson was the firmest of believers without being credulous, so he was the most charitable of mortals without being what we call an active friend. Admirable at giving counsel, no man saw his way so clearly; but he would not stir a finger for the assistance of those to whom he was willing enough to give advice: besides that, he had principles of laziness, and could be indolent by rule. To hinder your death, or procure you a dinner, I mean if really in want of one; his earnestness, his exertions could not be prevented, though health and purse and ease were all destroyed by their violence. If you wanted a slight favour, you must apply to people of other dispositions; for not a step would Johnson move to obtain a man a vote in a society, to repay a compliment which might be useful or pleasing, to write a letter of request, or to obtain a hundred pounds a year more for a friend, who perhaps had already two or three. No force could urge him to diligence, no importunity could conquer his resolution of standing still…. Promptitude of thought indeed, and quickness of expression, were among the peculiar felicities of Johnson: his notions rose up like the dragon’s teeth sowed by Cadmus all ready clothed, and in bright armour too, fit for immediate battle. He was therefore (as somebody is said to have expressed it) a tremendous converser, and few people ventured to try their skill against an antagonist with whom contention was so hopeless.

	Here lies poor Johnson! Reader, have a care,
	Tread lightly, lest you rouse a sleeping bear!
	Religious, moral, generous, and humane
	He was; but, self-sufficient, rude, and vain.
	Ill-bred, and over-bearing in dispute,
	A scholar, and a Christian, and a brute.

	Methinks I view his full, plain suit of brown,
	The large gray bushy wig, that grac’d his crown;
	Black worsted stockings, little silverbuckles;
	And shirt, that had no ruffles for his knuckles.
	I mark the brown great-coat of cloth he wore,
	That two huge Patagonian pockets bore,
	Which Patagonians (wondrous to unfold!)
	Would fairly both his Dictionaries hold.

  As Johnson lived the life of the righteous, his end was that of a Christian: he strictly fulfilled the injunction of the apostles, to work out his salvation with fear and trembling; and, though his doubts and scruples were certainly very distressing to himself, they give his friends a pious hope, that he, who added to almost all the virtues of Christianity, that religious humility which its great teacher inculcated, will, in the fulness of time, receive the reward promised to a patient continuance in well-doing.

  Johnson, it is said, was superstitious; but who shall exactly ascertain to us, what superstition is?… There was no occasion that Johnson should teach us to dance, to make bows, or turn compliments. He could teach us better things. To reject wisdom, because the person of him who communicates it is uncouth, and his manners are inelegant;—what is it, but to throw away a pineapple, and assign for a reason the roughness of its coat? That Johnson was generous and charitable, none can deny. But he was not always judicious in the selection of his objects: distress was a sufficient recommendation, and he did not scrutinize into the failings of the distressed. May it be always my lot to have such a benefactor!… For the mixture of power and weakness in the composition of this wonderful man, the scholar should learn humility. It was designed to correct that pride which great parts and great learning are apt to produce in their possessor. In him it had the desired effect. For though consciousness of superiority might sometimes induce him to carry it high with man (and even this was much abated in the latter part of life), his devotions have shewn to the whole world, how humbly he walked at all times with his God…. His eminence and his fame must of course have excited envy and malice: but let envy and malice look at his infirmities and his charities, and they will melt into pity and love.

  His necessary attendance while his play was in rehearsal, and during its performance, brought him acquainted with many of the performers of both sexes, which produced a more favourable opinion of their profession than he had harshly expressed in his “Life of Savage.” With some of them he kept up an acquaintance as long as he and they lived, and was ever ready to show them acts of kindness. He for a considerable time used to frequent the Green Room, and seemed to take delight in dissipating his gloom, by mixing in the sprightly chit-chat of the motley circle then to be found there. Mr. David Hume related to me from Mr. Garrick, that Johnson at last denied himself this amusement, from considerations of rigid virtue; saying “I’ll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.”

  I shall remark such qualities only as his works cannot convey. And among those the most distinguished was his possessing a mind which was, as I may say, always ready for use. Most general subjects had undoubtedly been already discussed in the course of a studious thinking life. In this respect few men ever came better prepared into whatever company chance might throw him, and the love which he had to society gave him a facility in the practice of applying his knowledge of the matter in hand in which I believe he was never exceeded by any man. It has been frequently observed that he was a singular instance of a man who had so much distinguished himself by his writings that his conversation not only supported his character as an author, but, in the opinion of many, was superior. Those who had lived with the wits of the age know how rarely this happens. I have had the habit of thinking that this quality, as well as others of the same kind, are possessed in consequence of accidental circumstances attending his life. What Dr. Johnson said a few days before his death of his disposition to insanity was no new discovery to those who were intimate with him. The character of Imlac in “Rasselas,” I always considered as a comment on his own conduct, which he himself practised, and as it now appears very successfully, since we know he continued to possess his understanding in its full vigour to the last. Solitude to him was horror; nor would he ever trust himself alone but when employed in writing or reading. He has often begged me to go home with him to prevent his being alone in the coach. Any company was better than none; by which he connected himself with many mean persons whose presence he could command…. We are both of Dr. Johnson’s school. For my part, I acknowledge the highest obligations to him. He may be said to have formed my mind, and to have brushed from it a great deal of rubbish. Those very people whom he has brought to think rightly will occasionally criticise the opinions of their master when he nods. But we should always recollect that it is he himself who taught us and enabled us to do it.

  It may be said, the death of Dr. Johnson kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example…. As a man, Dr. Johnson stands displayed in open day-light. Nothing remains undiscovered. What ever he said is known; and without allowing him the usual privilege of hazarding sentiments, and advancing positions, for mere amusement, or the pleasure of discussion, criticism has endeavoured to make him answerable for what, perhaps, he never seriously thought. His diary, which has been printed, discovers still more. We have before us the very heart of the man, with all his inward consciousness. And yet neither in the open paths of life, nor in his secret recesses, has any one vice been discovered. We see him reviewing every year of his life, and severely censuring himself, for not keeping resolutions, which morbid melancholy, and other bodily infirmities, rendered impracticable. We see him for every little defect imposing on himself voluntary penance, going through the day with only one cup of tea without milk, and to the last, amidst paroxysms and remissions of illness, forming plans of study and resolutions to amend his life. Many of his scruples may be called weaknesses; but they are the weaknesses of a good, a pious, and most excellent man.

  With a lumber of learning and some strong parts, Johnson was an odious and mean character—by principle a Jacobite, arrogant, self-sufficient, and overbearing by nature, ungrateful through pride, and of feminine bigotry. His manners were sordid, supercilious, and brutal, his style ridiculously bombastic and vicious; and in one word, with all the pedantry he had all the gigantic littleness of a country schoolmaster.

  Mrs. Williams was a person extremely interesting. She had uncommon firmness of mind, a boundless curiosity, retentive memory, and strong judgment. She had various powers of pleasing. Her personal afflictions and slender fortune she seemed to forget, when she had the power of doing an act of kindness: she was social, cheerful, and active, in a state of body that was truly deplorable. Her regard to Dr. Johnson was formed with such strength of judgment and firm esteem, that her voice never hesitated when she repeated his maxims, or recited his good deeds; though upon many other occasions her want of sight led her to make so much use of her ear, as to affect her speech. Mrs. Williams was blind before she was acquainted with Dr. Johnson.

  Johnson’s manner of composing has not been rightly understood. He was so extremely short-sighted, from the defect of his eyes, that writing was inconvenient to him; for whenever he wrote, he was obliged to hold a paper close to his face. He, therefore, never composed what we call a foul draft on paper of any thing he published, but used to revolve the subject in his mind, and turn and form every period, till he had brought the whole to the highest correctness and the most perfect arrangement. Then his uncommonly retentive memory enabled him to deliver a whole essay, properly finished, whenever it was called for. The writer of this note has often heard him humming and forming periods, in low whispers to himself, when shallow observers thought he was muttering prayers, &c.

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

  There never, indeed, was a human being of whom more may be known by those who have had no opportunity of personal acquaintance, and perhaps never a man whose failings, after having been exposed by imprudence or exaggerated by malice, were sooner forgotten in the esteem excited by his superior talents, and steady virtues.

  His good deeds were as many as his good sayings. His domestic habits, his tenderness to servants, and readiness to oblige his friends; the quantity of strong tea that he drank to keep down sad thoughts; his many labours reluctantly begun, and irresolutely laid aside; his honest acknowledgment of his own, and indulgence to the weaknesses of others; his throwing himself back in the post-chaise with Boswell, and saying, “Now I think I am a good-humoured fellow,” though nobody thought him so, and yet he was; his quitting the society of Garrick and his actresses, and his reason for it; his dining with Wilkes, and his kindness to Goldsmith; his sitting with the young ladies on his knee at the Mitre, to give them good advice, in which situation, if not explained, he might be taken for Falstaff; and last and noblest, his carrying the unfortunate victim of disease and dissipation on his back up through Fleet street (an act which realises the parable of the good Samaritan)—all these, and innumerable others, endear him to the reader, and must be remembered to his lasting honour. He had faults, but they lie buried with him. He had his prejudices and his intolerant feelings, but he suffered enough in the conflict of his own mind with them; for if no man can be happy in the free exercise of his reason, no wise man can be happy without it. His were not time-serving, heartless, hypocritical prejudices; but deep, inwoven, not to be rooted out but with life and hope, which he found from old habit necessary to his own peace of mind, and thought so to the peace of mankind. I do not hate, but love him for them. They were between himself and his conscience, and should be left to that higher tribunal

	“Where they in trembling hope repose,
	The bosom of his father and his God.”

In a word, he has left behind him few wiser or better men.

  Having mentioned some literary characters, who became personally known to me in the university, I will not omit, although extraneous to it, that giant of genius and literature, Dr. Samuel Johnson. My introduction to him was a letter from the Rev. Jonathan Odel, formerly missionary at Burlington. The Doctor was very civil to me. I visited him occasionally; and I know some who would be tempted to envy me the felicity of having found him, one morning, in the act of preparing his dictionary for a new edition. His harshness of manners never displayed itself to me, except in one instance; when he told me that had he been prime-minister, during the then recent controversy concerning the stamp-act, he would have sent a ship-of-war, and levelled one of our principal cities with the ground. On the other hand, I have heard from him sentiments expressive of a feeling heart; and convincing me, that he would not have done as he said.

  There was a pith about old Samuel which nothing could stand up against. His influence was not so much that of an author as of a thinker. He was the most powerful intellect in the world of books. He was the Jackson of the literary ring—the judge—the emperor—a giant—acknowledged to be a Saul amongst the people. Even David Hume would have been like a woman in his grasp; but, odd enough, the two never met.

  In the vicissitudes of twenty-seven years, no estrangement occurred to interrupt their mutual admiration and regard. Burke followed Johnson to the grave as a mourner; and in contemplating his character, applied to it a fine passage from Cicero, which might equally suit his own:—Intentum enim animum quasi arcum habebat, nec languescens succumbebat senecuti. When some one censured Johnson’s general rudeness in society, he replied with equal consideration and truth, “It is well, when a man comes to die, if he has nothing worse to accuse himself of than than some harshness in conversation.”

  When first I remember Johnson I used to see him sometimes at a little distance from the house, coming to call on my father; his look directed downwards, or rather in such apparent abstraction as to have no direction. His walk was heavy, but he got on at a great rate, his left arm always fixed across his breast, so as to bring the hand under the chin; and he walked wide, as if to support his weight. Getting out of a hackney-coach, which had set him down in Fleet Street, my brother Henry says he made his way up Bolt Court in the zig-zag direction of a flash of lightning; submitting his course only to the deflections imposed by the impossibility of going further to right or left. His clothes hung loose, and the pocket on the right hand swung violently, the lining of his coat being always visible. I can now call to mind his brown hand, his metal sleeve-buttons, and my surprise at seeing him with plain wristbands, when all gentlemen wore ruffles; his coat-sleeve being very wide, showed his linen almost to the elbow. His wig in common was cut and bushy; if by chance he had one that had been dressed in separate curls, it gave him a disagreeable look, not suited to his years or character. I certainly had no idea that this same Dr. Johnson, whom I thought rather a disgraceful visitor at our house, and who was never mentioned by ladies but with a smile, was to be one day an honour not only to us but to this country. I remember a tailor’s bringing his pattern-book to my brothers, and pointing out a purple, such as no one else wore, as the doctor’s usual choice. We all shouted with astonishment, at hearing that Polyheme, as, shame to say, we had nicknamed him, ever had a new coat; but the tailor assured us he was a good customer.

  Johnson, it is well known, professed to recruit his acquaintance with younger persons, and, in his latter days, I, with a few others were more frequently honoured by his notice. At times he was very gloomy, and would exclaim, “Stay with me, for it is a comfort to me”—a comfort that any feeling mind would wish to administer to a man so kind, though at times so boisterous, when he seized your hand, and repeated, “Ay, Sir, but to die and go we know not where,” &c.—here his morbid melancholy prevailed, and Garrick never spoke so impressively to the heart. Yet, to see him in the evening (though he took nothing stronger than lemonade), a stranger would have concluded that our morning account was a fabrication. No hour was too late to keep him from the tyranny of his own gloomy thoughts. A gentleman venturing to say to Johnson, “Sir, I wonder sometimes that you condescend so far as to attend a city club.” “Sir, the great chair of a full and pleasant club is, perhaps, the throne of human felicity.”

  In early youth I knew Bennet Langton, of that ilk, as the Scotch say. With great personal claims to the respect of the public, he is known to that public chiefly as a friend of Johnson. He was a very tall, meagre, long-visaged man, much resembling, according to Richard Paget, a stork standing on one leg, near the shore, in Raphael’s cartoon of the miraculous draught of fishes. His manners were in the highest degree polished; his conversation mild, equable, and always pleasing. He had the uncommon faculty of being a good reader. I formed an intimacy with his son, and went to pay him a visit at Langton. After breakfast we walked to the top of a very steep hill behind the house. When we arrived at the summit, Mr. Langton said, “Poor, dear Dr. Johnson, when he came to this spot, turned to look down the hill, and said he was determined ‘to take a roll down.’ When we understood what he meant to do, we endeavoured to dissuade him; but he was resolute, saying, he had not had a roll for a long time; and taking out of his lesser pockets whatever might be in them—keys, pencil, purse, or penknife, and laying himself parallel with the edge of the hill, he actually descended, turning himself over and over until he came to the bottom.” The story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak of the great lexicographer to have been a fiction or invention of Mr. Langton.

  Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus’s dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank—all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood…. 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 canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up—the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease; the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with a scorched foretop; the dirty hands, the nails bitten and paired to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the “Why, sir!” and the “What then, sir?” and the “No, sir!” and the “You don’t see your way through the question, sir!”

  Leaving now this our English Odyssey, with its Singer and Scholiast, let us come to the Ulysses; that great Samuel Johnson himself, the far-experienced, “much-enduring man,” whose labours and pilgrimage are here sung. A full-length image of his Existence has been preserved for us: and he perhaps of all living Englishmen, was the one who best deserved that honour…. Seldom, for any man, has the contrast between the ethereal heavenward side of things, and the dark sordid earthward, been more glaring: whether we look at Nature’s work with him or Fortune’s, from first to last, heterogeneity, as of sunbeams and miry clay, is on all hands manifest. Whereby indeed, only this was declared, That much life had been given him; many things to triumph over, a great work to do. Happily also he did it; better than the most. Nature had given him a high, keen-visioned, almost poetic soul; yet withal imprisoned it in an inert, unsightly body: he that could never rest had not limbs that would move with him, but only roll and waddle: the inward eye, all-penetrating, all-embracing, must look through bodily windows that were dim, half-blinded; he so loved men, and “never once saw the human face divine!” Not less did he prize the love of men; he was eminently social; the approbation of his fellows was dear to him, “valuable,” as he owned, “if from the meanest of human beings:” yet the first impression he produced on every man was to be one of aversion, almost of disgust. By Nature it was farther ordered that the imperious Johnson should be born poor: the ruler-soul, strong in its native royalty, generous, uncontrollable, like the lion of the woods, was to be housed, then, in such a dwelling-place: of Disfigurement, Disease, and lastly of a Poverty which itself made him the servant of servants. Thus was the born king likewise a born slave: the divine spirit of Music must awake imprisoned amid dull-croaking universal Discords; the Ariel finds himself encased in the coarse hulls of a Caliban. So is it more or less, we know (and thou O Reader, knowest and feelest even now), with all men: yet with the fewest men in any such degree as with Johnson.

  I love the Doctor as much as Bos. did, certainly. He was a noble fellow, saturated with knowledge; a magazine of satire, a powder-house of wit.

  Johnson’s malady and Cowper’s were precisely similar in the early period of each, as we have before remarked; the only difference was in the strength of mind of either sufferer. Cowper at once surrendered himself up to the tyranny of his disorder, and took a pleasure in parading the chains of his melancholy before the eyes of his correspondents, even when “immuring himself at home in the infected atmosphere of his own enthusiasm;” while Johnson struggled with his disease, sometimes indeed in a spirit of ferocious independence, and very seldom complained to his most intimate friends of his “humiliating malady.” In no point was the vigour of his intellect shown in so strong a light as in this particular; for in no malady is there so great a disposition to complain of the sufferings that are endured, and to over-state their intensity, lest, by any possibility, they should be underrated by others.

  Dr. Johnson’s fame now rests principally upon Boswell. It is impossible not to be amazed with such a book. But his “bow-wow” manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced;—for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke,—and Burke was a great and universal talker;—yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, that Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment and which are so much more easy to carry off. Besides, as to Burke’s testimony to Johnson’s powers, you must remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life.

  If then it be asked, who first, in England, at this period, breasted the waves and stemmed the tide of infidelity,—who, enlisting wit and eloquence, together with argument and learning, on the side of revealed religion, first turned the literary current in its favour and mainly prepared the reaction which succeeded,—that praise seems most justly to belong to Dr. Samuel Johnson. Religion was to him no mere lip-service nor cold formality: he was mindful of it in his social hours as much as in his graver lucubrations; and he brought to it, not merely erudition such as few indeed possessed, but the weight of the highest character, and the respect which even his enemies would not deny him. It may be said of him that, though not in Orders, he did the Church of England better service than most of those who at that listless era ate her bread.

  His youth was one of extreme poverty; yet when a person who knew of his condition had a pair of old shoes placed in his belongings, as soon as Johnson discovered them he flung them out the window. This incident is an expressive type of the man’s conduct through life; he never would stand in another’s shoes; he preferred misery when it was his own, to anything derivable from others. He was in all respects a ponderous man,—strong in appetite, powerful in intellect, of Herculean frame, a great passionate giant. There is something fine and touching too, if we will consider it, in that little, flimsy, flippant, vain fellow, Boswell, attaching himself as he did to Johnson: before others had discovered anything sublime, Boswell had done it, and embraced his knees when the bosom was denied him.

  Our English neighbors, as a people at least, are much less literary than ourselves. The fame of their best writers has scarce at all reached the masses of their population. They know nothing of Addison with his exquisitely classic prose, or of Pope with his finished and pointed verse. We have been struck, however, by finding it remarked by an English writer, who lived long in London, and moved much among the common people, that he found in the popular mind well-marked though indistinct and exaggerated traces of at least one great English author. He could learn nothing, he observed, from the men who drove cabs and drays, of the wits and scholars of Queen Anne, or of the much greater literati of the previous century; nay, they seemed to know scarce anything of living genius; but they all possessed somehow an indistinct, shadowy notion of one Dr. Samuel Johnson,—a large, ill-dressed man, who was a great writer of they knew not what; and almost all of them could point out the various places in which he had lived, and the house in which he died. Altogether independently of his writings—for these are far from being of a popular cast—the doctor had made an impression by the sheer bulk and energy of his character; he loomed large and imposing simply as a man.

  Another paradox of Mr. Gilfillan’s under this head is that he classes Dr. Johnson as indolent; and it is the more startling because he does not utter it as a careless opinion upon which he might have been thrown by inconsideration, but as a concession extorted from him reluctantly: he had sought to evade it, but could not. Now, that Dr. Johnson had a morbid predisposition to decline labour from his scrofulous habit of body is probable. The question for us, however, is not what nature prompted him to do, but what he did. If he had an extra difficulty to fight with in attempting to labour, the more was his merit in the known result,—that he did fight with that difficulty, and that he conquered it. This is undeniable. And the attempt to deny it presents itself in a comic shape when one imagines some ancient shelf in a library, that has groaned for nearly a century under the weight of the doctor’s works, demanding “How say you? Is this Sam Johnson, whose Dictionary alone is a load for a camel, one of those authors whom you call idle? Then Heaven preserve us poor oppressed bookshelves from such as you will consider active.” George III, in a compliment as happily turned as any one of those ascribed to Louis XIV, expressed his opinion upon this question of the Doctor’s industry by saying that he also should join in thinking Johnson too voluminous a contributor to literature were it not for the extraordinary merit of the contributions. Now, it would be an odd way of turning the royal praise into reproach if we should say: “Sam, had you been a pretty good writer, we, your countrymen, should have held you to be also an industrious writer; but, because you are a very good writer, therefore, we pronounce you a lazy vagabond.”

  Dr. Johnson’s essays on politeness are admirable; yet his “You lie, sir!” and “You don’t understand the question, sir!” were too common characteristics of his colloquies. He and Dr. Shebbeare were both pensioned at the same time. The report immediately flew, that the king had pensioned two bears,—a he-bear and a she-bear.

  He brought, into common talk, too plain an anticipation of victory and triumph. He wore his determination not to be thrown or beaten, whatever side he might please to take, somewhat defiantly upon his sleeve; and startled peaceful society a little too much with his uncle Andrew’s habits in the ring at Smithfield. It was a sense, on his own part, of this eagerness to make every subject a battleground, which made him say, at a moment of illness and exhaustion, that if he were to see Burke then, it would kill him. From the first day of their meeting, now some years ago, at Garrick’s dinner-table, his desire had been to measure himself with Burke on all occasions.

  Johnson once lived in Fetter Lane, but the circumstances of his abode there have not transpired. We now, however, come to a cluster of his residences in Fleet Street, of which place he is certainly the great presiding spirit, the Genius loci. He was conversant for the greater part of his life with this street, was fond of it, frequented its Mitre Tavern above any other in London, and has identified its name and places with the best things he ever said and did. It was in Fleet Street, we believe, that he took the poor girl up in his arms, put her to bed in his own house, and restored her to health and her friends; an action sufficient to redeem a million of the asperities of temper occasioned by disease, and to stamp him, in spite of his bigotry, a good Christian. Here, at all events, he walked and talked, and shouldered wondering porters out of the way, and mourned, and philosophised, and was “a good-natured fellow” (as he called himself), and roared with peals of laughter till midnight echoed to his roar.

  Next I told the driver to take me to Fleet street, to Gough Square, and to Bolt court, where Johnson lived and died. Bolt court lies on Fleet street, and it is but a few steps along a narrow passage to the house, which is now a hotel, where Johnson died; but you must walk on farther through the narrow passage, a little fearful to a woman, to see the place where he wrote the dictionary. The house is so completely within a court, in which nothing but brick walls could be seen, that one wonders what the charm of London could be, to induce one to live in that place. But a great city always draws to itself the great minds, and there Johnson probably found his enjoyment.

  I was but little interested in the legends of the remote antiquity of Lichfield, being drawn thither partly to see its beautiful cathedral, and still more, I believe, because it was the birthplace of Dr. Johnson, with whose sturdy English character I became acquainted, at a very early period of my life, through the good offices of Mr. Boswell. In truth, he seems as familiar to my recollection, and almost as vivid in his personal aspect to my mind’s eye, as the kindly figure of my own grandfather…. Beyond all question I might have had a wiser friend than he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was dense; his awful dread of death showed how much muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, before he could be capable of spiritual existence; he meddled only with the surface of life, and never cared to penetrate farther than to plough-share depth; his very sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laugh at him sometimes, standing beside his knee. And yet, considering that my native propensities were toward Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is generally mixed up with the mental sustenance of a New Englander, it may not have been altogether amiss, in those childish and boyish days, to keep pace with this heavy-footed traveller, and feed on the gross diet that he carried in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now. And, then, how English! Many of the latent sympathies that enable me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that so readily amalgamated themselves with the American ideas that seemed the most adverse to them, may have been derived from, or fostered and kept alive by, the great English moralist. Never was a descriptive epithet more nicely appropriate than that! Dr. Johnson’s morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.

  Communion, though but for a short while, with the spirit of this man’s life, fellowship with his sufferings, sympathy with his sorrows, the sense of his virtues, and the felt presence of his genius, will surely bring a touch of healing to some wounded heart, or a word of strength to some weary brain. It has been well said, “The first condition of human goodness is, something to love; the second, something to reverence,” both these conditions meet, and meet grandly, in the life of Doctor Samuel Johnson.

  Dr. Johnson was a man of no profound mind,—full of English limitations, English politics, English Church, Oxford philosophy; yet, having a large heart, mother-wit, and good sense which impatiently overleaped his customary bounds, his conversation as reported by Boswell has a lasting charm. Conversation is the vent of character as well as of thought; and Dr. Johnson impresses his company, not only by the point of the remark, but also, when the point fails, because he makes it.

  Johnson had the warmest of hearts. He was tender and even gallant, love was almost a weakness with him. When an uncouth youth, he was in love with a local belle. There was a certain Molly Aston, with whom he was desperately smitten; and his gallantry to ladies when advanced in life makes up some pretty scenes in Boswell. The real attachments of his life were two: the first for his wife; the second, the well-known devotion to Mrs. Thrale. Mrs. Johnson was a singularly coarse, painted creature, much older than he was, without a charm to recommend her. Yet he was really infatuated by her. Garrick, attending his school, used to make much mirth out of the clownish attempts at adoration on the part of the Edial pedagogue, and would later mimic the uncouth love-making of the future dictionary-writer. To her he was all through the devoted husband, just as he had been the devoted son; and his grief at her loss showed that this almost grotesque affection was based on the most substantial and enduring grounds.

  Is it possible to feel as deep an interest in and admiration for Carlyle, apart from his works, as we do in Johnson? Different temperaments will answer differently. Some people have a natural antipathy to Carlyle, based largely, no doubt, on misconception. But misconception is much easier in his case than in Johnson’s. He was more of an exceptional being. He was pitched in too high a key for the ordinary uses of life. He had fewer infirmities than Johnson, moral and physical. Johnson was a typical Englishman, and appeals to us by all the virtues and faults of his race. Carlyle stands more isolated, and held himself much more aloof from the world. On this account, among others, he touches us less nearly. Women are almost invariably repelled by Carlyle; they instinctively flee from a certain hard, barren masculinity in him. If not a woman-hater, he certainly had little in his composition that responded to the charms and allurements peculiar to the opposite sex; while Johnson’s idea of happiness was to spend his life driving briskly in a postchaise with a pretty and intelligent woman. Both men had the same proud independence, the same fearless gift of speech, the same deference to authority or love of obedience. In personal presence, the Englishman had the advantage of mere physical size, breadth, and a stern forbidding countenance. Johnson’s power was undoubtedly more of the chest, the stomach, and less of the soul, than Carlyle’s, and was more of a blind, groping, unconscious force; but of the two men he seems the more innocent and child-like. His journal is far less interesting and valuable as literature than Carlyle’s, but in some way his fervent prayers, his repeated resolutions to do better, to conquer his laziness, “to consult the resolve on Tetty’s coffin,” “to go to church,” “to drink less strong liquors,” “to get up at 8 o’clock,” “to reject or expel sensual images and idle thoughts,” “to read the Scriptures,” etc., touch one more nearly than Carlyle’s exaggerated self-reproaches and loud bemoanings of the miseries of life. Yet the fact remains that Johnson lived and moved and thought on a lower plane than Carlyle, and that he cherished less lofty ideals of life and of duty. It is probably true also that his presence and his conversation made less impression on his contemporaries than did Carlyle’s; but, through the wonderful Boswell, a livelier more lovable and more real image of him is likely to go down to succeeding ages than of the great Scotchman through his biographer.

  Concerning the portraits of Dr. Johnson alone, many pages might be written. His face is as familiar to-day as that of Bonaparte, Shakespeare or Mary Queen of Scots. In one private collection of Johnson there are one hundred and fifty-three prints, no two of which are alike; and this collection is known to be incomplete. When the Neophyte comes to this name on his list he will be at a loss where to begin and how soon to stop. He will certainly be tempted to gather as many as his purse will buy.

  The Blaspheming Doctor,—Blinking Sam,—The Bolt Court Philosopher,—The Cerberus of Literature,—The Classic Rambler,—The Colossus of English Philology,—The Giant of Literature,—The Great Bear,—Great Caliban,—The Great Cham of Literature,—The Great Moralist,—The Great Seer,—The Incomprehensible Holofernes,—A Learned Attila,—Our Letter’d Polypheme,—The Leviathan of Literature,—The Literary Anvil,—The Literary Castor,—The Literary Colossus,—Our Literary Whale,—Pomposo,—The Respectable Hottentot,—Sir Charles Easy,—Sober,—Surly Sam,—Ursa Major.

	That dear Old Doctor! fierce of mien,
	Untidy, arbitrary, fat,
	What gentle thoughts his name enfold!
	So generous of his scanty gold,
	So quick to love, so hot to scorn,
	Kind to all sufferers under heaven—
	A tenderer despot ne’er was born;
	His big heart held a corner even
	For Hodge the cat.

  Given thus, on the one hand, a man of vigorous intellect, strong, though controlled passions, and fascinating conversation, and, on the other, a woman of talent, able and quick to appreciate his merits, and let the two be thrown together intimately for the period of sixteen years, nothing would be more natural than for a feeling to spring up, at least on the part of the man, warmer than mere friendship. Difference of age counts for little in such cases for it is a common saying that the heart never grows old. A man in Johnson’s position readily forgets how he actually appears to the woman who flatters and pleases him, and, conscious only of his own youthful feelings, is prone to imagine that he seems to her as young as he does to himself. There is no proof that Mrs. Thrale ever entertained any sentiment for Johnson other than the esteem which in Madame d’Arblay became reverent adoration. Indeed, when spoken to about her supposed passion for him some years afterwards by Sir James Fellows, she ridiculed the idea, saying that she always felt for Johnson the same respect and veneration as for a Pascal. But if the long-continued manifestation of these sentiments, coupled with the most assiduous devotion and tender, wifelike care, had not awakened in him some response beyond mere gratitude, he would have been the most insensible of beings. Love, moreover, is frequently the result of propinquity and habit, and to both these influences Johnson was subjected for more than sixteen years. If he misinterpreted the attentions he received, and was emboldened by them to hope for a return of the passion they aroused, he did only what many a wise man has done under the same circumstances, and will do again.

  Johnson had a tall, well-formed, and massive figure, indicative of great physical strength, but made grotesque by a strange infirmity. Madame d’Arblay speaks of his “vast body in constant agitation, swaying backwards and forwards;” Miss Reynolds describes his apparently unconsciousness “antics,” especially when he crossed a threshold. Sometimes when he was reading a book in the fields a mob would gather to stare at his strange gestures. Reynolds mentioned that he could constrain them when he pleased, though Boswell called them St. Vitus’s dance. He had queer tricks of touching posts and carefully counting steps, even when on horseback. He was constantly talking or muttering prayers to himself. His face, according to Campbell, had “the aspect of an idiot.” He remained in silent abstraction till roused, or, as Tyers said, was like a ghost, who never speaks till he is spoken to. In spite of his infirmities he occasionally indulged in athletic performances. Mrs. Piozzi says that he sometimes hunted with Thrale. He understood boxing, and regretted the decline of prize-fighting, jumped, rowed, and shot, in a “strange and unwieldy” way, to show that he was not tired after a “fifty miles’ chase,” and, according to Miss Reynolds, swarmed up a tree and beat a young lady in a foot-race when over fifty. Langton described to Best how at the age of fifty-five he had solemnly rolled down a hill. His courage was remarkable; he separated savage dogs, swam into dangerous pools, fired off an overloaded gun, and defended himself against four robbers single-handed. His physical infirmities were partly accountable for roughness of manner. He suffered from deafness and was shortsighted to an extreme degree, although by minute attention he could often perceive objects with an accuracy which surprised his friends. He was thus often unable to observe the failings of his companions. Manners learnt in Grub Street were not delicate; his mode of gratifying a voracious appetite was even disgusting; while his dress was slovenly, and he had “no passion for clean linen.” He piqued himself, indeed, upon his courtesy; and, when not provoked by opposition, or unable to perceive the failings of others, was both dignified and polite. Nobody could pay more graceful compliments, especially to ladies, and he was always the first to make advances after a quarrel. His friends never ceased to love him; and their testimony to the singular tenderness which underlay his roughness is unanimous. He loved children, and was even too indulgent to them; he rejoiced greatly when he persuaded Dr. Sumner to abolish holiday tasks, and was most attentive to the wants of his servants. He was kind to animals, and bought oysters himself for his cat Hodge, that his servants might not be prejudiced against it. He loved the poor, as Mrs. Piozzi says, as she never saw any one else do; and tended to be indiscriminate in his charity.

  Johnson’s experiences of Booksellers were very varied. He had not quite the same opinion of Osborne that he had of Davies. But probably poor Osborne could not afford the extravagance of a pretty wife like Tom Davies. The story is well known how, when Johnson was earning the most miserable pittance as a Cataloguer for Osborne, he fell out with his employer, and, knocking him down with a folio, called him a blockhead. “Sir, he was impertinent to me, and I beat him,” was the Doctor’s version of the story afterwards.

  In the whole company of English writers from Chaucer to Carlyle there is no more sharply defined and vigorous personality; none more pronounced, more clearly shown, more easily understood. Evidently the failure of Johnson’s work to impress us adequately is in no sense due to lack of individuality behind it; the fact that we are transferring our interest more and more from the work to the man shows clearly enough that the man possessed qualities which his work fails to convey. Johnson’s defect as a writer lay in his inability to make his voice distinct; it does not ring clear in perfectly natural tones. When he talked, his words were charged with the electric current of his tremendous personality; when he wrote, the circuit was broken; at some point the current escaped into the air, and the reader never receives any emotion or impulse approaching a shock in intensity. It is probable that the only saving quality in Johnson’s work is due to the fact that it helps us to understand him. In most cases we remember the man because of the work he did; in Johnson’s case we shall remember the work because of the man who did it.

  He had other intimates, other disciples. But these were Gay Heart [Topham Beauclerk] and Gentle Heart [Bennet Langton] who drove his own blue-devils away with their idolatrous devotion, and whose bearing towards him stands ever as the best possible corroboration of his great and warm nature. With him and for him, they so fill the air of the time that to whomsoever has but thought of them that hour, London must seem lonely without their idyllic figures.

	—“Our day is gone;
	Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.”

There are gods as good for the after years; but Odin is down, and his pair of unreturning birds have flown west and east.

  His brain was as big, or bigger, than his heart; it had made itself felt all over England by long, honest work—by brave, loud speech. He had snubbed the elegant Lord Chesterfield, who would have liked to see his name upon the first page of the great Dictionary. Not an outcast of the neighborhood but had heard of his audacious kindness; not a linkboy but knew him by the chink of his half-pence; not a beggar but had been bettered by his generous dole; not a watchman but knew him by his unwieldly hulk, and his awkward, intrepid walk; and we know him,—if we know him at all—not by his “Rambler” and his “Rasselas,” so much as by the story of his life.

  We were engaged at extra-illustrating Boswell’s life of Johnson, and had already got together somewhat more than eleven thousand prints when we ran against a snag, an obstacle we never could surmount. We agreed that our work would be incomplete, and therefore vain, unless we secured a picture of the book with which the great lexicographer knocked down Osborne, the bookseller at Gray’s Inn Gate.

  “If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.” Such was the deliberate pronouncement of a philosopher verging on seventy; and, despite the ominous hint about futurity, it is surely one of the finest compliments ever paid to the sex. What is more, it accurately represents, which few compliments do, the honest conviction of the speaker. We know from his own lips, and the testimony of his friends, that there were two things in which the Doctor’s soul delighted—rapid motion, and the society of agreeable young women. Whirling along in a post-chaise was his notion of true enjoyment from a physical point of view; conversing with some sprightly beauty who could understand him and add something to the conversation, his acme of intellectual happiness. For this ordinarily uncouth and quarrelsome old man; this rampaging, brow-beating controversialist—who, at other times, betrayed a savage pleasure in flouting the amenities of social intercourse—could change himself into a vastly different monster when in the company of women,—could sheathe his claws, smooth his bristles, and moderate his roar, when they patted and fondled him. What is stranger, he was always ready to forsake his predatory pursuits to the patting and fondling in question.

  All competent critics—and he has occupied the most competent—have found it not merely necessary to admit that the man was greater than his works, but not specially easy to indicate the special character of his human greatness…. In mere knowledge he might sometimes go wrong; in mere taste, frequently; in crotchet, perpetually. But he was perfectly honest; there was not an atom or a shred of cant in him; his moral nature in his best moments was of the noblest, the kindest, the sanest ever known or even conceivable. We are sometimes told that his greatness is the creation of Boswell. His own age, the age of Burke and Gibbon, was neither foolish nor credulous; it had not read Boswell, and it made no mistake about Johnson. He is not the greatest or the most universal of our men of letters, but he is by far the most English; and very little shame need we take to ourselves so long as we can point to him as our literary embodiment, if not exactly our literary exemplar or masterpiece.

  Dr. Samuel Johnson’s library, which was sold in 1785, was not a very valuable one. It consisted of 650 lots, which sold for £100. Among them was the second Shakespeare folio, now in the possession of Sir Henry Irving.

Poems

  Perused Johnson’s “London” and “Vanity of Human Wishes.” His numbers are strong in sense, and smooth in flow, but want that varied grace and inextinguishable spirit which constitute the essential charm of Pope’s.

  Dr. Johnson, born no doubt with violent passions, yet with the organs of his senses, thro’ which the fancy is stored, if not imperfect, surely far from acute, had from a very early age most cultivated his powers of ratiocination, till by degrees he grew to esteem lightly every other species of excellence: and carrying these ideas into poetry, he was too much inclined to think that to reason in verse, when the harmony of numbers, and especially if something of the ornament of poetical language, was added to the force of truth, was to attain the highest praise of the art.

  The fame of Dr. Johnson would not have been less widely diffused if the few poetical productions contained in the following pages had never been written; and yet the “Two Satires,” and the “Prologue for the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre,” are noble productions; and would have been sufficient to throw no mean lustre on the reputation of an ordinary writer. He, like Pope, chose to be the poet of reason; not because he was deficient in imagination, for his Oriental fictions contain much of the elements of the most fanciful poetry, but his mind was so constituted that “he condemned all that had not a direct practical tendency.” That he knew how to appreciate the creative faculty of the poet is evident from the character he has drawn of Shakspeare; and he would have done justice to Milton, if his prejudices against the man had not blinded his judgment to the merits of the poet. He had diligently studied the works of Dryden and Pope, and has caught the spirit, vigour and terseness of his great models…. Of his lyric effusions much cannot be said: they want the enthusiasm and feeling which is the soul of such compositions. When we recollect the imperfection of two of the senses, sight and hearing, in Johnson, we shall not be surprised that he has not a keen perception of the beauties of nature, or of the powers of harmony; his want of relish for descriptive poetry, and pastoral cannot therefore be wondered at; nor his want of success in his “Odes on the Seasons.” He does not paint from nature, but from books.

  That his Tragedy (“Irene”) was a great failure on the stage has been already related; that it is of extreme dulness, of a monotony altogether insufferable, and therefore tires out the reader’s patience quite as much as it did the auditor’s, is true; that most of his lesser pieces are only things of easy and of fairly successful execution is likewise certain, with perhaps the exception of his verses on Robert Levett’s death, which have a sweetness and a tenderness seldom found in any of his compositions. But had he never written anything after the “Imitations of Juvenal,” his name would have gone down to posterity as a poet of great excellence,—one who only did not reach equal celebrity with Pope, because he came after him, and did not assiduously court the muse. In truth, these two pieces are admirable, both for their matter, their diction, and their versification…. Of Johnson’s Latin verses it remains to speak, and they assuredly do not rise to the level of his English, nor indeed above mediocrity. The translation of Pope’s “Messiah,” however, a work of his boyhood, gave a promise not fulfilled in his riper years.

  He was a poet of no mean order. His resonant lines, informed as they often are with the force of their author’s character—his strong sense, his fortitude, his gloom—take possession of the memory, and suffuse themselves through one’s entire system of thought.

  Dr. Johnson’s epitaph on his friend Levett is as prosaic a poem as ever was written, and as strong a one. It is perhaps the only friendly epitaph in the language that contains no compliment to the object of it, in excess of the bare truth, and what Dr. Johnson could do with no other fuel to feed a genius that was never poetic in its essence, than the bare truth, is shown by the splendid culmination of the last four lines.

  His work in verse is very small, and though all of it is scholarly and some elegant, it is universally composed in obedience to a very narrow and jejune theory of English versification and English poetics generally. Nothing perhaps but the beautiful epitaph on his friend Levett, and the magnificent statement of his religious pessimism in the “Vanity of Human Wishes,” distinctly transcends mediocrity.

London, 1739

  “London” is to me one of those few imitations that have all the ease and all the spirit of an original. The same man’s verses on the opening of Garrick’s theatre are far from bad.

  This poem of Mr. Johnson’s is the best imitation of the original that has appeared in our language, being possessed of all the force and satirical resentment of Juvenal. Imitation gives us a much truer idea of the ancients than ever translation could do.

  Dr. Johnson’s “London, a Satire,” is a noble poem. But his great moral genius was constrained in composition by the perpetual parody on his powerful prototype, Juvenal. To have shown so much genius and so much ingenuity at one and the same time, to have been so original even in imitation, places him in the highest order of minds. But his range was here circumscribed; for he had to move parallel with the Roman,—finding out in every passage corresponding and kindred sins,—and in order to preserve—which he did wondrously—the similitude—

	“To bridle in his struggling muse with pain,
	Which long’d to launch into a nobler strain.”

  “London” is marked by genuine public spirit; at the same time we see quite as much of the man as of the moralist in the poet’s characteristic allusions to the penalties of poverty, his antipathy to the Whigs, and his dislike of foreigners. The story that “Thales” was meant for Savage, and that the occasion of the poem was the departure of the latter from London after his trial, is confuted by dates, but we may be sure that the poem gives us a real representation of Johnson’s feelings as a struggling author and a political partisan.

Life of Savage, 1744

  No finer specimen of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead; and a discerning critic might have confidently predicted that the author was destined to be the founder of a new school of English eloquence.

  In its early days Johnson was the chief contributor to its pages. [The Gentleman’s Magazine]. He had a room set apart for him at St. John’s Gate, where he wrote as fast as he could drive his pen, throwing the sheets off, when completed, to the “copy” boy. The “Life of Savage” was written anonymously, in 1744, and Mr. Harte spoke in high terms of the book, while dining with Cave. The publisher told him afterwards: “Harte, you made a man very happy the other day at my house by your praise of ‘Savage’s Life.’” “How so? none were present but you and I.” Cave replied, “You might observe I sent a plate of victuals behind the screen; there lurked one whose dress was too shabby for him to appear; your praise pleased him much.”

  The best extant illustration of the life of the struggling authors of the time.

  It is the longest and most elaborate of Johnson’s essays in biography, and may still be read with great pleasure, in spite of various patent faults. It recounted, with all detail, a scandal, into the truth of which Johnson had not taken the pains to inquire; it was but careless in the statement of fact which lay easily within the writer’s circle of experience; and it treated with extreme indulgence a character which, in a stranger, would have called down the moralist’s sternest reproof. The critical passages now escape censure only because so few in the present day read the works examined. But the little book was undeniably lively; it contained several anecdotes admirably narrated, and its graver parts displayed the development of Johnson’s studied magnificence of language. Good biography was still rare in England, and “The Account of Savage” attracted a great deal of notice.

Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749

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

  The “Vanity of Human Wishes,” the subject of which is in a great degree founded on the Alcibiades of Plato, possesses not the point and fire which animates the “London.” It breathes, however, a strain of calm and dignified philosophy, much more pleasing to the mind, and certainly much more consonant to truth, than the party exaggeration of the prior satire. The poet’s choice of modern examples, in place of those brought forward by the ancient bard, is happy and judicious; and he has everywhere availed himself, and in a style the most impressive, of the solemnity, the pathos, and sublime morality of the christian code. In consequence of this substitution of a purer system of ethics, and of a striking selection of characters, among which that of Charles of Sweden is conspicuously eminent, the whole has the air of an original, and, to be understood, requires not to be collated with its prototype.

  Read Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes,”—all the examples and mode of giving them sublime, as well as the latter part, with the exception of an occasional couplet. I do not so much admire the opening. I remember an observation of Sharpe’s (the Conversationist, as he was called in London, and a very clever man), that the first line of his poem was superfluous, and that Pope (the very best of poets, I think), would have begun at once, only changing the punctuation,—

“Survey mankind from China to Peru.”

The former line, “Let observation,” &c., is certainly heavy and useless. But ’tis a grand poem—and so true! true as the tenth of Juvenal himself. The lapse of ages changes all things,—time—language—the earth—the bounds of the sea—the stars of the sky, and every thing “about, around, and underneath” man, except man himself, who has always been, and always will be, an unlucky rascal. The infinite variety of lives conduct but to death, and the infinity of wishes lead but to disappointment.

  The deep and pathetic morality of which has often extracted tears from those whose eyes wander dry over pages professedly sentimental.

  Tennyson admired Samuel Johnson’s grave earnestness, and said that certain of his couplets, for these qualities and for their “high moral tone,” were not surpassed in English satire. However, he ventured to make merry over:

	“Let observation, with extensive view,
	Survey mankind, from China to Peru.”

“Why did he not say ‘Let observation, with extended observation, observe extensively?’”

  Its strong Stoical morality, its profound and melancholy illustrations of the old and ever new sentiment, Vanitas Vanitatum, make it perhaps the most impressive poem of the kind in the language.

Irene, 1749

  Though uninteresting on the stage, was universally admired in the closet, for the propriety of the sentiments, the richness of the language, and the general harmony of the whole composition.

  In his tragedy, the dramatis personæ are like so many statues “stept from their pedestal to take the air.” They come on the stage only to utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays everything prostrate before him.

  Even the mighty intellect, the eloquent morality, and lofty style of Johnson, which gave too tragic and magnificent a tone to his ordinary writing, failed altogether to support him in his attempt to write actual tragedy; and “Irene” is not only unworthy of the imitator of “Juvenal” and the author of “Rasselas” and the “Lives of the Poets,” but is absolutely, and in itself, nothing better than a tissue of wearisome and unimpassioned declamations.

  One of the heaviest and most unreadable of dramatic performances, interesting now, if interesting at all, solely as a curious example of the result of bestowing great powers upon a totally uncongenial task.

  There are several accounts extant by those who were present on the first night, but that which Dr. Adams gave Boswell is perhaps the most trustworthy. “Before the curtain drew up there were catcalls whistling which alarmed Johnson’s friends. The prologue, which was written by himself in a manly strain, soothed the audience, and the play went off tolerably till it came to the conclusion, when Mrs. Pritchard, the heroine of the piece, was to be strangled on the stage, and was to speak two lines with the bow-string round her neck. The audience cried out ‘Murder! Murder!’ She several times attempted to speak, but in vain. At last she was obliged to go off the stage alive.” The author’s annoyance at this interruption must have been a good deal alleviated by the triumph it gave him over Garrick, at whose suggestion the strangling scene had been arranged. Dr. Burney’s version is more favourable, but he speaks of a curious story circulated at the time of the author’s being “observed at the representation to be dissatisfied with some of the speeches and conduct of the play himself, and, like La Fontaine, expressing his disapprobation aloud.” Old Aaron Hill, one of the heroes of “The Dunciad,” who had composed much bad poetry and worse prose, and whose critical judgment may be estimated by his prediction of his own posthumous fame and of Pope’s speedy oblivion, wrote to Mallet: “I was at the anomalous Mr. Johnson’s benefit, and found the play his proper representative; strong sense, ungraced by sweetness or decorum.” Though Irene was not a great success, it escaped positive failure, and Johnson received from copyright and “author’s nights,” very nearly three hundred pounds.

The Rambler, 1750–52

  I am inexpressibly pleased with them…. I hope the world tastes them; for its own sake I hope the world tastes them…. I would not, for any consideration, that they should be laid down through discouragement.

  “The Rambler,” is certainly a strong misnomer: he always plods in the beaten road of his predecessors, following the “Spectator” (with the same pace as a packhorse would do a hunter) in the style that is proper to lengthen a paper. These writers may, perhaps, be of service to the public, which is saying a great deal in their favour. There are numbers of both sexes who never read anything but such productions, and cannot spare time, from doing nothing, to go through a sixpenny pamphlet. Such gentle readers may be improved by a moral hint, which, though repeated over and over, from generation to generation, they never heard in their lives. I should be glad to know the name of this laborious author.

  I have lately been reading one or two volumes of “The Rambler;” who, excepting against some few hardnesses in his manner, and the want of more examples to enliven, is one of the most nervous, most perspicuous, most concise (and) most harmonious prose writers I know. A learned diction improves by time.

  The “Rambler” may be considered as Johnson’s great work. It was the basis of that high reputation which went on increasing to the end of his days. The circulation of those periodical essays was not, at first, equal to their merit. They had not, like the “Spectators,” the art of charming by variety; and indeed how could it be expected? The wits of Queen Anne’s reign sent their contributions to the “Spectator;” and Johnson stood alone. A stage coach, says Sir Richard Steele, must go forward on stated days, whether there are passengers or not. So it was with the “Rambler,” every Tuesday and Saturday, for two years. In this collection Johnson is the great moral teacher of his countrymen; his essays form a body of ethics; the observations on life and manners are acute and instructive; and the papers, professedly critical, serve to promote the cause of literature. It must, however, be acknowledged, that a settled gloom hangs over the author’s mind; and all the essays, except eight or ten, coming from the same fountain-head, no wonder that they have the raciness of the soil from which they spring. Of this uniformity Johnson was sensible…. It is remarkable, that the pomp of diction, which has been objected in to Johnson, was first assumed in the “Rambler.” His “Dictionary” was going on at the same time, and, in the course of that work, as he grew familiar with technical and scholastic words, he thought that the bulk of his readers were equally learned; or at least would admire the splendour and dignity of the style.

  His “Ramblers” are in everybody’s hands; about them opinions vary, and I rather believe the style of these essays is not now considered as a good model, this he corrected in his more advanced age, as may be seen in his “Lives of the Poets,” where his diction, though occasionally elaborate and highly metaphorical, is not nearly so inflated and ponderous as in the “Ramblers.”

  The mass of intellectual wealth here heaped together is immense, but it is rather the result of gradual accumulation, the produce of the general intellect, labouring in the mine of knowledge and reflection, than dug out of the quarry, and dragged into the light by the industry and sagacity of a single mind. I am not here saying that Dr. Johnson was a man without originality, compared with the ordinary run of men’s minds, but he was not a man of original thought or genius, in the sense in which Montaigne or Lord Bacon was. He opened no new vein of precious ore, nor did he light upon any single pebbles of uncommon size and unrivalled lustre.

  Dr. Johnson seems to have been really more powerful in discoursing vivâ voce in conversation than with his pen in hand. It seems as if the excitement of company called something like reality and consecutiveness into his reasonings, which in his writings I cannot see. His antitheses are almost always verbal only; and sentence after sentence in the “Rambler” may be pointed out to which you cannot attach any definite meaning whatever. In his political pamphlets there is more truth of expression than in his other works, for the same reason that his conversation is better than his writings in general. He was more excited and in earnest.

  It would not be easy to name a book more tiresome, indeed, more difficult to read, or one which gives moral lessons, in a more frigid tone, with less that is lively or novel in the matter, in a language more heavy and monotonous. The measured pace, the constant balance of the style, becomes quite intolerable; for there is no interesting truth to be inculcated remote from common observation, nor is there any attack carried on against difficult positions, nor any satirical warfare maintained either with opinions or with persons.

  It has been asked, with emphasis, “Who now reads the ‘Rambler?’” And it is indubitable that this book, which once exerted so mighty an influence on the English language and people, has given place, at least in general reading, to works of far inferior merit and interest. The reason seems to be, that its object is well nigh accomplished. It commenced with a standard of morals and language elevated far above the prevailing style of morals and of writing. It has elevated both, and has brought the English language and notions of morality to its own level. Nor is it wonderful that men should regard with less interest a work which now is seen to have no very extraordinary elevation. It is a component part of English literature, having fixed itself in the language, the style, and the morals of the English people, and taken its place as an integral, almost undistinguished, part of the national principles of writing and morality. The result is that, while the benefits of the “Rambler” may be diffusing themselves, unperceived, to almost all the endearments of the fireside and virtues of the community, the book itself may be very imperfectly known and unfrequently perused. Johnson may be almost forgotten, except in praise; but his mighty power is yet sending forth a mild influence over lands and seas, like the gentle movements of the dew and the sunbeam.

  The “Rambler” is not a book to be opened in a careless moment, for the style is out of fashion; but it requires a reader of little sagacity to penetrate to its profound stores of thought and feeling; and as he pursues his way through apologues and allegories, he will be rewarded by many delightful sketches of character, enlivened by jest and humor.

  The pompous and involved language seems indeed to be a fit clothing for the melancholy reflections which are its chief staple, and in spite of its unmistakable power it is as heavy reading as the heavy class of lay-sermonizing to which it belongs.

  The wonder is that Johnson should have managed to continue it for two years, and that with its many obvious defects he should have been able to win for it at last a very substantial popularity. Too much stress is sometimes laid on the pomposity of his diction. For serious topics, which were avowedly his chief aim, his style is well suited, and his use of a balanced, periodic structure, if ludicrous when misapplied, is certainly impressive when it is made the vehicle of his moralizings…. Johnson was far from being a pedant, but he wanted the agility to make a graceful descent from the pinnacles of art, and he had not the supreme requisite of being able to conceal the condescensions of learning.

  Although his essays have been oftener under- than over-valued of late, they are far from original in conception, and those at least of the “Rambler” are too often injured by the excessively stiff and cumbrous style which has been rather unjustly identified with Johnson’s manner of writing generally.

Dictionary, 1755

  I think the publick in general, and the republick of letters in particular, are greatly obliged to Mr. Johnson, for having undertaken, and executed, so great and desirable a work. Perfection is not to be expected from man; but if we are to judge by the various works of Johnson already published, we have good reason to believe, that he will bring this as near to perfection as any man could do. The plan of it, which he published some years ago, seems to be a proof of it. Nothing can be more rationally imagined, or more accurately and elegantly expressed. I therefore recommend the previous perusal of it to all those who intend to buy the Dictionary, and who, I suppose, are all those who can afford it…. It must be owned, that our language is, at present, in a state of anarchy, and hitherto, perhaps, it may not have been the worse for it. During our free and open trade, many words and expressions have been imported, adopted, and naturalized from other languages, which have greatly enriched our own. Let it still preserve what real strength and beauty it may have borrowed from others; but let it not, like the Tarpeian maid, be overwhelmed and crushed by unnecessary ornaments. The time for discrimination seems to be now come. Toleration, adoption, and naturalization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary. But where shall we find them, and, at the same time, the obedience due to them? We must have recourse to the old Roman expedient in times of confusion, and chuse a dictator. Upon this principle, I give my vote for Mr. Johnson to fill that great and arduous post. And I hereby declare, that I make a total surrender of all my rights and privileges in the English language, as a free-born British subject, to the said Mr. Johnson, during the term of his dictatorship. Nay more, I will not only obey him, like an old Roman, as my dictator, but, like a modern Roman, I will implicitly believe in him as my Pope, and hold him to be infallible while in the chair, but no longer. More than this he cannot well require; for, I presume, that obedience can never be expected, when there is neither terrour to enforce, nor interest to invite it…. But a Grammar, a Dictionary, and a History of our Language through its several stages, were still wanting at home, and importunately called for from abroad. Mr. Johnson’s labours will now, I dare say, very fully supply that want, and greatly contribute to the farther spreading of our language in other countries. Learners were discouraged, by finding no standard to resort to; and, consequently, thought it incapable of any. They will now be undeceived and encouraged.

	Talk of war with a Briton, he’ll boldly advance,
	That one English soldier will beat ten of France;
	Would we alter the boast from the sword to the pen,
	Our odds are still greater, still greater our men:
	In the deep mines of science though Frenchmen may toil,
	Can their strength be compared to Locke, Newton, and Boyle?
	Let them rally their heroes, send forth all their pow’rs,
	Their verse-men, and prose-men; then match them with ours.
	First Shakespeare and Milton, like gods in the fight,
	Have put their whole drama and epic to flight;
	In satires, epistles, and odes would they cope,
	Their numbers retreat before Dryden and Pope;
	And Johnson, well-arm’d, like a hero of yore,
	Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more.

  Johnson’s Dictionary is a most important, and, considered as the work of one man, a most wonderful performance. It does honour to England, and to human genius; and proves, that there is still left among us a force of mind equal to that which formerly distinguished a Stephanus or a Varro. Its influence in diffusing the knowledge of the language, and retarding its decline, is already observable:

	Si Pergama dextra
	Defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent.

And yet, within the last twenty years, and since this great work was published, a multitude of new words have found their way into the English tongue, and, though both unauthorised and unnecessary, seem likely to remain in it.

  Such is the merit,… that our language does not possess a more copious, learned, and valuable work.

  The definitions have always appeared to me such astonishing proofs of acuteness of intellect and precision of language, as indicate a genius of the highest rank. This it is which marks the superiour excellence of Johnson’s “Dictionary” over others equally or even more voluminous, and must have made it a work of much greater mental labour than mere Lexicons, or Word-books, as the Dutch call them. They, who will make the experiment of trying how they can define a few words of whatever nature, will soon be satisfied of the unquestionable justice of this observation, which I can assure my readers is founded upon much study, and upon communication with more minds than my own. A few of his definitions must be admitted to be erroneous. Thus, Windward and Leeward, though directly of opposite meaning, are defined identically the same way; as to which inconsiderable specks it is enough to observe, that his Preface announces that he was aware there might be many such in so immense a work; nor was he at all disconcerted when an instance was pointed out to him. A lady once asked him how he came to define Pastern the knee of a horse: instead of making an elaborate defense, as she expected, he at once answered, “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance.”

  From a careful examination of this work, and its effect upon the language, I am inclined to believe that Johnson’s authority has multiplied instead of reducing the number of corruptions in the English language…. I can assure the American public that the errors in Johnson’s “Dictionary” are ten times as numerous as they suppose; and that the confidence now reposed in its accuracy is the greatest injury to philology that now exists. I can assure them further that if any man, whatever may be his abilities in other respects, should attempt to compile a new dictionary, or amend Johnson’s, without a profound knowledge of etymology, he will unquestionably do as much harm as good.

  Had Johnson left nothing but his “Dictionary,” one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight, and successful method, it may be called the best of all dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true builder did it.

  The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full justice, and something more than justice. The best lexicographer may well be content if his productions are received by the world with cold esteem. But Johnson’s Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm such as no similar work has ever excited. It was indeed the first dictionary which could be read with pleasure. The definitions shows so much acuteness of thought and command of language, and the passages from poets, divines, and philosophers are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. The faults of the book resolve themselves, for the most part, into one great fault. Johnson was a wretched etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any Teutonic language except English, which indeed, as he wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic language; and thus he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius and Skinner.

  What the middle of the last century has to be proud of is, Dr. Johnson’s colossal work, the first great Dictionary of our language.

  Dr. Johnson was the Magnus Apollo of lexicographers then, and his bulky fame still casts a large shadow over the world of words. To rebel against his autocratic rule at the beginning of this century was to write one’s self down an audacious and presuming sciolist. It is not surprising, therefore, that Webster’s criticism of Johnson in this Dictionary and in other places should have exposed him to censure.

  An ignorant philologist, following in the track of still more ignorant predecessors.

  The publication of Johnson’s Dictionary was as the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, heralding the downfall of the patronage system; and the indignant though dignified letter of wounded pride and surly independence which he wrote on February 7, 1755, to the courtly Earl of Chesterfield, who had professed much but had performed little for him at a time when he was friendless and unknown, was as the shrill blast of a trumpeter proclaiming in plain and unmistakable terms that the winter of individual patronage was past and that the summer of public patronage had begun.

  It was a great advance upon its predecessors. The general excellence of its definitions and the judicious selection of illustrative passages make it (as often observed) entertaining as well as useful for reference. Its most obvious defect arises from Johnson’s ignorance of the early forms of the language and from the conception then natural of the purpose of a dictionary. Johnson (see his preface) had sensibly abandoned his first impression that he might be able to “fix the language,” as he came to see that every living language must grow. He did not aim, however, at tracing the growth historically, but simply at defining the actual senses of words as employed by the “best authors.” He held that the language had reached almost its fullest development in the days of Shakespeare, Hooker, Bacon, and Spenser, and thought it needless to go further back than Sidney. He also, as a rule, omitted living authors. The dictionary, therefore, was of no philological value, although it has been the groundwork upon which many later philologists have worked. Taking for granted the contemporary view of the true end of a dictionary, it was a surprising achievement, and made an epoch in the study of the language.

  That Dictionary did ultimately give him a great lift—as it has to a good many, since. The ponderous volume furnished very many New England households seventy years ago; and I can remember sitting upon it, in my child-days, to bring my head properly above the level of the table.

Rasselas, 1759

  I have lately read the “Prince of Abyssinia”—I am almost equally charm’d and shocked at it—the style, the sentiments are inimitable—but the subject is dreadful—and handled as it is by Dr. Johnson, might make any young, perhaps old, person tremble.

  I wish I were not warranted in saying, that this elegant work is rendered, by its most obvious moral, of little benefit to the reader. We would not indeed wish to see the rising generation so unprofitably employed as the Prince of Abyssinia; but it is equally impolitic to repress all hope, and he who should quit his father’s house in search of a profession, and return unprovided, because he could not find any man pleased with his own, would need a better justification than that Johnson, after speculatively surveying various modes of life, had judged happiness unattainable, and choice useless.

  To those who look no further than the present life, or who maintain that human nature has not fallen from the state in which it was created, the instruction of this sublime story will be of no avail. But they who think justly, and feel with strong sensibility, will listen with eagerness and admiration to its truth and wisdom. Voltaire’s “Candide,” written to refute the system of Optimism, which it has accomplished with brilliant success, is wonderfully similar in its plan and conduct to Johnson’s Rasselas; insomuch, that I have heard Johnson say, that if they had not been published so closely one after another that there was not time for imitation, it would have been in vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other. Though the proposition illustrated by both these works was the same, namely, that in our present state there is more evil than good, the intention of the writers was very different. Voltaire, I am afraid, meant only by wanton profaneness to obtain a sportive victory over religion, and to discredit the belief of a superintending Providence: Johnson meant, by shewing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal. “Rasselas,” as was observed to me by a very accomplished lady, may be considered as a more enlarged and more deeply philosophical discourse in prose, upon the interesting truth, which in his “Vanity of Human Wishes” he had so successfully enforced in verse.

  No prig shall ever persuade me that “Rasselas” is not a noble performance, in design and in execution. Never were the expenses of a mother’s funeral more gloriously defrayed by a son than the funeral of Samuel Johnson’s mother by the price of “Rasselas,” written for the pious purpose of laying her head decently and honourably in the dust.

  The reader who first attempts the “Abyssinian Candide” feels that he has imposed on himself a task rather than found a pleasure, or even a relaxation. The manner is heavy, and little suited to the occasion; the matter is of a very ordinary fabric, if it is safe and wholesome; there is nothing that shines except the author’s facility of writing in a very artificial style, as soon as we are informed, by external evidence, of the whole having been written in a few nights. He, perhaps, had some kind of misgiving that it was not a successful effort, for he had never looked at it till two-and-twenty years after it was written, when a friend happening to have it who was travelling with him, Johnson read it with some eagerness.

  So on the story rolls, poetic and gloomy, like a bit of the Black Sea!

  All the sterner traits of Johnson’s character, his uncompromising rectitude, his steadiness of outlook on unrelieved gloom, his hatred of sentimental and unthinking optimism, have left their mark on “Rasselas.”

  This elephantine novelette has a host of excellent and eloquent moral reflections in it, shouldering and elbowing themselves out from its flimsy dress of fiction.

  “Rasselas,” struck off at a heat when his mother lay dying, tells in prose what, the “Vanity of Human Wishes” tells in verse. It is little known to the modern reader, who is not easily reconciled to its style. At no time could it have been a favorite with the young and thoughtless. Nevertheless, as years steal over us, we own, as we lay it down with a sigh, that it gives a view of life as profound and true as it is sad.

Edition of Shakespeare, 1765

  The praise is due of having first adopted and carried into execution Dr. Johnson’s admirable plan of illustrating Shakspeare by the study of writers of his own time. By following this track, most of the difficulties of the author have been overcome, his meaning (in many instances apparently lost) has been recovered, and much wild unfounded conjecture has been happily got rid of. By perseverance in this plan, he effected more to the elucidation of his author than any if not all his predecessors, and justly entitled himself to the distinction of being confessed the best editor of Shakspeare.

  Johnson compares him who should endeavour to recommend this poet by passages unconnectedly torn from his works, to the pedant in Hierocles who exhibited a brick as a sample of his house. And yet how little, and how very unsatisfactorily, does he himself speak of the pieces considered as a whole! Let any man, for instance, bring together the short characters which he gives at the close of each play, and see if the aggregate will amount to that sum of admiration which he himself, at his outset, has stated as the correct standard for the appreciation of the poet.

  Johnson explained much well, but there is something magisterial in the manner wherein he dismisses each play like a boy’s exercise, that irritates the reader. His criticism is frequently judicious, but betrays no ardent admiration for Shakspeare.

  Garrick got a better hold of Shakespeare’s thought than Dr. Johnson, the John Bull of erudition on whose nose Queen Mab must have skipped about queerly enough, whilst he was writing about the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He certainly did not know why Shakespeare occasioned him more involuntary irritation and desire to sneeze than any other of the poets he criticised.

  When Johnson had issued his proposals twenty years before for an edition of Shakespeare, he pointed to a great novelty for the elucidation of the poet. His intuitive sagacity had discerned that a poet so racy and native required a familiarity both with the idiom and the manners of his age. He was sensible that a complete explanation of an author, not systematic and consequential, but desultory and vagrant, abounding in casual allusions and slight hints, is not to be expected from any single scholiast. He enumerates, however, the desiderata for this purpose; among which we find that of reading the books which Shakespeare read, and to compare his works with those of writers who lived at the same time, or immediately preceded, or immediately followed him. This project, happily conceived, inferred comprehensive knowledge in the proposer; but it was only a reverie,—a dim Pisgah view which the sagacity of the great critic had taken of that future Canaan, which he himself never entered. With this sort of knowledge, and these forgotten writers, which the future commentators of Shakespeare revelled in, Johnson remained wholly unacquainted. But what proved more fatal to the editorial ability of Johnson than this imperfect knowledge of the literature and the manners of the age of Shakespeare, was that the commentator rarely sympathized with the poet; for his hard-witted and unpliant faculties, busied with the more palpable forms of human nature, when thrown amid the supernatural and the ideal, seemed suddenly deserted of their powers: the magic knot was tied which cast our Hercules into helpless impotence; and, in the circle of imaginative creation, we discover the baffled sage resisting the spell by apologizing for Shakespeare’s introduction of his mighty preternatural beings!

  He would doubtless have admitted that it would be the height of absurdity, in a man who was not familiar with the works of Æschylus and Euripides to publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition of Shakspeare, without having ever in his life, as far as can be discovered, read a single scene of Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster, Marlow, Beaumont, or Fletcher.

  The larger portion of Johnson’s Preface not only to a certain extent represented the tone of opinion in Johnson’s age, but was written with so much pomp of diction, with such apparent candour, and with such abundant manifestations of good sense, that, perhaps more than any other production, it has influenced the public opinion of Shakspere up to this day. That the influence has been, for the most part, evil, we have no hesitation in believing.

  It is giving the Doctor but little praise to say that he was a better editor than his Reverend predecessor. The majority of his emendations of the text were, nevertheless, singularly unhappy; and his notes, though often learned and sometimes sensible, were generally wanting in just that sort of learning and sense most needful for his task. Strange as it may seem, no one who himself appreciates Shakespeare, can read Johnson’s comments and verbal criticisms upon his plays without the conviction that to the “great moralist,” the grandest inspirations and most exquisitely wrought fancies of the great dramatist were as a sealed book. Many an humble individual whom the learned bear growled at—we do not hesitate to include even “Bozzy” himself—appreciated Shakespeare better than the literary dictator did.

Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775

  Dr. Johnson has just published his Journey thro’ the western isles; I have read it, and you should read it. It is quite a sentimental Journey, divested of all natural history and antiquities; but full of good sense, and new and peculiar reflections.

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

  It is to Johnson that we go to see the life, the houses, the food, the garments—nay, the very speech and manners of the Scotsmen amongst whom he passed, and who were attracted to his personality by the magnetic force of a master-mind…. Johnson’s Journal has the indescribable but irresistible charm of a monument of literary genius.

Taxation no Tyranny, 1775

  Of this performance I avoided to talk with him; for I had now formed a clear and settled opinion, that the people of America were well warranted to resist a claim that their fellow-subjects in the mother-country should have the entire command of their fortunes, by taxing them without their own consent; and the extreme violence which it breathed, appeared to me so unsuitable to the mildness of a christian philosopher, and so directly opposite to the principles of peace which he had so beautifully recommended in his pamphlet respecting Falkland’s Islands, that I was sorry to see him appear in so unfavourable a light. Besides, I could not perceive in it that ability of argument, or that felicity of expression, for which he was, upon other occasions, so eminent. Positive assertion, sarcastical severity, and extravagant ridicule which he himself reprobated as a test of truth, were united in this rhapsody. That this pamphlet was written at the desire of those who were then in power, I have no doubt; and, indeed, he owned to me, that it had been revised and curtailed by some of them.

  His political tracts must have exercised the very minimum of influence for the productions of so great a writer. He was the last man in the world to conciliate opposition, and his strong powers of argument were warped by prejudice. His “Taxation no Tyranny,” written to defend the taxation of the American colonists against their will, is at once overbearing and sophistical. It might inflame and imbitter partisans, but it was too abusive and too unreasonable to make converts.

  There was, indeed, one matter in which Johnson showed such a monstrous perversity that even the faithful Boswell fell away from him. He could not away with the claims of America. “Taxation no Tyranny” is indeed a lamentable pamphlet, but it is not Toryism…. In fact, much of the argument of his pamphlet is not so much wrong in itself as hopelessly beside the mark; and it is beside the mark not because Johnson was a Tory, but just because he was indifferent to the forms of government. Thus he was distracted from the main issue to subsidiary points, and at such a crisis subsidiary points could have no weight.

Lives of the Poets, 1779–81

  Johnson, to occasional felicity of diction, great purity of moral, and energy of thought, united a very considerable portion of critical acumen, and his Lives of Dryden and Pope are noble specimens of his powers of discrimination; yet, notwithstanding this rare combination of striking qualities, he was deficient in that sensibility to, and enthusiasm for, the charms of nature, in that relish for the simple and pathetic, so absolutely necessary to just criticism in poetry. To these defalcations were superadded an unreasonable antipathy to blank verse, a constitutional ruggedness of temper, and a bigoted, though well-meant, adhesion to some very extravagant political and religious tenets. His biographical details have suffered much from these peculiarities of temper and of taste; and a Milton, an Akenside, a Collins, a Dyer, and a Gray, might upbraid the Literary Dictator for his bitter and illiberal invective, his churlish and parsimonious praise, his great and various misrepresentations.

  There are parts of the “Lives of the Poets” which every lover of literary or moral justice would be glad to see stamped with an indelible brand of reprobation, with a disgrace so signal and conspicuous as to be a perpetual warning against the perversion of criticism and private history by political and religious bigotry and personal spleen.

  Throughout his “Lives of the Poets,” he constantly betrays a want of relish for the more abstracted graces of the art. When strong sense and reasoning were to be judged of, these he was able to appreciate justly. When the passions or characters were described, he could to certain extent decide whether they were described truly or no. But as far as poetry has relation to the kindred arts of music and painting, to both of which he was confessedly insensible, it could not be expected that he should have much perception of its excellences…. When he is most strong, he gives us some good reason for his being so. He is often mistaken, but never trivial and insipid. It is more safe to trust to him when he commends than when he dispraises; when he enlarges the boundaries of criticism which his predecessors had contracted, than when he sets up new fences of his own.

  Dr. Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets” are necessarily a prominent ornament of every library; as they have been the common theme of admiration of all countries. The style and the reflections are the chief charm of this popular work. Many of the facts must be cautiously admitted. Not that Johnson designedly falsified; but he always wanted time, diligence, and patience, in the collection of his materials; and, he rejoiced to find the fact as he wished to find it: without sufficiently weighing it in the balance of impartiality. He hugged every thing which he thought might throw a shade on a republican, a whig, or a dissenter; and spared no pains in executing such a picture in his most powerful and overwhelming colours. But toryism and orthodoxy neither require nor recommend such intemperate conduct. Even the very loose reports which had reached him of Dryden’s funeral, were inserted without a suspicion of their veracity; and it remained for Mr. Malone (in his admirable edition of Dryden’s prose works, to which a biography of the poet is prefixed) to dispel and dissipate this idle story as a barefaced fiction. But Johnson, had he been living, would not have surrendered it without a growl. Much that he has inserted in the life of Pope, and more in that of Milton, has been, and will continue to be, corrected and disproved: but who that reads Johnson’s criticisms on certain portions of the “Paradise Lost,” is not convinced that he is reading one of the most masterly performances of the human intellect? exhibiting an extent of power of conception—a vigour and felicity of diction—such as one knows not where to find equalled in any modern production. His life of Savage, the first in the order of execution, is considered to be the chef-d’œuvre; but this may be because it was the first; and because we have long known that Sir Joshua Reynolds read it with such intense interest, as to be unconscious that he was nearly dislocating his arm against a chimney piece, all the time! In consequence, he sought Johnson’s acquaintance, and respected and loved the great philologist to his dying day. Still, the lives of Dryden and Pope abound with some of the happiest specimens of Johnson’s powers of narrative and criticism. The whole set of Lives is indeed charming: fraught with wisdom and excellent taste.

  We could find no pleasure in sacrificing one great man to the manes of another…. He did not and he could not appreciate Milton. We doubt whether two other minds, having so little in common as those of which we are now speaking, can be found in the higher walks of literature. Johnson was great in his own sphere, but that sphere was comparatively “of the earth,” whilst Milton’s was only inferior to that of angels. It was customary, in the day of Johnson’s glory, to call him a Giant, to class him with a mighty but still an earth-born race. Milton we should rank among Seraphs.

  A life of Milton is yet a desideratum in our literature. Johnson hated his democratic principles, and despised his impracticable philosophy: the severity with which he handled him was only restrained by a veneration for his piety, and perhaps ignorance of his Arianism.

  He had his prejudices, and his partialities, and his bigotries, and his blindnesses, but on the same fruit-tree you see shrivelled pears or apples on the same branch with jargonelles or golden pippins worthy of Paradise…. Show me the critique that beats his on Pope and on Dryden,—nay, even on Milton; and hang me if you may not read his “Essay on Shakspeare” even after having read Charles Lamb, or heard Coleridge, with increased admiration of the powers of all three, and of their insight through different avenues, and as it might seem, almost with different bodily and mental organs, into Shakspeare’s “old exhausted” and his “new imagined worlds.” He was a critic and a moralist who would have been wholly wise had he not been partly constitutionally insane.

  “The Lives of the Poets” has been by far the most popular of his works, and is doubtless the one for which he will be reverenced in future times. It afforded room for the display of every kind of talent; of his critical sagacity, his burning imagination, his learned research, and that memory by which he retained many curious anecdotes and traits of character, which would otherwise have been lost. No doubt a prejudiced air is given to the work by his political prepossessions, and he has done injustice to some distinguished names; but he wrote what he thought, and treated his subjects as he believed they deserved. It is now clear that he was wrong in some respects; but he did not err in malice, and how was it reasonable to expect, that he should follow the prejudices of others in preference to his own.

  A production more discreditable to the author is not to be found in the whole of his voluminous works; equally discreditable, whether regarded in an historical light or as a sample of literary criticism…. His “Life of Milton” is a humiliating testimony of the power of political and religious prejudices to warp a great and good mind from the standard of truth, in his estimation not merely of contemporary excellence, but of the great of other years, over whose frailties Time might be supposed to have drawn his friendly mantle.

  The critic was certainly deficient in sensibility to the more delicate, the minor beauties of poetic sentiment. He analyzes verse in the cold-blooded spirit of a chemist, until all the aroma, which constituted its principal charm, escapes in the decomposition. By this kind of process, some of the finest fancies of the Muse, the lofty dithyrambics of Gray, the ethereal effusions of Collins, and of Milton too, are rendered sufficiently vapid. In this sort of criticism, all the effect that relies on impressions goes for nothing. Ideas are alone taken into the account, and all is weighed in the same hard, matter-of-fact scales of common sense, like so much solid prose.

  Wrote the lives of the poets and left out the poets.

  The lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson’s works. The narratives are as entertaining as any novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often excellent, and, even when grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be studied. For, however erroneous they may be, they are never silly. They are the judgments of a mind trammelled by prejudice and deficient in sensibility, but vigorous and acute. They therefore generally contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be separated from the alloy; and, at the very worst, they mean something, a praise to which much of what is called criticism in our time has no pretensions.

  You know, of course, that Swift has had many biographers; his life has been told by the kindest and most good-natured of men, Scott, who admires but cannot bring himself to love him, and by stout old Johnson, who, forced to admit him into the company of poets, receives the famous Irishman, and takes off his hat to him with a bow of surly recognition, scans him from head to foot, and passes over to the other side of the street…. Johnson truly admires Swift: Johnson does not quarrel with Swift’s change of politics, or doubt his sincerity of religion: about the famous Stella and Vanessa controversy the Doctor does not bear very hardly on Swift. But he could not give the Dean that honest hand of his; the stout old man puts it into his breast, and moves off from him.

  Johnson did not care for facts:—too indolent for research, it was enough if what he said of Pope were true of human nature,—true as to the motives and feelings that influence men,—and the comment was of universal application. Johnson’s speculation on the incidents or assumed incidents in the “Life of Pope” is philosophy teaching by example; and would be instructive had no such man as Pope ever lived,—had the work been a romance, like the “Life of Robinson Crusoe,” “Tom Jones,” or “The Vicar of Wakefield.” But the abstract and imperishable value of Johnson’s Memoir is no apology for another and for every other writer.

  A cry was raised on more grounds than one against his Life of Milton. “I could thrash his old jacket,” writes Cowper, “till I made his pension jingle in his pocket.” All Cambridge was in arms against what Mackintosh has called “that monstrous example of critical injustice which he entitles the life of Gray.” The same feeling was expressed against his criticism on Collins, and only less generally because the reputation of that poet was but then upon the rise. The friends of Lord Lyttelton were annoyed at the contempt, artful and studied as they called it, thrown upon the character of a nobleman who, with all the little foibles he might have, was, in their eyes, one of the most exalted patterns of virtue, liberality, and benevolence. Great displeasure was expressed with equal justice at his account of Thomson, while his censure of Akenside was thought by many what it really is, illiberal, and his criticism on Prior was condemned as “severe and unjust.”

  A work which, with all its faults, is the most masculine and massive body of criticism in the English tongue.

  The worst enemy that Milton and his great cause have ever been called on to confront; the worst as regards undying malice: in which qualification for mischief Dr. Johnson was not at all behind the diabolical Lauder or the maniacal Curran; and the foremost by many degrees in talents and opportunities for giving effect to his malice. I will here expand the several steps in the process of the case, so that the least attentive of readers, or least logical, may understand in what mode and in what degree Dr. Johnson, hunting for a triumph, allowed himself to trespass across the frontiers of calumny and falsehood, and at the same time may understand how far my own exposure smashes the Doctor’s attempt in the shell.

  The Doctor was a capital judge of the substantial value of the goods he handled, but his judgment always seems that of the thumb and forefinger. For the shades, the disposition of colors, the beauty of the figures, he has as good as no sense whatever. The critical parts of his “Life of Dryden” seem to me the best of his writing in this kind. There is little to be gleaned after him. He had studied his author, which he seldom did, and his criticism is sympathetic, a thing still rarer with him. As illustrative of his own habits, his remarks on Dryden’s reading are curious.

  His “Lives of the Poets” do indeed truly stand for what Boswell calls them, “the work which of all Dr. Johnson’s writings will perhaps be read most generally and with most pleasure.” And in the lives of the six chief personages of the work, the lives of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Addison, Pope, and Gray, we have its very kernel and quintessence; we have the work relieved of whatever is less significant, retaining nothing which is not highly significant, brought within easy and convenient compass, and admirably fitted to serve as a point de rèpere, a fixed and thoroughly known centre of departure and return, to the student of English literature. I know of no such first-rate piece of literature, for supplying in this way the wants of the literary student, existing at all in any other language; or existing in our own language, for any period except the period which Johnson’s six lives cover. A student cannot read them without gaining from them, consciously or unconsciously, an insight into the history of English literature and life.

  The child of his old age—the “Lives of the Poets”—a book in which criticism and biography are combined, is an admirable performance in spite of serious defects. It is the work that best reflects his mind, and intelligent readers who have once made its acquaintance, will be apt to turn it into a familiar companion.

  It has generally been acknowledged that Johnson’s life of Gray is the worst section in his delightful series. It formed the last chapter but one in the fourth volume of the “Lives of the Poets,” and was written when its author was tired of his task, and longed to be at rest again. It is barren and meagre of fact to the last degree.

  This was a literary task for which he was exactly qualified. Originally he designed to give only a paragraph to minor poets, and four or five pages to the greater; but the flood of anecdote and criticism, as Macaulay happily says, overflowed the narrow channel; and sheets were expanded into volumes. It is instructive to note that, whereas the author’s remuneration was three hundred guineas, the publishers reaped nearly six thousand pounds. Sic vos non vobis! With this supreme effort of his genius, which continues to be a text-book to literary students to the present day, Johnson’s intellectual activity came to an end.

  It is no matter that Johnson’s standards and view-points are extravagantly and exclusively of his time, so that occasionally—the cases of Milton and Gray are the chief—he falls into critical errors almost incomprehensible except from the historical side. Even these extravagances fix the critical creed of the day for us in an inestimable fashion, while in the great bulk of the Lives this criticism does no harm, being duly adjusted to the subjects. Johnson’s estimate of Chaucer doubtless would have been, as his “Rambler” remarks on Spenser actually are, worthless, except as a curiosity. But of Dryden, of Pope, and of the numerous minor poets of their time and his, he could speak with a competently adjusted theory, with admirable literary knowledge and shrewdness, and with a huge store of literary tradition which his long and conversation-loving life had accumulated, and which would have been lost for us had he not written.

Letters

  There is little (in “Johnson’s Letters”) to gratify curiosity, or to justify impatience. They are such letters as ought to have been written, but ought never to have been printed. Still they are the true letters of friendship, which are meant to show kindness rather than wit. Every place to which he was invited, every dose of physic he took, everybody who sent to ask how he did, is recorded. I can read them with a degree of interest, because I knew and loved the man, and besides was often a party concerned in the dinners he mentions. A few of these letters are very good; sometimes he is moral, and sometimes he is kind—two points of view in which it is always agreeable to consider Johnson. I am often named, never with unkindness, sometimes with favour. The impudence of editors and executors is an additional reason why men of parts should be afraid to die. Burke said to me the other day in allusion to the innumerable lives, anecdotes, remains, etc., which have been published of Johnson—“How many maggots have crawled out of that great body!”

  He who found it so easy to talk, rarely took of his own accord to the task of composition. Nor will Johnson, in spite of the plea set up for him by the present editor, be ever known as a great letter-writer, hardly even as a good one. This is not saying that in these two volumes there is not much weighty observation, much acute comment, much that would be found interesting in itself, even did it not have the additional interest of having been written by the most famous literary man that England then possessed. But the indefinable charm of unconscious self-revelation which sets off the hastiest productions of the born letter-writer, is not to be found either among the valuable reflections or the dry details that make up no small share of this correspondence.

  As a letter-writer, Johnson has great merits. Let no man despise the epistolary art. It is said to be extinct. I doubt it. Good letters are always scarce. It does not follow that because our grandmothers wrote long letters, they all wrote good ones, or that nobody nowadays writes good letters because most people write bad ones. Johnson wrote letters in two styles. One was monumental—more suggestive of the chisel than the pen. In the other there are traces of the same style, but, like the old Gothic architecture, it has grown domesticated, and become the fit vehicle of plain tidings of joy and sorrow—of affection, wit, and fancy.

General

  Of this Johnson, you and I, I believe, think much alike. (?)

  Auctioneer.—This is the Leviathan of Literature, the Colossus Doctor—and his friend the Head of the Press; a technical pair fit to fill up any lady’s library. The first was secretary to Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, but, turning out both an Idler and a Rambler, and giving False Alarms to the city by which he frightened into fits the Queen of Irene, he was immediately ordered to be sold by public auction. His compassion was thought to be Good-natured Man, till he injured a Vicar of Wakefield, deluding the poor priest with a False Prospect of Society: since which he has crawled among the ruins of a Deserted Village, and employed his time in castrating the Roman History. These are the Literary Castor and Pollux; the benevolent, celebrious, convivial associates, the incomprehensible Holofernes and the impenetrable Goodman Dull.

	So pleads the tale that gives to future times
	The son’s misfortunes and the parent’s crimes;
	There shall his fame (if own’d to-night) survive,
	Fix’d by the hand that bids our language live.

  The distinguishing excellence of Johnson’s manner, both in speaking and writing, consists in the apt and lively illustrations by example with which, in his vigorous sallies, he enforces his just and acute remarks on human life and manners, in all their modes and representations; the character and charm of his style, in a happy choice of dignified and appropriate expressions, and that masterly involution of phrase by which he contrives to bolt the prominent idea strongly on the mind.

	Here Johnson lies—a sage by all allow’d,
	Whom to have bred, may well make England proud;
	Whose prose was eloquence, by wisdom taught,
	The graceful vehicle of virtuous thought;
	Whose verse may claim—grave, masculine and strong,
	Superior praise to the mere poet’s song;
	Who many a noble gift from Heaven possess’d,
	And faith at last, alone worth all the rest.
	O man, immortal by a double prize,
	By fame on earth—by glory in the skies!

	By nature’s gifts ordain’d mankind to rule,
	He, like a Titian, form’d his brilliant school;
	And taught congenial spirits to excel,
	While from his lips impressive wisdom fell.
	Our boasted Goldsmith felt the sovereign sway;
	From him deriv’d the sweet, yet nervous lay.
	To Fame’s proud cliff he bade our Raphael rise;
	Hence Reynolds’ pen with Reynolds’ pencil vies.
	With Johnson’s flame melodious Burney glows,
	While the grand strain in smoother cadence flows.
	And you, Malone, to critick learning dear,
	Correct and elegant, refin’d though clear,
	By studying him, acquir’d that classick taste,
	Which high in Shakspeare’s fane thy statue plac’d.
	Near Johnson Steevens stands, on scenick ground,
	Acute, laborious, fertile, and profound.
	Ingenius Hawkesworth to this school we owe,
	And scarce the pupil from the tutor know.
	Here early parts accomplish’d Jones sublimes,
	And science blends with Asia’s lofty rhymes:
	Harmonious Jones! who in his splendid strains
	Sings Camdeo’s sports, on Agra’s flowery plains:
	In Hindu fictions while we fondly trace
	Love and the Muses, deck’d with Attick grace.
	Amid these names can Boswell be forgot,
	Scarce by North Britons now esteem’d a Scot;
	Who to the sage devoted from his youth,
	Imbib’d from him the sacred love of truth;
	The keen research, the exercise of mind,
	And that best art, the art to know mankind.—
	Nor was his energy confin’d alone
	To friends around his philosophick throne;
	Its influence wide improv’d our letter’d isle,
	And lucid vigour marked the general style:
	As Nile’s proud waves, swoln from their oozy bed,
	First o’er the neighbouring meads majestick spread;
	Till gathering force, they more and more expand,
	And with new virtue fertilise the land.

  Of literary merit, Johnson, as we all know, was a sagacious but a most severe judge. Such was his discernment, that he pierced into the most secret springs of human actions; and such was his integrity, that he always weighed the moral characters of his fellow-creatures in the “balance of the sanctuary.”

	No need of Latin or of Greek to grace
	Our Johnson’s memory, or inscribe his grave;
	His native language claims this mournful space,
	To pay the Immortality he gave.

  Overbearing pedant and bully, whose reputation was proof of the decline of British taste and learning.

  We are reading in idle moments, or rather dipping into, a very different work, Boswell’s long-expected “Life of Johnson.” It is like going to Ranelagh; you meet all your acquaintance: but it is a base and a mean thing to bring thus every idle word into judgement—the judgement of the public. Johnson, I think, was far from a great character; he was continually sinning against his conscience, and then afraid of going to hell for it. A Christian and a man of the town, a philosopher and a bigot, acknowledging life to be miserable, and making it more miserable through fear of death; professing great distaste to the country, and neglecting the urbanity of towns; a Jacobite, and pensioned; acknowledged to be a giant in literature, and yet we do not trace him, as we do Locke, or Rousseau, or Voltaire, in his influence on the opinions of the times. We cannot say Johnson first opened this vein of thought, led the way to this discovery or this turn of thinking. In his style he is original, and there we can track his imitators. In short, he seems to me to be one of those who have shone in the belles lettres, rather than, what he is held out by many to be, an original and deep genius in investigation.

  After the Doctor’s death, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Boswell sent an ambling circular-letter to me, begging subscriptions for a Monument for him—the two last, I think, impertinently; as they could not but know my opinion, and could not suppose I would contribute to a Monument for one who had endeavoured, poor soul! to degrade my friend’s superlative poetry. I would not deign to write an answer; but sent down word by my footman, as I would have done to parish officers with a brief, that I would not subscribe. In the two new volumes Johnson says, and very probably did, or is made to say, that Gray’s poetry is dull, and that he was a dull man! The same oracle dislikes Prior, Swift, and Fielding. If an elephant could write a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy ungraceful animal. Pass to a better chapter!

  I remember Mr. Burke, speaking of the Essays of Sir Francis Bacon, said, he thought them the best of his works. Dr. Johnson was of opinion, that “their excellence and their value consisted in being the observations of a strong mind operating upon life; and in consequence you find there what you seldom find in other books.” It is this kind of excellence which gives a value to the performances of artists also. It is the thoughts expressed in the works of Michael Angelo, Correggio, Raffaelle, Parmegiano, and perhaps some of the old Gothic masters, and not the inventions of Pietro da Cortona, Carlo Marati, Luca Giordano, and others, that I might mention, which we seek after with avidity: from the former we learn to think originally. May I presume to introduce myself on this occasion, and even to mention, as an instance of the truth of what I have remarked, the very Discourses which I have had the honour of delivering from this place? Whatever merit they have, must be imputed, in a great measure, to the education which I may be said to have had under Dr. Johnson. I do not mean to say, though it certainly would be to the credit of these Discourses, if I could say it with truth, that he contributed even a single sentiment to them; but he qualified my mind to think justly. No man had, like him, the faculty of teaching inferior minds the art of thinking. Perhaps other men might have equal knowledge; but few were so communicative.

  Johnson’s partiality for old English manners and practices was unbounded; nor can there be produced from the annals of our literature a more fervent anti-whig and anti-gallican.

  Every one of tolerable education feels the imitability of Dr. Johnson’s and other-such’s style, the imitability of Shakspere’s, etc. Hence, I believe, arises the partiality of thousands for Johnson. They can imagine themselves doing the same. Vanity is at the bottom of it. The number of imitators proves this in some measure.

  Johnson’s style has pleased many from the very fault of being perpetually translatable; he creates an impression of cleverness by never saying any thing in a common way.

  The structure of his sentences, which was his own invention, and which has been generally imitated since his time, is a species of rhyming in prose, where one clause answers to another in measure and quantity, like the tagging of syllables at the end of a verse; the close of the period follows as mechanically as the oscillation of a pendulum, the sense is balanced with the sound; each sentence, revolving round its centre of gravity, is contained within itself like a couplet, and each paragraph forms itself into a stanza. Dr. Johnson is also a complete balance-master in the topics of morality. He never encourages hope, but he counteracts it by fear; he never elicits a truth, but he suggests some objection in answer to it. He seizes and alternately quits the clue of reason, lest it should involve him in the labyrinths of endless error: he wants confidence in himself and his fellows. He dares not trust himself with the immediate impressions of things, for fear of compromising his dignity; or follow them into their consequences, for fear of committing his prejudices. His timidity is the result, not of ignorance, but of morbid apprehension.

  It is a great defect in the education of our youth in both the Universities that they do not sufficiently apply themselves to the study of their mother tongue. By this means it happens, that some very learned men and polite scholars are not able to express themselves with propriety in common conversation, and that when they are discoursing on a subject which they understand perfectly well. I have been acquainted with three persons only who spoke English with that eloquence and propriety, that if all they said had been immediately committed to writing, any judge of the English language would have pronounced it an excellent and very beautiful style—Atterbury, the exiled bishop of Rochester; Dr. Gower, provost of Worcester College; and Samuel Johnson.

Rough Johnson, the great moralist.

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

  Perhaps you do not know of my profound veneration for this surly sage; but I am such an admirer of his peculiar style of excellence, that I can easily endure defects that bring him within my reach, and save me the effort of standing on tiptoe to contemplate his gigantic mind.

  At length rose the Colossus of English Philology, Samuel Johnson; having secretly and unremittingly formed his style upon the basis of that of Sir Thomas Browne; a name, in every respect to be held in grateful remembrance. But Johnson, as a philologist, is almost an original; and doubtless among the very foremost in the ranks of the literature of his country. And yet, I know not how it is, but, as years creep on, we do not read his pages with that devoted enthusiasm which we did in our College days: for where is the man, who, having turned his thirtieth year, peruses “Rasselas” or the “Rambler?” It is as a Colloquialist and Biographer that Johnson has scarcely a rival—especially when prejudices did not spread a film over those intellectual orbs, which were constructed to gaze uninjured upon the sun!

  The judgments which Johnson passed on books were in his own time regarded with superstitious veneration; and in our own time are generally treated with indiscriminate contempt. They are the judgments of a strong but enslaved understanding. The mind of the critic was hedged round by an uninterrupted fence of prejudices and superstitions. Within his narrow limits he displayed a vigour and an activity which ought to have enabled him to clear the barrier that confined him…. He was no master of the great science of human nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but the species Londoner. Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant with all the forms of life, and all the shades of moral and intellectual character, which were to be seen from Islington to the Thames, and from Hyde-Park corner to Mile-end green. But his philosophy stopped at the first turnpike gate. Of the rural life of England he knew nothing; and he took it for granted that everybody who lived in the country was either stupid or miserable.

  His imagination was not more lively than was necessary to illustrate his maxims; his attainments in science were inconsiderable, and in learning far from the first class; they chiefly consisted in that sort of knowledge which a powerful mind collects from miscellaneous reading, a various intercourse with mankind. From the refinement of abstruse speculation he was withheld, partly, perhaps, by that repugnance to such subtleties which much experience often inspires, and partly also by a secret dread that they might disturb those prejudices in which his mind had found repose from the agitation of doubt. He was a most sagacious and severely pure judge of the actions and motives of men, and he was tempted by frequent detection of imposture to indulge somewhat of that contemptuous scepticism, respecting the sincerity of delicate and refined sentiments, which affected his whole character as a man and writer.

  No man contemplates with greater tenderness than we do the frailties of Dr. Johnson; none respects more the sound parts of his moral system; or admires more the vigor of the elephantine step with which he sometimes tramples down insolent error and presumptuous sophistry. But let no young man, who wishes to write well, study his style.

  Samuel Johnson, in some respects, stood entirely alone in Europe. In those years there was no one in Europe like him…. Was a large-minded man, an entirely sincere and honest man. Whatever may be our differences of opinion is here entirely insignificant; he must inevitably be regarded as the brother of all honest men. One who held this truth among the insincerities that lay around him, that, after all, “life was true yet,” and he was a man to hold by that truth, and cling to it in the general shipwreck on the sea of Eternity.

  His brilliant style has been the ambition of every schoolboy, and of some children of larger growth, since the days of the “Rambler.” But the nearer they come to it, the worse. The beautiful is turned into the fantastic, and the sublime into the ridiculous.

  A love of hard and learned words prevailed throughout; and a fondness for balanced periods was its special characteristic. But there was often great felicity in the expression, occasionally a pleasing cadence in the rhythm, generally an epigrammatic turn in the language, as well as in the idea. Even where the workmanship seemed most to surpass the material, and the word-craft to be exercised needlessly and the diction to run to waste, there was never any feebleness to complain of, and always something of skill and effect to admire. The charm of nature was ever wanting, but the presence of great art was undeniable. Nothing was seen of the careless aspect which the highest of artists ever give their masterpieces,—the produce of elaborate but concealed pains; yet the strong hand of an able workman was always marked; and it was observed, too, that he disdained to hide from us the far less labour which he had much more easily bestowed. There is no denying that some of Johnson’s works, from the meagerness of the material and the regularity of the monotonous style, are exceedingly little adapted to reading. They are flimsy, and they are dull; they are pompous, and, though full of undeniable—indeed, self-evident—truths, they are somewhat empty; they are, moreover, wrapped up in a style so disproportioned in its importance, that the perusal becomes very tiresome, and is soon given up. This character belongs more especially to the “Rambler,” the object of such unmeasured praises among his followers, and from which he derived the title of the Great Moralist.

  As a writer, he is the very incarnation of good sense; and as a man, he was an example of so high a degree of virtue, magnanimity, and self-sacrifice, that he has been justly placed by a profound modern speculator among the heroes of his country’s annals…. Johnson’s style during the whole of his career was exceedingly peculiar and characteristic both in its beauties and defects, and when he arrived at eminence may be said to have produced a revolution in the manner of writing in English; and as this revolution has to a certain degree lasted till the present day, it will be well to say a few words on the subject. It is in the highest degree pompous, sonorous, and, to use a happy expression of Coleridge, hyper-latinistic; running into perpetual antithesis, and balancing period against period with an almost rhythmical regularity, which at once fills and fatigues the ear…. The prevailing defect of Johnson’s style is uniformity: the combinations of his kaleidoscope are soon exhausted; his peal of bells is very limited in its changes; and there is necessarily, in so artificial a style, an air of pretention and ambitiousness, the sameness is more fatiguing than would be the snipped periods and tuneless meanness of a more unostentatious mode of expression…. His mind, admirably adapted as it was for the scientific part of criticism, was impotent to feel or appreciate what is picturesque or passionate. He is like a deaf man seated at a symphony of Beethoven—a sense is wanting to him…. The character of Shakspeare’s genius, given in the preface, is a noble specimen of panegyric; and it is singular to see how far the divine genius of the dramatist almost succeeds in overcoming all the prejudices of Johnson’s age and education. As a moralist, as a painter of men and minds, Johnson has done Shakspeare (at least as far as any man could) ample justice; but in his judgment of the great creative poet’s more romantic manifestations he exhibits a callousness and insensibility which was partly the result of his education and of the age when he lived, and partly, without doubt, the consequence of the peculiar constitution of his mind—a mind which felt much more sympathy with men than with things, and was much more at home in the “full tide of London existence” than in the airy world of imagination—among the everyday crowds of Fleet Street, than in Prospero’s enchanted isle, or the moonlit terraces of Verona.

  Dr. Johnson, gravely supporting an aristocratic public policy, while he powerfully and pathetically rebuked aristocratic private conduct. Let the name of Dr. Johnson never be mentioned among scholars without a sad respect; but is he, distinctively, the scholar in English history?

  Doctor Johnson’s written abstractions have little value; the tone of feeling in them makes their chief worth.

  Dr. Johnson’s English style demands a few words. So peculiar is it, and such a swarm of imitators grew up during the half century of his greatest fame, that a special name—Johnsonese—has been often used to donate the march of its ponderous classic words. Yet it was not original, and not a many-toned style. There were in our literature, earlier than Dr. Johnson’s day, writers who far outdid their Fleet Street disciple in recruiting our native ranks with heavy-armed warriors from the Greek phalanx and the Latin legion. Of these writers Sir Thomas Browne was perhaps the chief. Goldy, as the great Samuel loved to call the author of the “Deserted Village,” got many a sore blow from the Doctor’s conversational sledge-hammer; but he certainly contrived to get within the Doctor’s guard and hit him home, when he said, “If you were to write a fable about little fishes, Doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales.” Macaulay tells us that when Johnson wrote for publication, he did his sentences out of English into Johnsonese.

  There is perhaps no subsequent prose-writer upon whose style that of Johnson has been altogether without its effect.

  His true genius lay in the masculine strength of his common sense; and in spite of his prejudices, of his dogmatism, of his frequent intolerance and occasional paradox—in spite, still more, of a style in prose strangely contrasting the cold severity of his style in verse—unfamiliar, inflated, artificially grandiose—still that common sense has such pith and substance that it makes its way to every plain, solid understanding. And while all that Johnson owed to his more imaginative qualities has faded away from his reputation; while his poems are regarded but as scholastic exercises; while his tragedy is left unread; while the fables and tales scattered throughout his essays allure no popular imitation, and even “Rasselas” is less admired for its loftiness of purpose and conception than censured for its inappropriate dialogue or stilted diction, and neglected for the dryness of its narrative and the frigidity of its characters; while his ablest criticisms, composed in his happiest style, rarely throw light upon what may be called the metaphysics of imaginative art,—his knowledge of the world has a largeness and at times a depth which preserve authority to his opinions upon the general bearings of life and the prevalent characteristics of mankind—a knowledge so expanded, by its apprehension of generical truths, from mere acquaintanceship with conventional manners, and the sphere of the town life which enthralled his taste, that at this day it is not in capitals that his works are most esteemed as authoritative, but rather in the sequestered homes of rural book-readers. To men of wit about town, a grave sentence from Johnson upon the philosophy of the great world would seem old-fashioned pedantry, where, to men of thought in the country, it would convey some truth in social wisdom too plain to be uttered by pedants, and too solid to be laughed out of fashion by wits.

  Johnson neither in amplitude of literature nor exactness of scholarship could be deemed a match for Lessing; but they were alike in the power of readily applying whatever they had learned, whether for purposes of illustration or argument. They resemble each other, also, in a kind of absolute common-sense, and in the force with which they could plant a direct blow with the whole weight both of their training and their temperament behind it. As a critic Johnson ends where Lessing begins. The one is happy in the lower region of the understanding: the other can breathe freely in the ampler air of reason alone. Johnson acquired learning, and stopped short through indolence at a certain point. Lessing assimilated it, and accordingly his education ceased only with his life. Both had something of the intellectual sluggishness that is apt to go with great strength; and both had to be baited by the antagonism of circumstances or opinions, not only into the exhibition, but into the possession of their entire force. Both may be more properly called original men than, in the highest sense, original writers.

  In fact, his phraseology rolls always in solemn and majestic periods, in which every substantive marches ceremoniously, accompanied by its epithets; great, pompous words peal like an organ; every proposition is set forth balanced by a proposition of equal length; thought is developed with the compassed regularity and official splendour of a procession. Classical prose attains its perfection in him, as classical poetry in Pope. Art cannot be more consummate, or nature more forced. No one has confined ideas in more strait compartments; none has given stronger relief to dissertation and proof; none has imposed more despotically on story and dialogue the forms of argumentation and violent declamation; none has more generally mutilated the flowing liberty of conversation and life by antitheses and technical words. It is the completion and the excess, the triumph and the tyranny, of oratorical style. We understand now that an oratorical age would recognise him as a master, and attribute to him in eloquence the primacy which it attributed to Pope in verse.

  Johnson first taught literary men the lesson of self-reliance and independence. Of all men of genius he is the only typical Englishman in whose strength, as also in his weakness, we see the national character. He was absolutely free from meanness and jealousy; a mighty soul which disdained tricks and subterfuges. “Like the Monument,” in his own language, he stood upright and never stooped; no human power could have torn him from his base. Yet in this strongest of natures there was the gentlest affection, and the deepest reverence and humility. The giant has a heart like a woman or a child.

  Johnson wrote almost all his “Ramblers” just as they were wanted for the press; he sent a certain portion of the copy of an essay, and wrote the remainder while the earlier part was printing. When it was wanted, and he had fairly sat down to it, he was sure, he said, it would be done.

  Doctor Samuel Johnson was poet, dramatist, essayist, lexicographer, dogmatist, and critic, and, in this array of professional characters, played so distinguished a part in his day that he was long regarded as a prodigy in English literature. His influence has waned since his personality has grown dim, and his learning been superseded or over-shadowed; but he still remains, and must always remain, the most prominent literary figure of his age…. His style is full-sounding and antithetic, his periods are carefully balanced, his manner eminently respectable and good; but his words, very many of them of Latin derivation, constitute what the later critics have named Johnsonese, which is certainly capable of translation into plainer Saxon English, with good results…. As a critic, his word was law: his opinion was clearly and often severely expressed on literary men and literary subjects, and no great writer of his own or a past age escaped either his praise or his censure. Authors wrote with the fear of his criticism before their eyes; and his pompous diction was long imitated by men who, without this influence, would have written far better English. But, on the other hand, his honesty, his scholarship, his piety, and his championship of what was good and true, as depicted in his writings, made him a blessing to his time, and an honored and notable character in the noble line of English authors.

  The style of Johnson, deemed so admirable at the time, seems to us now intolerably artificial, pedantic, constrained, and ponderous. His periods are carefully considered and balanced, its proportionate length, emphasis, and weight of heavy words being given to each member: homely and familiar words and phrases, however apposite or expressive, are rejected as undignified; antithesis does duty for brilliancy, and an occasional reversal of the syntax for variety. Each point is handled in the style of a solemn argument: step by step the demonstration proceeds, often leading to a conclusion which would have been admitted upon statement. His utterances are too frequently elaborately dressed-up commonplaces; and a laborious paragraph is employed to evolve a thought which might have been more forcibly expressed in a single terse idiomatic phrase. Thus, his style has no freshness, no individual coloring; we feel that it is the result of a multitude of heterogeneous minds, all ground together in the mill of omnivorous learning. Johnson’s criticisms are learned, carefully weighed, but deficient in insight. He had no faculty of entering into other men’s natures, and justly appreciating views which he did not himself hold. He was an infatuated, though perfectly honest and disinterested, Tory; and his intense political bias often led him into absurd injustice. In his eyes Voltaire was merely an infidel and cynical buffoon, and Rousseau a miscreant deserving the gallows. Being absolutely destitute of the poetic faculty, he lacked the essential qualification for a critic of poetry; and, while sure to detect a fallacy in reasoning, or a blemish in morals, the finer spirit of poetry he could not appreciate. On the other hand, his writings are everywhere pervaded by a perfect love of truth and justice, and an utter abhorrence of falsehood and fraud; by a pure morality, enforced with the strongest emphasis; by a warm admiration for all things good and noble; and by the sincerest spirit of Christian piety; all which qualities he exemplified in his own brave and blameless life. His style, ponderous and constrained as it now appears, was not without many good qualities.

  Robert Hall, in his early days, made Johnson a model, but soon gave him up, complaining of a want of fervour in his morality. Though profoundly convinced of the doctrines of Religion, he seldom dilates on her “august solemnities,” or on the grandeur of her hopes and fears. What he keeps principally in view is the beneficial effect of religious belief on human conduct, laying down the law in sonorous dogmas. In the presence of objects that raise emotions of sublimity in other men, he was on the watch to lay hold of general rules. Instead of giving way to the æsthetic influence of the situation, he pondered on the causes of the moral value of them, and meditated dictatorial, high-sounding, general propositions.

  A solid Doric column, chipped into outline and assigned position by circumstances, he nevertheless chiefly interests us by the rugged strength of his own native texture.

  His prose writings are noted for their formality of style and vigor of thought Like Addison, he has furnished an adjective descriptive of literary style; and to be “Johnsonian” is to be ponderous and grandiose. “Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia,” an allegorical story from which we take our extracts, is perhaps the most familiar of his compositions to the general reader. Dr. Johnson was a man of vigorous intellect, acute and argumentative, but narrow in his views, dogmatic and positive in his assertions.

  He presented “common-sense” in the most prosaic sense of the word.

  Now that we are out of reach of his terrible voice and his overbearing demeanour, and regarding him thus from a safe distance, we do not find it so difficult to designate his capacity for judging in literary matters as often shallow and pretentious…. The formidable lexicographer was of that class of men who are almost prepared to find fault with the sun because of the spots upon his surface.

  He was as good a moralist as a man can be who regards the ultimate foundations of morality as placed beyond the reach of speculation. “We know we are free, and there’s an end on’t” is the answer to the great metaphysical difficulty. He “refutes” Berkeley by kicking a stone. He thinks that Hume is a mere trifler, who has taken to “milking the bull” by way of variety. He laughs effectually at Soame Jenyns’s explanation of the origin of evil; but leaves the question as practically insoluble, without troubling himself as to why it is insoluble, or what consequences may follow from its insolubility. Speculation, in short, though he passed for a philosopher, was simply abhorrent to him. He passes by on the other side, and leaves such puzzles for triflers. He has made up his mind once for all that religion is wanted, and that the best plan is to accept the established creed. And thus we have the apparent paradox that, whilst no man sets a higher value upon truthfulness in all the ordinary affairs of life than Johnson, no man could care less for the foundations of speculative truth. His gaze was not directed to that side. Judging in all cases rather by intuition than by logical processes, he takes for granted the religious theories which fall in sufficiently with his moral convictions. To all speculation which may tend to loosen the fixity of the social order he is deaf or contemptuously averse. The old insidious Deism seems to him to be mere trash; and he would cure the openly aggressive Deism of Rousseau by sending its author to the plantations. Indifference to speculation generates a hearty contempt for all theories. He has too firm a grasp of facts to care for the dreams of fanciful Utopians; his emotions are too massive and rigid to be easily excited by enthusiasts. He ridicules the prevailing cry against corruption. The world is bad enough in all conscience, but it will do no good to exaggerate or to whine.

  That great Luminary of Learning, the English Lexiphanes.

  No writer delivers moral maxims and dictatorial sentences with greater force, or lays down definitions with more grave precision. His critical acumen, setting aside personal and political prejudices, was likewise very great; but he is utterly averse to the easy and familiar, both in style and sentiment. His style formed an era in English composition. Its balanced pomp and antithetical clauses had with many an irresistible charm. However, the admiration for its exuberance of words of Latin etymology, and its sonorous rotundity of phrase, after having betrayed some writers into an injudicious imitation, has at length subsided; and the share of influence which remains, has certainly improved the general language.

  One clever writer has lately attempted a defence of Dr. Johnson’s pompous style, saying that the sage drew distinctions as he drew his breath, and that he could not express these distinctions without couching his diction in Latin-born phrases. The answer is most simple: he drew distinctions with equal subtility when he was talking, and he expressed them in the homeliest Teutonic. He has had his reward: his “Rambler” lies unread on our book-shelves; his talk, as recorded by Boswell, is perused every year by thousands of delighted students. Any writer of our day, who has a mind to be read a hundred years hence, should lay the lesson to heart.

  Johnson gained his reputation by his unrivalled power of concentrating his own forces, of defending himself against the aggression of outer influences,—and striking a light in the process. Of course Johnson was a man of very strong general understanding. Had he not been so, he could not have commanded the respect he did, for those who do not in a considerable degree understand others, will never be themselves understood. Still, admitting freely that it both takes a man of some character as well as insight, to understand distinctly what is beyond his own sphere, and a man of some insight as well as character, to teach others to understand distinctly what is within himself, it is clear that Johnson’s genius lay in the latter, not in the former direction,—in maintaining himself against the encroachments of the world, and in interpreting himself to that world, not in enlarging materially the world’s sympathies and horizons, except so far as he taught them to include himself. The best things he did of any kind were all expressions of himself.

  Merely a man of keen perception and shrewd reasoning.

  Johnson unites in his own style many of the opposite excellences exhibited by his predecessor and his friend. It was impossible that the bias of his strong character should be altogether concealed in his verse, and “London” in particular appears to have been largely inspired by personal motives like those which suggested to Pope his “Imitations of Horace.” But the different genius of the two poets is seen in the selection of their respective originals. Pope was struck by the many superficial points of resemblance between himself and the lively egotistical Horace, and seized eagerly on the opportunity of presenting his own virtues, friendships, and enmities to the public under a transparent veil of imitation. Johnson, on the contrary, who, as an unknown writer, could not hope to interest the public in his personal concerns, chose a general theme, and imitated the satirist whose denunciations of Roman vice offered, in many respects, an apt parallel to the manners of his own age…. “The Vanity of Human Wishes” marks a calmer and more prosperous epoch in the poet’s life, and its philosophical generalising spirit is an anticipation of Goldsmith’s “Traveller.” Johnson was now relieved from the immediate pressure of want; and in his second “Imitation” he takes a wider survey of mankind; he suppresses all personal satire, and fetches the illustrations of his argument from distant times. The style of this poem is also completely different from that of “London:” in the latter he is ardent, animated, and colloquial, while in the “Vanity of Human Wishes” he speaks with the gravity of a moralist, making his periods swelling and sonorous, balancing his verses against each other, and equaling Pope himself in the condensation of his language. Nevertheless, the whole spirit of the composition, though professedly an imitation, is highly characteristic of the man: we see in it the melancholy gloom that darkened all his views of human existence, while at the same time the noble lines of the conclusion recall the language of those touching fragments of prayer which Boswell discovered among his papers and has preserved in his “Life.” His Prologues are of the highest excellence; indeed it may be confidently affirmed that he is the best writer of prologues in the language. No man was ever so well qualified to strike that just mean between respectfulness and authority which such addresses to the public require. His sound critical power and elevated feeling are well exemplified in the “Prologue spoken at the opening of Drury Lane Theatre;” and there is true greatness of spirit in his Prologue to “Comus,” in which he claims the liberality of the audience for Milton’s granddaughter as a tardy redress for the injustice shown by the nation to the genius of the poet himself. His admirable independence of the character is perhaps even better seen in the Prologue to “A Word to the Wise,” a play which at its first exhibition was damned in consequence of political prejudices against the author, but was revived after his death. Nothing can be better than the dignity with which Johnson, in this address, while recognising the judicial authority of the audience, indirectly reproves them for their previous disregard of the laws of humanity by which all their verdicts ought to be determined.

  Johnson did more than any other one man in English letters to make literature a working profession—to take it out of the hands of patrons, and make the dealings of author and publisher a substantial business relation. He was one of the first English authors who lived by his work, and the honest independence with which he inspired the profession, has been a help to authors ever since his time. His dictionary, too, was one of the great works of the century. While we can not help wishing that the Johnsonian tendency in language had been towards greater simplicity and not towards the introduction of so many Latin words, still we must see that he did a great work for language. In his time there was no standard dictionary—the best one very imperfect—and Johnson in arranging and defining the words of the language, brought it into order and gave it form. He singly and alone attempted to do for England what the French Academy did for France, and although it is a question whether it is not better to have so important a work done by a body of scholars rather than by one man alone, yet nobody in raising that question, will doubt the value and honesty of Samuel Johnson’s labors.

  He taught others to look, like himself, through all the fleeting accidents of life to that in which a man can really live, and there were none who came to know him without learning how pure a spring of love and tenderness kept the whole nature fresh within. Firmly attached to the established Church, Johnson was a stout Tory on the religious side of his life and held the First Georges in such contempt as, it may be said, their lives had duly earned for them. But no delusions of party feeling dimmed his sense of human brotherhood, and of the large interests of humanity. Negro slavery was to his mind so gross a wrong that he startled a polite company one day with a toast “to the next Insurrection of the Blacks.” The political corruption of his time caused Johnson in his Dictionary, which appeared in 1755, to define “Pension” as “a grant made to any one without an equivalent,” and “Pensioner” as “a slave of state, hired by a stipend to obey his master.”… Johnson’s power had grown with the time, and he so far shared the reaction against formalism in his style, that the English of his “Lives of the Poets” differs distinctly from the English of his “Rambler.”

  The most able criticism of the 18th century was Johnson’s; he may be called in fact the first really systematic critic of English literature; for, although his remarks on other authors are scattered all about his own miscellaneous writings, it may be confidently stated that he made criticism his profession, and earned his living by it. He is an important link in the chain of English prose writers, for he is the first author whose whole thoughts were turned to the works of his predecessors.

  In morals and criticism, it will ever be to his praise that he has assailed all sentimentalism and licentiousness. His wit, eloquence, and logic were always enlisted on the side of revealed religion, to deepen and extend, in heart and practice, the human faith in God. In the fields of Literature, which were now beginning to be cultivated on all sides, he did more than any of his contemporaries to create a pure and invigorating atmosphere. His balanced pomp of antithetic clauses soon had for others, as it had for him, an irresistible charm, and caused a complete revolution, for a time, in English style. Unhappily, it was too often imitated by inferior writers, who had not the glow to kindle the massive structure—little fishes talking like whales. There has been no English prose writer, onward to the present day, whose style has not been influenced by that of Johnson.

  I never for an instant compared Johnson to Scott, Pope, Byron, or any of the really great writers whom I loved. But I at once and forever recognized in him a man entirely sincere, and infallibly wise in the view and estimate he gave of the common questions, business, and ways of the world. I valued his sentences not primarily because they were symmetrical, but because they were just, and clear; it is a method of judgment rarely used by the average public, who ask from an author always, in the first place, arguments in favour of their own opinions, in elegant terms; and are just as ready with their applause for a sentence of Macaulay’s, which may have no more sense in it than a blot pinched between doubled paper, as to reject one of Johnson’s, telling against their own prejudice,—though its symmetry be as of thunder answering from two horizons. I hold it more than happy that, during those continental journeys, in which the vivid excitement of the greater part of the day left me glad to give spare half-hours to the study of a thoughtful book, Johnson was the one author accessible to me. No other writer could have secured me, as he did, against all chance of being misled by my own sanguine and metaphysical temperament. He taught me carefully to measure life, and distrust fortune; and he secured me, by his adamantine common-sense, for ever, from being caught in the cobwebs of German metaphysics, or sloughed in the English drainage of them.

  There is hardly any among the great men of history who can be called so emphatically and distinctively “a man of letters,” undoubtedly none who has won so high a personal position and so large a contemporary influence by sheer strength of pen. The literary life is not generally considered to be especially favorable to the cultivation of piety; and Johnson’s peculiar circumstances were not of a kind to make it more favorable in his case than usual. He was poor, neglected, struggling during a great part of his career against the heaviest odds. His natural disposition was by no means such as to predispose him to religion. He was afflicted from childhood with a hypochondriac and irritable humor; a proud domineering spirit, housed in an unwieldy and disordered body; plagued by inordinate physical appetites; inclined not unnaturally to rely with overconfidence upon the strength and accuracy of his reasoning powers; driven by his impetuous temper into violent assertion and bitter controversy; deeply wounded by his long years of obscurity, and highly elated by his final success,—he was certainly not one whom we would select as likely to be a remarkably religious man. Carlyle had less to embitter him. Goethe had no more to self-deify him. And yet, beyond a doubt, Samuel Johnson was a sincere, an humble, and, in the main, a consistent Christian.

  Among Johnson’s numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance are, perhaps, his “Dictionary of the English Language,” 1755; his moral tale, “Rasselas,” 1759; the introduction to his “Edition of Shakspere,” 1765; and his “Lives of the Poets,” 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous, cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses…. There is more of this in Johnson’s “Rambler” and “Idler” papers than in his latest work, the “Lives of the Poets.” In this he showed himself a sound and judicious critic, though with decided limitations. His understanding was solid, but he was a thorough classicist, and his taste in poetry was formed on Pope. He was unjust to Milton and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, Shenstone, and Dyer. He had no sense of the higher and subtler graces of romantic poetry, and he had a comical indifference to the “beauties of nature.” When Boswell once ventured to remark that poor Scotland had, at least, some “noble, wild prospects,” the doctor replied that the noblest prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that led to London.

  The unfading interest in Dr. Johnson is one of the good signs of English character. Men do not read his books, but they never cease to care about him. It shows what hold the best and broadest human qualities always keep on the heart of man. This man, who had to be coaxed into favor before a request could be asked, and whose friends and equals were afraid to remonstrate with him except by a round-robin, was yet capable of the truest delicacy, the purest modesty, the most religious love for all that was greater and better than himself. But the great value of him was his reality. He was a perpetual protest against the artificialness and unreality of that strange eighteenth century in which he lived.

  Johnson has never been highly estimated as a critic, and on this point he has hardly received fair consideration. His hasty remarks, uttered in the heat of controversy, have been handed down as the result of deliberate judgment, but his literary instincts were more correct than has generally been imagined. Personal feelings undoubtedly often influenced his opinions, and he was unwilling to allow praise to writers of whose principles he disapproved. He could see little merit in the vigorous irony of Swift, and would never acknowledge him to be the author of “The Tale of a Tub!” but there is scarcely any writer from whom Johnson quoted so often in his dictionary…. On the other hand, he spoke too favourably of writers whose personal characters he respected. Beattie he loved, and he mentioned his writings in terms which now appear ludicrous. He was under obligations to Richardson, and thought highly of the moral tendency of his works, which in consequence he immensely over-rated, but he admitted that anybody who read Richardson’s novels for the sake of the story would be compelled to hang himself, and forgot the fact that it is exactly for the sake of the story that novels are generally read, and that, however excellent may be the sentiment, the reader of a work of fiction will soon close the volume if there is no amusement in the plot.

  His sagacious words and suggestions are likely to last with the literature of the language, for they embody great living truths and principles which are and must continue superior to the changes which affect and rule in the minor affairs of life.

  Johnson was never designed to be a successful periodical essayist. He had a better field in biography, lexicography and general criticism. He was far more than a miscellaneous essayist, and in this respect was the superior of Addison. Such critics as De Quincey are led to speak in high terms of Johnson’s style not so much on the basis of his periodical work as on that of his entire work as an author and commentator.

  The hold that Johnson has on the esteem of mankind, after the lapse of a century, proves that he was no unreal giant, but a hater of shams, and ever striving after the eternal verities, although unquestionably indebted to Boswell for his highest fame. He could not endure undeserved praise, and knew well enough that his tragedy of “Irene” added neither to his literary fame nor to the sum of his real merits. When a gentleman by the name of Pot was reported as having said that it “was the finest tragedy of modern times,” Johnson at once replied, “If Pot says so, Pot lies;” and that verdict the public has never reversed. Goldsmith really touched Johnson in his most vulnerable point when he said, “He makes his little fishes talk like whales.”

  Johnson has contributed many imperishable sayings to the English language. Unfortunately, in literary matters he had a divided life. Macaulay has exaggerated the contrast between Johnson talking at his ease in the club or at Mrs. Thrale’s tea-table, and Johnson penning “Ramblers” in the study. Still, there was a difference. Talk was to the Doctor the wine of life; it stirred his pulses, quickened his powerful but rather sluggish intellect, brought out his humour, drove off his besetting melancholy. Alone in Bolt Court, with blue devils, his pen lagged, and he produced, with some profoundly interesting work, a good deal of lumber. Though he raised the tone of the essay, he disimproved its form, as the masterly hand of Addison left it. The “Ramblers” and “Idlers,” for instance, are, on the whole, failures, for want of the salt of personality which make the club talks successes. “Rasselas” is almost charming, but it resembles a theatrical performance by Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Crummies and Company. One was all Crummies; the other is all Johnson. Pakuah, Imlac, Rasselas, and the rest, all wear knee-breeches and buckles; their speech bewrayeth them. Here and there, especially in the “Idlers,” there is a lively personal touch worthy of the “Spectator;” and weighty satire and vigorous criticisms of life are never wanting…. As a critic Johnson is excellent—intelligent, shrewd, knowing—and his worth may be well gauged by comparing him with his contemporaries, and even with the critical school of the earlier years of the nineteenth century. He has been abused for his mistakes. What critic is without them? What about the Edinburgh Reviewers? How many of Francis Jeffrey’s literary verdicts remain?… What will Carlyle’s historical criticism be worth fifty years hence? What are Mr. Froude’s worth now? Of Johnson, it may be said that as he produced the best dictionary in an age when philology was in its infancy, so he was the best literary critic of an age when there was very little criticism to speak of. Look at the stuff which passes for literary judgments with Horace Walpole, who was always sneering at Johnson’s “tasteless pedantry!” Johnson was, in fact, a good deal better than his age and his prejudices.

  When the coffin was lowered into the grave, one able to read the outward signs of coming change might have seen buried with it the whole of the eighteenth century literature, as Johnson understood literature, and not to speak of frivolous productions such as those of Fielding and Smollett, who had also gone before. After Johnson’s name in the list of English poets, scholars, and essayists may be drawn a thick black line such as in railway guides they use to indicate that here the train stops. Johnson’s train of literature, which started merrily with Pope, Addison, Steele, and a glorious company of wits, had been running slowly of late, and has now come to a final stop. Not only was the old order changing, as happens continually, by the laws of being, but it was completely dead, and its successor as yet was not born. There was to be no more literature of the old school: nothing worth reading on the old lines was to be published; and the world must wait until the new men should begin their work with new thoughts, new ways of looking at things, and new forms of expression.

  Johnson, in addition to his other great achievements, was capable of making colossal errors without the slightest help from others.

  There was an intellectual dress, as it were, put on by the man of genius of those times. It hung loosely upon Goldsmith’s irregular frame. It sat close, well-fitting and fashionable upon Addison, but Samuel Johnson’s mighty limbs almost burst its seams and betrayed at every movement the giant who wore it.

  While he wrote some strong and quotable verse, full of vigorous and telling rhetoric, he is pre-eminently a prose writer in an age of prose. The uninspired and practical temper of his time found prose rather than poetry its natural medium…. While Johnson thus stands as the bulwark of the old order, both by his own work and by his critical verdicts on that of others, all about him new agitations were already rife. Absolute as was his literary dictatorship, his throne was reared on the verge of that revolution which begins the modern period of our literary history.

  Johnson’s paragraph is remarkably short. In the “Rambler” there are but 2.32 sentences to the paragraph; the two rises to three in “Rasselas.” The fewness of the sentences per paragraph and the high percentage (27 per cent.) of paragraphed sentences are phenomena not due in either case to dialogue. Johnson was exceedingly particular that each paragraph should form an integer; beyond this he cared not how few the sentences. His favourite order is loose, with a large share of deductive paragraphs. He loves a short introductory sentence, and when the chance permits he likes to make this sentence a generalization far wider than can be substantiated from the subsequent details. In the matter of proportion by varying short sentences with long, Johnson in his later work is by no means weak. Even in the earlier works the percentage of sentences of less than 15 words is considerable—9 per cent. in “Rambler” and “Rasselas,” while the “Lives” shows 16 per cent. of simple sentences.

  To attempt the Johnsonian period without a familiar knowledge of the Latin tongue is to practice diving before learning to swim; thereafter there is life to be saved at sea.

  Johnson’s weighty and impressive style suits well with a subject of moral grandeur such as not seldom employed his pen; but it grows monotonous, and becomes even ludicrous, when applied on occasions of ordinary or trifling importance. It was to this uniform pomposity of style that Goldsmith alluded when he said that Dr. Johnson would make little fishes talk like whales. But while Johnson’s style of writing is overloaded with long words from the Latin, and ponderous with rolling sentences, his speech presented a contrast in pithy and pointed idiomatic Saxon English. He was to his century what Dryden had been to the seventeenth—a literary dictator whose verdict was final. The moral integrity of Johnson gave weight to his decisions.

  Perhaps a little over-fond of trumpeting; loving so much his long sonorous roll of Ciceronian vocables.

  In style alone, we may justly claim that he is the vertebrate column of our prose. He could not accomplish the impossible. Once more I venture to express the conviction that the highest conceivable perfection of English prose was possible only to the Elizabethans, and that when the task passed unaccomplished from their hands, the hopes of it vanished beyond recall. But what Johnson could do, he did with consummate power. To him it was left to establish a code, to evolve order out of disorderly materials, to found a new ideal of style in absolutely logical precision, adding to that precision dignity and eloquence of force. To ascribe to him a slavish propensity to cumbrous and pedantic sesquipedalianism is to mistake the travesty for the original. His dictatorship in literature, based on native strength, was most unquestioned in the sphere of style; and it is not too much to say that all that is best in English prose since his day is his debtor in respect of not a few of its highest qualities, above all in respect of absolute lucidity, unfailing vigour, and saving common sense.

  What, then, was Johnson’s method? and what its practical application? The method is nothing if not magisterial. It takes for granted certain fixed laws—whether the laws formulated by Aristotle, or by Horace, or the French critics, is for the moment beside the question—and passes sentence on every work of art according as it conforms to the critical decalogue or transgresses it. The fault of this method is not, as is sometimes supposed, that it assumes principles in a subject where none are to be sought; but that its principles are built on a miserably narrow and perverted basis. That there are principles of criticism that the artist’s search for beauty must be guided by some idea, is obvious enough. It can be questioned only by those who are prepared to deny the very possibility of criticism; who would reduce the task both of critic and of artist to a mere record of individual impressions. It need hardly be said that the very men who are most ready to profess such a doctrine with their lips, persistently and rightly, give the lie to it in their deeds. No creative work, no critical judgment, either is or can be put forward as a mere impression; it is the impression of a trained mind—that is, of a mind which, instinctively or as a conscious process, is guided by principles or ideas. So far, then, as he may be held to have borne witness to the need of ideas, Johnson was clearly in the right. It was when he came to ask, What is the nature of those ideas, and how does the artist or the critic arrive at them? that he began to go astray. Throughout he assumes that the principles of art—and that, not only in their general bearing (proportion, harmony, and the like), but in their minuter details—are fixed and invariable. To him they form a kind of case-law, which is to be extracted by the learned from the works of a certain number of “correct writers,” ancient and modern; and which, once established, is binding for all time both on the critic and on those he summons to his bar. In effect, this was to declare that beauty can be conceived in no other way than as it presented itself, say, to Virgil or to Pope. It was to lay the dead hand of the past upon the present and the future…. Yet again. In the hands of Johnson—and it was a necessary consequence of his critical method—poetry becomes more and more a mere matter of mechanism…. As has already been said, Johnson is nothing if not a hanging judge; and it is just where originality is most striking that his sentences are the most severe.

  The gradual tendency of the century had more and more come to be concentrated upon attention to common-sense, and in Johnson a character was developed, of noble intelligence, of true and tender heart, of lambent humour, in whose entire philosophy every impulse was subordinated to that negative virtue. Johnson became, therefore, the leading intellect of the country, because displaying in its quintessence the quality most characteristic of the majority of educated men and women. Common-sense gave point to his wit, balance to his morality, a Tory limitation to his intellectual sympathy. He keeps the central path; he is as little indulgent to enthusiasm as to infidelity; he finds as little place in his life for mysticism as for coarse frivolity. Vita fumus, and it is not for man to waste his years in trying to weigh the smoke or puff it away; bravely and simply he must labour and acquiesce, without revolt, without speculation, in “all that human hearts endure.” This virile hold upon facts, this attitude to conduct as a plain garment from which the last shred of the Shaftesbury gold-lace optimism had been torn, explains the astounding influence Johnson wielded during his lifetime. His contemporaries knew him to be thoroughly honest, profoundly intelligent, and yet permeated by every prejudice of the age. They loved to deal with facts, and no man had so large a stock of them at his disposal as Johnson.

  Thus, inured in life-long struggles, fortified in spirit by a robust faith, exalted in mind by the loftiest expression of Greek philosophy, Johnson was one of those few who are numbered among the immortals while still in this life: even as that other great Englishman and greatest of modern men, whom the world has just mourned with you, but whom immortality now claims as one of her noblest ornaments.

  Johnson’s style is formal, balanced, and Latinized, and his manner is rather oracular. He influenced English prose greatly for fifty years. His writing now

	“Neglected and deserted lie,
	As they were not of nature’s company.”

But he is full of good sense, often expressed in apt and forcible language. His range of thought is limited and insular, he is a typical eighteenth-century writer,—a good deal of a Philistine, but a great deal of a man.

  Some wits of the day said that he used long words to make his “Dictionary” a necessity. If we read much of Johnson, we are in danger of imitating him unconsciously. A critic in the latter part of the nineteenth century, describing Johnson’s style, says: “He delivers himself with severe majestical dignity and vigorous authoritative brevity.” This critic was unconsciously writing Johnsonese. In the second place, Johnson loved formal balance so much that he used too many antitheses. Many of his balancing clauses are out of place or add nothing to the sense…. As a rule, Johnson’s prose is too abstract and general, and it awakens too few images.

  All true Johnsonians treat with an amused contempt the statement so freely circulated in newspapers that nobody nowadays reads Johnson’s writings. People are, of course, free to read what they like, and (if they like) not to read at all. Some of us keep books, other poultry. One man drives a motor car, whilst his brother is perhaps an amateur photographer. All the tastes are respectable. But if it so happens that you are fond of English literature, you will be a reader of Johnson, and from his works, whether in prose or verse, you will be infected and become possessed with a perception of a strong character, and a constant habit of mind presented in the pages of Boswell and Burney and Thrale, and indeed all the other sources of our knowledge.