No More Learning

Yet the very greatness of his personality
has tended to interfere with the recognition of his greatness as a
A large amount of new material on Johnson's family and early life has recently
been made accessible in The Reades of Blackwood Hill and Dr Johnson's Ancestry (1906)
by Reade, A. L. , and in his Johnsonian Gleanings (1909 etc. ). New material on his
later life is given in Broadley and Seccombe's Doctor Johnson and Mrs Thrale (1910).


## p. 158 (#184) ############################################

158
Johnson and Boswell
a
man of letters. No other author whose profession was literature
seems to owe so little of his fame to his books. Many writers,
Dryden and Scott among others, give the impression that they
were greater than anything that they have written. It has been
the unique fate of Johnson to be dissociated from his works. He
would have welcomed the knowledge that he was to be remembered
as a man, for he had no delusions about authorship. But he is to be
found in his works as he wished to be known, and as he was. If the
greatest of biographies catches him at moments which he would not
have recorded, it is also true that his writings give us his more
intimate thoughts, and take us into regions which were denied to
his conversation.
He was born at Lichfield on 18 September 1709, in the year in
which his father, one of the chief booksellers of the midlands, was
sheriff of the city. As a schoolboy, he seems to have been already
distinguished by his ease in learning, his tenacity of memory, his
lack of application, and delays adjusted to his power of rapid work.
But the best part of his instruction he acquired for himself in his
father's shop. There, he prowled about at leisure, and read as his
fancy directed. He was never a laborious reader. The progress
which the understanding makes through a book, he said, has more
pain than pleasure in it. “Sir; do you read books through ? ' he
once asked. There may have been few books that he read through
himself. His defective eyesight had probably some bearing on what
came to be an intellectual habit. But he had in a supreme degree
the gift of discovering the matter and quality of a book, almost on
opening its pages. The extent of his knowledge was the wonder of
all his friends: Adam Smith declared that Johnson knew more
books than any man alive. He had begun this knowledge by
sampling his father's store. And in these days, before he had left
school, he was already a good enough Latinist to be diverted from
a search for apples by the discovery of a folio of Petrarch.
He was intended to follow his father's business. Hawkins and
Mrs Piozzi both say that he could bind a book. But, after two 1:
.
years at home, he contrived to proceed to Oxford. He entered
Pembroke college as a commoner on 31 October 1728, and
remained there continuously, with, at most, one week's break in
the long vacation, till December 1729. Thereafter, his residence
was irregular, and he left the university without taking a degree? .
1
6
1 Boswell says he left in autumn, 1731. ' There is much support for this date in
Hawkins. But Croker argued that he never returned after December 1729, though his


## p. 159 (#185) ############################################

6
Oxford and Birmingham 159
The outstanding fact of his college career was the translation of
Pope's Messiah into Latin verse, as a Christmas exercise. This
was the first of his works that was printed, being included in
A Miscellany of Poems by Several Hands (1731), collected by
J. Husbands, fellow of Pembroke college. Latin was already
almost as familiar a language to him as his own. Late in life,
during his tour in France, he was ‘resolute in speaking Latin,'
though he had a command of French idiom that enabled him to
supply the first paragraph to Baretti's translation of Rasselas'.
'Though he is a great critic in French,' said Baretti, 'and knows
almost as much Italian as I do, he cannot speak either language,
but he talks Latin with all Cicero's fury? His knowledge of the
renascence poets was unusually wide. He regretted that they
were not generally known, and that Pope's attempt to rescue
them from neglect by his Selecta Poemata Italorum had been
fruitless. The first book which he himself designed was an edition
of Politian, with a history of Latin poetry in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Proposals for printing it by subscription were
issued in August 1734; but nothing came of the scheme, and the
Latin poems of Politian still await an editor.
Of his five and a half years in the midlands after his residence
in Oxford, the records are fragmentary. His earliest extant letter
(30 October 1731) has reference to an unsuccessful application for
the post of usher in the grammar school of Stourbridge. He acted
in this capacity for some time, in 1732, at Market Bosworth,
in Leicestershire. Later in the same year, he paid a visit to
his lifelong friend Edmund Hector, then settled as a surgeon
in Birmingham; and it would appear that Birmingham was his
home for the next three years: What is certain is that his hopes
had now turned to writing. He contributed to The Birmingham
Journal a number of essays, all of which are lost; he planned
his edition of Politian; he offered to write for The Gentleman's
Magazine ; and he completed his first book, A Voyage to Abyssinia,
name remained on the books till October 1731 ; and this view has been commonly
adopted. The arguments for residence till 1731 remain the stronger.
1 See Prior’s Life of Malone (1860), p. 161.
2 See Giuseppe Baretti, Collison-Morley, L. (1909), p. 85.
8 The issue of the Politian proposals at Lichfield in August 1734 appears to be the only
evidence for the common statement that he then returned to Lichfield. It was to be
expected that the subscriptions should be received by his brother Nathanael, who, with
his mother, had carried on the family business from the death of his father in 1731. A
Voyage to Abyssinia was all written at Birmingham. If it was completed before
August 1734, there must bave been a delay of six months in publication. The letter to
The Gentleman's Magazine was written from Birmingham on 25 November 1734.


## p. 160 (#186) ############################################

160
Johnson and Boswell
by Father Jerome Lobo. With a Continuation of the History of
Abyssinia, and Fifteen Dissertations, by Mr Le Grand. From
the French. The volume was printed in Birmingham and published
in London, anonymously, in January 1735.
In this translation, there is much more of Le Grand than of
Lobo. In parts, Johnson condensed freely; where he allowed him-
self least liberty was in the sixteen (not fifteen) dissertations, which
occupy more than half the volume and deal with such subjects as
the Nile, Prester John, the queen of Sheba and the religious
customs of the Abyssinians. He was always an eager reader of
books of travel; and it was fitting that the passion for whatever
afforded views of human nature, which led him to describe his own
experiences of another country and to urge others to describe theirs,
should be shown in his first work. But the main interest of the
volume now lies in the short preface. In the translation, he is
.
content to convey the meaning of the original, and, while he
follows in haste another's thought and language, we fail to find
the qualities of his own style. But they are unmistakable in
such a passage as this :
The Reader will here find no Regions cursed with irremediable Barren-
ness, or bless’d with Spontaneous Fecundity, no perpetual Gloom or unceasing
Sunshine; nor are the Nations here described either devoid of all Sense of
Humanity, or consummate in all private and social Virtues, here are no
Hottentots without Religion, Polity, or Articulate Language, no Chinese per-
fectly Polite, and compleatly skill'd in all Sciences: He will discover, what
will always be discover'd by a diligent and impartial Enquirer, that wher-
ever Human Nature is to be found, there is a mixture of Vice and Virtue, a
contest of Passion and Reason, and that the Creator doth not appear Partial
in his Distributions, but has balanced in most Countries their particular
Inconveniences by particular Favours.
a
He who writes much, Johnson said, will not easily escape a manner.
But here is Johnson's manner in his first book. And here, too,
is a forecast of the philosophy of The Rambler and The Vanity of
Human Wishes. There are no distinct periods in Johnson's literary
development, no sudden access of power, no change in his outlook,
no novelties in his methods. He continued as he had begun. He
grew in confidence and facility; he perfected his command of
expression ; but there was not any change in the spirit of his
expression or in what he wished to express.
His experience of letters at Birmingham had not promised
success, and, on his marriage in July 1735 with Mrs Elizabeth
Porter, the widow of one of his Birmingham friends, he set up
a school at Edial, near Lichfield. His first reference to the new


## p. 161 (#187) ############################################

From Edial to London. Irene
161
a
enterprise is found in a letter of 25 June 1735, recently published
for the first timel.
'I am going,' he writes, 'to furnish a House in the Country and keep a
private Boarding-house for Young Gentlemen whom I shall endeavour to
instruct in a method somewhat more rational than those commonly practised. '
His "scheme for the classes of a grammar school, as given by
Hawkins and Boswell, illustrates what he was to say about teach-
ing in his Life of Milton. The school failed, and, on 2 March
1737, he set out for London with one of his pupils, David Garrick.
Henceforward, London was to be his home. Having no profession,
he became by necessity an author.
He had no promise of work, but he looked to find employment
on The Gentleman's Magazine, and he had hopes in the drama.
He had written at Edial three acts of his tragedy Irene? . He
worked at it during his first months in London, and finished it on
his visit to Lichfield to settle his affairs, in the summer of 1737.
But there remained for him the labour of introducing it on the
stage, an undertaking which to an ingenuous mind was in a very
high degree vexatious and disgusting'-as he wrote of another's
experience while his own tragedy was still unacted. The goodwill
of Garrick, whom he placed under a heavy debt by the great
prologue which heralded his managership of Drury lane in 1747,
at last brought it on the stage in February 1749', and protracted
its run to nine nights, so that there might be three third-night
benefits. With all his knowledge of human nature, Johnson was
unable to exhibit dramatically the shades which distinguish one
character from another. Irene is only a moral poem in a suc-
cession of dialogues on the theme that ‘Peace from innocence
must flow' and 'none are happy but the wise and virtuous. ' And
the thought struggles with the metre. He could not divest his
blank verse of the qualities of the couplet. The same faults are
to be found in his translation, made many years later, of a short
passage of Metastasio. We expect the rime at the end of the line;
and, when we come on it in the couplets with which each act
1 Bi-Centenary of the Birth of Johnson. Commemoration Festival Reports, edited
by Raby, J. T. (1909), pp. 26—7.
? It was founded on a story in Knolles's History of the Turks, previously treated in
The Tragedy of The Unhappy Fair Irene, by Gilbert Swinboe, 1658; Irena, a Tragedy,
of unknown authorship, 1664; and Irene, or the Fair Greek, by Charles Goring, 1708.
Before Knolles, the same subject had been treated in Peele's lost play The Turkish
Mahamet and Hyrin the fair Greek (see Peele, ed. Bullen, A. H. , vol. 1, p. xxxvii, and
vol. II, p. 394).
3 The title on the play-bills was Mahomet and Irene. See An Essay on Tragedy,
1749, p. 12 note, and Genest, English Stage, 1832, vol. iv, pp. 265—6.
E. L. X. CH. VIII.
11


## p. 162 (#188) ############################################

162
Johnson and Boswell
a
closes, instead of feeling that they are tags, as we do in our great
tragedies, we find the verse bound forward with unwonted ease.
Johnson had too massive and too logical an intellect to adapt
himself readily to the drama. He came to perceive this, but not
till long after he had described the qualifications of a dramatist in
his Life of Savage, and had proceeded with a second play, Charles
of Sweden, of which the only record is an ambiguous allusion in a
letter (10 June 1742). The labour he spent on Irene led him to think
well of it for a time; but, late in life, when he returned to it afresh,
he agreed with the common verdict. He 'thought it had been better. '
He could speak from his own experience when, in the passage on
tediousness in his Life of Prior, he said that 'unhappily this
pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover. '
It was The Gentleman's Magazine that gave Johnson his real
start as a man of letters. Founded by Edward Cave, under the
name Sylvanus Urban, in January 1731, it had been growing
steadily from small beginnings. Its original purpose was to
reprint, from month to month, a selection of the more interest-
ing matter that had appeared in the journals; and the name
'magazine' was, in this its first application to a periodical, in-
tended as a modest title for a collection which made small claim
to originality. The idea was not altogether new. The Grub-street
Journal contains a section of domestic news' extracted from
other papers, and sometimes so treated as to suggest to the
modern reader the more urbane comments in the pages of Punch.
But, as the editors of The Grub-street Journal complained in the
preface to Memoirs of the Society of Grub-street (1737), their
rival of The Gentleman's Magazine took anything he fancied-
news, letters, essays or verses—and printed as much or as little
of them as he pleased. The success of the Magazine was never
in doubt. The first number went into a fifth edition ; and with
success came ambition. In the number for January 1739, a
correspondent, who evidently was Johnson, observes that the
extracts from the weekly journalists have shrunk at length into
a very few columns and made way for original letters and dis-
sertations. ' The Magazine now included parliamentary reports,
poetical essays, serial stories, mathematical papers, maps, songs
with music, and a register of publications. Most of the devices of
modern journalism were anticipated in these early numbers. Cave
had the luck and the skill to hit on what the public wanted. If
we may trust the preface to the collected numbers for 1738, there
were immediately almost twenty imitations. Yet The Gentleman's
9


## p. 163 (#189) ############################################

The Gentleman's Magazine
163
6
Magazine had many features in common with The Gentleman's
Journal; or the Monthly Miscellany, which Peter Motteux had
started in January 1692 and carried on with flagging zeal to 1694.
The earlier periodical had begun on a much higher literary level and
remains a work of very great interest; but its fortunes were not
watched over by a man of business. It had been modelled partly
on Le Mercure Galant. The Gentleman's Magazine was, in its
origin, independent of both its French and its English forerunners.
In the letter which Johnson sent to Cave from Birmingham in
1734, besides offering to contribute, he suggested several improve-
ments. For the low jests, awkward buffoonery, or the dull
scurrilities of either party,' which were to procure for it or its
imitators a place in The Dunciad, might be substituted, he thought,
‘short literary dissertations in Latin or English, critical remarks
on authors ancient or modern, or loose pieces worth preserving. '
Nothing came of the letter; but the suggestion that the Magazine
should take itself more seriously accorded with Cave's business
instincts, and the changes gradually introduced were in accordance
with Johnson's wishes. His first contribution, the Latin alcaics
beginning Urbane, nullis fesse laboribus, did not appear till
March 1738. From that time, he was regularly employed; and
he at once asserted some sort of literary control. There cannot be
any doubt that the subsequent steady rise in the character of the
Magazine was largely due to him. He also helped to guide its
fortunes through a grave crisis. Reports of the proceedings and
debates in parliament had been given in the Magazine since 1732;
but, on 13 April 1738, the House of Commons declared such reports
to be 'a notorious breach of the Privilege of this House. The
Magazine could not easily omit a section on which much of its
popularity depended, and, in June 1738, there appeared 'debates
in the Senate of Magna Lilliputia. ' If, as Hawkins says, the
device was Cave's, it had Johnson's approval; and his hand is
unmistakable in the passage in which the device is explained.
He began by editing the reports, which continued to be written
by William Guthrie, the first of his many Scottish friends. He was
their sole author only for the thirty-six numbers and supplements
from July 1741 to March 1744, and author rather than reporter.
According to Hawkins, he had never entered either House ; ac-
cording to Murphy, he had once found his way into the House of
Commons. He expanded in Cave's printing office, long after the
actual debates, the scanty notes supplied to him, and invested
them with his own argumentative skill and eloquence. Some of
11-2


## p. 164 (#190) ############################################

164
Johnson and Boswell
6
7
the speeches are said to represent what was said by more than
one speaker ; others he described as the mere coinage of his
imagination. His reports are, in fact, original work, and a very
great work. To us who know the secret of their authorship, it is
surprising that they should not have been recognised as the work
of a man of letters. They are on a high level of literary excellence,
and there is an obvious uniformity in the style. Even when they
succeed in suggesting the idiosyncrasies of the different speakers,
they show one cast of mind and texture of language. They are
Johnson's own debates on the political questions of the day, based
—and based only—on the debates in parliament. He said, within
a few days of his death, that he wrote them with more velocity'
than any other work—often three columns of the Magazine within
the hour, and, once, ten pages between noon and early evening.
The wonder is, not so much that debates thus written could
have been so good, as that debates so good could have been
accepted as giving the words of the speakers. Johnson had not
expected this; and, when he recognised it, he determined not to
be any longer 'accessory to the propagation of falsehood. ' This
is the explanation given for his sudden abandonment of them in
1744. But the secret was long kept, and they continued to be
regarded as genuine. There is more of Johnson than of Pitt
in the famous speech about 'the atrocious crime of being a young
man. ' And two speeches entirely written by him appeared, to his
amusement, in the collected works of Chesterfield.
The extent of his other contributions cannot easily be de-
termined. We have often only the evidence of style to guide us,
and his editorial privileges make it difficult to apply. It is very
doubtful, for instance, if the short notice, in November 1739, of the
poems of Joseph Warton and Collins printed in the previous
number is, as Wooll states in his Memoirs of Warton, the work
of Johnson. Our best authority is Boswell, but his list is only
tentative. We know that he wrote the biographies of Sarpi,
Boerhaave, Blake, Drake, Barretier, Lewis Morin, Burmann and
Sydenham; and there are other articles about which there can be
no reasonable doubt. The amount of his writing varies greatly
from month to month. In the number for December 1740, which
contains his Essay on Epitaphs, most of the original contri-
butions are his; in other numbers, we cannot safely ascribe to
him more than the debates. The question of authorship has
never been examined thoroughly; but, even with the help
of Cave's office books, there would be serious obstacles to a


## p. 165 (#191) ############################################

The Life of Savage
165
conclusive finding. In addition to his work for Cave, he had
brought out, with other publishers, Marmor Norfolciense (April
1739), an ironical discussion, with a political bearing, on the sup-
posed discovery of a prophecy in ‘monkish rhyme,' and A Compleat
Vindication of the Licensers of the Stage (May 1739), an ironical
attack on the rejection of Brooke's Gustavus Vasa. Continued
irony is rarely successful. Johnson did not try it again.
The early series of biographies was followed by the elaborate
life of a poet whom Johnson had known intimately, and whose
character required protection from the insults and calumnies
which it invited. Richard Savage died in the prison of Bristol
at the beginning of August 1743; and, in the number of The
Gentleman's Magazine for the same month, Johnson announced,
in an unsigned letter, that a biography of him was in preparation.
He wrote it with his usual speed-once he wrote as much as
forty-eight printed pages at a sitting and had it published in
February 1744. It is a work of remarkable and varied interest,
and throws light on a period of Johnson's career of which we know
too little. They had suffered poverty together and forgotten it in
their companionship; they had spent whole nights in the streets
when their combined resources could not find them a shelter; and
the description of Savage's fortunes reflects what Johnson had
himself endured, and might have still to endure. He was attracted
to Savage by the story of his life, on which research had not yet
cast any doubt, by his shrewd knowledge of human nature, by his
social skill and experience and by his talent as a writer. Savage
was eleven years older than Johnson, and in his varied life had
much to tell. But the chief attraction was Savage's own character.
His great capacities could not save him from his undoing.
He
was self-indulgent, petulant, aggressive and ungrateful; there was
excuse for the indifference or resentment of those who had once
been benefactors. All this Johnson brings out clearly in a narra-
tive which, when it leans from impartiality, leans to the side of
friendship. He related everything as he knew it, with no suggestion
of censure, but with generous sympathy. The Life of Savage is
one of those rare biographies which, by their perfect sincerity, tell
us as much of the character of the author as of the man described.
He included it, later, with only slight alterations, in The Lives of
the Poets. It had been an adequate expression of his feelings
when it was written, and he wisely decided to let well alone. But
it is a different Life from the other Lives, and differs from them
in more than scale and method. It is the study of a personality


## p. 166 (#192) ############################################

166
Johnson and Boswell
a
rather than of a poet, though at no time would Johnson have
tried to make such a distinction. The criticism of Savage's works
is the least part of it, and has not yet all the writer's easy mastery.
The style, too, which, at its best, is as good as it ever was to be,
sometimes lacks its later certainty and precision. And the fre-
quent repetition of the same ideas, though always in different
language, shows a desire to give in full the content of a full mind
rather than to represent it by selection. The new setting of The
Life of Savage invites a comparison which proves that Johnson's
abilities were strengthening and maturing to his seventieth year.
Yet he never revealed himself more fully than in this early
tribute to the memory of a difficult friend.
Johnson's contributions to The Gentleman's Magazine had
become less frequent in 1743, and they ceased in the following year.
He was meditating larger schemes. And he had latterly been
doing much other work. Since the end of 1742, he had been
engaged with William Oldys in cataloguing the printed books in
the library of the earl of Oxford, then newly purchased by Thomas
Osborne, the bookseller. The Proposals for printing the catalogue
by subscription were written by Johnson and issued in December
1742, and the Account of the Harleian Library, which they
contained, was afterwards made to serve as preface to the first
of the four volumes of the catalogue-Catalogus Bibliothecae
Harleianae, 1743–4. While the catalogue was in progress, the
bookseller, who had remarkable luck in having secured the services
of one of the greatest of English literary antiquaries and one of
the most scholarly of English critics, was persuaded to publish a
collection of the more scarce and valuable tracts or pamphlets in
his possession, under the title The Harleian Miscellany. The bulk
of the selective and editorial work fell to Oldys; but it was
Johnson who, again, wrote the Proposals, and contributed the
introduction (1744), which, when reprinted separately, he entitled
An Essay on the Origin and Importance of Small Tracts and
Fugitive Pieces. In this, his first attempt at literary history, he
gives a short sketch of English pamphlets from the reformation to
the reign of Charles II, and follows in the tracks of such works as
The Phenix (1707) and The Phoenix Britannicus (1731), The
Critical History of Pamphlets (1716) of Myles Davies, and the
Dissertation on Pamphlets (1731) of his collaborator Oldys. There
is no evidence of Johnson's hand in the Harleian Collection of
Voyages and Travels (1745).
On the completion of this congenial experience in bibliography,


## p. 167 (#193) ############################################

Greater Schemes
167
Johnson proposed to edit Shakespeare. The work was not to be
undertaken for many years yet; but it was the first of the larger
schemes planned by him. Miscellaneous Observations on the
Tragedy of Macbeth' (April 1745) was intended to prepare the
way. There was still room for a new edition, as Hanmer had given
most thought to regularised metre and sumptuous printing, and
Warburton seemed to have abandoned what he had announced as
early as 1740. But, after the death of Pope and the completion
of Hanmer's edition in 1744, Warburton set to work in earnest,
and the prospect of early publication compelled Johnson to lay
aside his scheme, which could not have had an equal chance of
success, inasmuch as, like most of his work up to this time, it was
anonymous. When Warburton's edition appeared, in 1747, Johnson
had the meagre satisfaction of finding his Miscellaneous Observa-
tions singled out for praise in the vituperative preface. It was
now that he turned to the Dictionary. He had 'long thought of
it,' he said; "it had grown up in his mind insensibly. The Plan
of a Dictionary of the English Language was issued in 1747, and,
at the desire of Dodsley, was addressed to the earl of Chesterfield.
This year—which is, also, the year of the Drury lane prologue-
marks the turn in Johnson's fortunes, though the fitful struggle
with poverty was not yet over. But what was Johnson doing in
1745 and 1746 ? Here again the records are deficient. Of more
than a thousand letters of his that are known, there is not one
to throw light on either of these years.
Johnson did not confine himself to the labours of the Dictionary.
During the eight years of its preparation he wrote his greatest
poem, and gave new life to the periodical essay.
His school verses, which were preserved by the pride of a
teacher and the admiration of a friend, and printed by Boswell,
are of little interest except in relation to his later work. They show
the study of The Rape of the Lock and the translation of Homer,
and they occasionally indulge in the liberties of Dryden's triple
rime and alexandrine liberties from which Johnson afterwards
refrained, though he came to say that the art of concluding the
sense in couplets ‘has perhaps been with rather too much con-
stancy pursued? ' The piece entitled "The Young Authour' is a
first study for the great passage in The Vanity of Human Wishes
1 The title continues :—To which is affir'd, Proposals for a New Edition of Shake-
spear, with a Specimen. No copy is known to contain the Proposals. They were;
however, issued separately. The Bodleian library possesses the rare folio sheet, MS
Bodl. Add. C. 244 (387).
2 Life of Denham.
6


## p. 168 (#194) ############################################

168
Johnson and Boswell
a
on the scholar's life, and, in the music of the metre, and in the
turn and balance of the expression, already discovers the quality
of his mature verse. He acquired a reputation for ease in writing
.
and for readiness to help a friend in need. His verses Written
at the request of a gentleman to whom a lady had given a sprig
of myrtle were remembered as having been made in five minutes,
and those To Miss Hickman, playing on the Spinnet, or others
like them, led the girl's father to opine that their author could
write about anything. What he called 'the endearing elegance
of female friendship’ had been, long before he met Mrs Thrale,
an effective spur to his facility. Some of the pieces written while
he was still in search of occupation in the midlands afterwards
found their way into The Gentleman's Magazine and Mrs Williams's
Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1766). None of them is more
characteristic than Friendship, An Ode. On the other hand, the
collected editions include several pieces clearly not his. He could
not have written To Lyce, an elderly Lady. It is no less certain
that, though he did write some verses To Stella, the chance that
a piece is addressed to Stella is not, as his editors seem to have
believed, an argument of his authorship. His early poems have
still to be discriminated'; but their chief interest will always be
that they were written by the author of London and The Vanity
of Human Wishes.
London: a poem, in imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal
was published in May 1738, on the same day as Pope's One
Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty-Eight, a Dialogue something
like Horace, and thus, accidentally, invited a comparison which
appears to have gone in Johnson's favour. Here was a new author
who concealed his name, rivalling Pope in the very kind of verse
which, after an undisputed career, he had found best suited to
his genius. The poem went into a second edition within a week ;
and Pope himself, who was always generous in his recognition
of excellence, and had said of Johnson's youthful translation of
his Messiah that posterity would have to decide which form of the
poem was the original, declared that the unknown author of London
could not be long concealed. The method of imitation' adopted
in this poem was described by Johnson in his Life of Pope as 'a
kind of middle composition between translation and original design,
which pleases when the thoughts are unexpectedly applicable and
| Boswell promised an edition of the poems, in which he would 'with the utmost
care ascertain their authenticity, and illustrate them with notes and various readings. '
Such an edition has not yet appeared.


## p. 169 (#195) ############################################

a
London and The Vanity of Human Wishes 169
the parallels lucky. Brought into vogue by Boileau, it had been
practised in English by Rochester, Oldham and Dryden (in his
revision of Soames's translation of Boileau's Art Poétique), and
many others; and it had recently been perfected by Pope, who
had so written that a knowledge of the original might enhance
the appreciation, but should not be indispensable to it. Juvenal's
Third Satire lent itself to imitation and had already been copied
by Boileau and Oldham. The chief criticism to be urged against
Johnson's poem is that it does not show Pope's art in escaping
from its model. He was still timid enough to wish to show him-
self scholar as well as poet. When he wrote that ‘falling houses
thunder on your head,' or that the midnight murderer 'leaves un-
seen a dagger in your breast,' he thought more of Juvenal than
of modern fact. The need of a parallel forces him to say, 'I cannot
bear a French metropolis’; but this was not the London described
in Voltaire's Lettres Anglaises. He himself admitted (in a manu-
script note) that the description of Orgilio was 'no picture of
modern manners, though it might be true at Rome. ' His own
opinion on the advantages of country life we shall find, not here,
but in the passage on scenes of flowery felicity and the melody of
the nightingale in The Life of Savage. His political views are
more truly represented: the references to excise and pensions, as
well as to patrons, anticipate the definitions in the Dictionary.
But it is when Juvenal leads him to speak of poverty that he
expresses his own feelings in his own person.
None of these objections can be urged against The Vanity of
Human Wishes, written in imitation of Juvenals Tenth Satire
and published, with Johnson's name, in January 1749. There
is nothing in this poem to suggest to those unacquainted with
the model that it is an imitation; it is, indeed, not so much an
imitation as a companion study by one who, amid different circum-
stances, took a very similar view of life. Instead of the Roman
illustrations, we have modern instances of hopes that lay in power,
and learning, and war, and long life and beauty. The pictures of
Wolsey and Charles of Sweden, and the description of the lot of
the scholar, are distinct studies of human ambition, each complete
in itself and easily taken from its setting, but all viewed in the
same light, and united by the one lesson of inevitable disap-
pointment. The poem is completely satisfying as a statement
of its theme. It is not less valuable as a personal document.
There is nothing in it but what Johnson consistently thought and
felt. He was wont to say that there is more to be endured than


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170 Johnson and Boswell
enjoyed in the general condition of human life; and he had found
that human happiness, if it ever comes, must come by our own
effort. The concluding lines which he supplied many years later
to Goldsmith's Traveller state his invariable experience. In The
Life of Savage he had said that happiness is to be placed only
in virtue, which is always to be obtained; and he had said much
the same in Irene. But there were times when he doubted even
this. "Where then shall hope and fear their objects find ? ' In
his simple piety, he gave himself to the earnest exercise of religion.
His Prayers, which were made public after his death, will win the
admiration alike of idle curiosity and of doubting reason. And so,
with his habitual sincerity, he gave to The Vanity of Human
Wishes a religious conclusion which reflected his own practice.
He was no pessimist. The sense of vanity may keep us from
thinking that things are better than they are, but it need not
make us think that they are worse.
He would maintain in talk
that the world was not half so wicked as it was represented to be,
that there was very little gross wickedness in it, and very little
extraordinary virtue. This we are told explicitly by Mrs Piozzi,
and we may learn it for ourselves from his writings.
Shortly before he wrote The Vanity of Human Wishes, he had
aided Dodsley in planning The Preceptor (April 1748), a substantial
work containing “a general course of education,' and had contributed
to it the preface and The Vision of Theodore, the Hermit of
Teneriffe. He told Percy that he thought this fable the best thing
he ever wrote. It states the part which he assigned to religion in the
conduct of life, and should be read as a supplement to The Vanity
of Human Wishes. It may, also, be regarded as a prelude to
The Rambler.
This paper began on Tuesday, 20 March 1750, and ended,
with its 208th number, on Saturday, 14 March 1752, three days
before the death of Johnson's wife.
He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day, will often bring
to his task, an attention dissipated, a memory overwhelmed, an imagination
embarrassed, a mind distracted with anxieties, and a body languishing with
disease.
So he wrote in the last number, reviewing his experiences.
But the paper appeared regularly every Tuesday and Saturday,
though the printer might complain of the late hour of receiving
the copy. The very title was chosen in haste. Johnson meant it
to announce that he would pass in each essay from subject to
subject. But it was not suited to his majestic deliberations. There


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The Rambler
171
is nothing of the rambler in any single essay. Each pursues its
way in a steady, unswerving march? .
The conditions amid which Johnson revived the periodical essay
differed widely from those amid which it originally flourished. In
the interval of forty years, there had been a development of
journalistic enterprise which was not paralleled in any other
country. More than 150 periodicals, of one kind or another, had
been meeting the needs of the reading public, and contributing
to its steady growth in size and power. Some of these were on
the model of The Spectator, while others, written with a different
purpose, or planned to include a greater variety of matter, showed
its influence. The periodical essay no longer offered any of the
attractions of novelty. In its strict form, it was a type of
journalism that was being crushed out of favour by politics
and news. By 1750, The Gentleman's Magazine enjoyed a secure
popularity, and had its rivals ; and, in the previous year, The
Monthly Review had been established. The time was not auspicious
for beginning a paper devoted exclusively to meditations on matters
of no immediate interest, without the assistance of any item of
news, or of a single advertisement. But, in The Rambler, the
periodical essay reasserted itself, and entered on the second of its
two great decades, that of The Rambler, The Adventurer, The
World, The Connoisseur, The Idler and The Citizen of the World.
The effect of The Rambler was the more remarkable, in that
Johnson was deficient in the qualifications of a periodical writer.
The maxim that 'the drama's laws the drama's patrons give'is
equally true of the essay. It was not in Johnson's nature to bow
to the public, however much he believed in its ultimate verdict.
He spoke in his first number as if success depended on the choice
of subject. But, in the treatment of his choice, he lacked the art of
going to meet his readers; and they never came in great numbers.
The circulation of The Rambler was only about 500 copies. But it
raised the literary level of the periodical essay and set a standard
of excellence to such papers as The World, whose sale was num-
bered in thousands.
It found a larger public on being reprinted in volume form,
and came to be the only periodical of the century to vie with The
1 Such slight assistance as he received is scrupulously acknowledged in the last
number. Four papers were written by others : no. 30 by Mrs Catharine Talbot, nos.
44 and 100 by Mrs Elizabeth Carter, and no. 97 by Samuel Richardson; and six letters
were contributed, the four in no. 10 by Hester Mulso, afterwards Mrs Chapone; the
second in no. 15 and the second in no. 107, both of unknown authorship.
el


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172
Johnson and Boswell
Spectator in popularity. Johnson revised it for the collected
edition with unusual care! It had been his most ambitious work ;
and he knew that it was best suited to a leisurely perusal. Yet
there is little in The Rambler that is now well known. Much
of its literary criticism was superseded by the preface to his
Shakespeare and by his Lives of the Poets. The allegories and
stories have not the reputation of their models in The Spectator.
Nor are Johnson's characters familiar as Addison's are. The ex-
planation lies mainly in his inability to visualise. He did not number
the streaks of the tulip because, in effect, he did not see them; but
he remarked general properties and large appearances because he
had the gift, which he assiduously developed, of viewing things in
their moral aspects and human relationships. The real interest
of the famous passage in Rasselas on the aims of the poet-a
passage which, it must be remembered, leads to the humorous
conclusion that ‘no human being can ever be a poet'-lies in
its personal basis. The best poets of his century, and the poets
of all time whom he most admired, numbered the streaks when
they wished. But he did not number them, because they did
not enter into his experience. We do not give a face or figure
to any of his characters in The Rambler, because he did not
see either clearly himself. Polyphilus, the quick wit without
purpose ; Suspirius, the fault-finder ; Quisquilius, the virtuoso ;
Venustulus, the effeminate beau-are, each of them, bundles of
habits, or a predominant habit. Even Prospero, who might have
been drawn from Garrick, represents only the social failings of the
rich man who has risen in life. Johnson reverted to the methods
of the character-studies of the seventeenth century. Addison had
set out by continuing them, but he was at war with them at heart,
and he adapted them to his purpose. The superiority of Addison
in this respect will never be denied. But Johnson shows a deeper
knowledge of human nature 'in all its gradations, and, while he
lacks the familiar elegance which alone can play with foibles and
frivolities, he offers a richer harvest of deep observation.
According to Alexander Chalmers, the alterations made by Dr Johnson in the
second and third editions of The Rambler far exceed six thousand. ' Cf. Drake, Nathan,
Essays illustrative of the Rambler, 1809, vol. I, pp. 273–280. Johnson created an
impression that his care for his works ceased at their publication; but, to adopt his
phrase about Pope, his parental fondness did not immediately abandon them. Boswell
says that, in 1781, Johnson had not looked at Rasselas since it was first published; but
he does not add that a comparison of the editions of 1759 and 1789 shows a considerable
number of alterations. The poems were revised : James Boswell the younger tran-
scribed into his copy of the edition of 1789 the 'notes and various readings' in Johnson's
own handwriting on a copy of the fifth edition of London.


## p. 173 (#199) ############################################

6
6
A Dictionary of the English Language 173
And Johnson had not the desire, even had he possessed the
ability, to disguise his purpose. Addison, too, had been frankly
didactic; he had said that he meant to bring philosophy to dwell
on tea-tables and in coffeehouses. But he kept his readers from
suspecting that they were being taught or reformed. Johnson's
lessons are obvious. His aim was only the propagation of truth';
it was always his 'principal design to inculcate wisdom or piety. '
The great moralist lavishes the best instruction he can offer, the
instruction of a man of the world who knows what the world
cannot give; but he does not offer it in a way to attract unwilling
attention. He recognised this himself and admitted that the
severity of dictatorial instruction has been too seldom relieved. '
His deep humour is present throughout, and is occasionally given
scope, as in the essay on the advantages of living in a garret ; but
it is always controlled by the serious purpose.
In concluding The Rambler, he stated that he had laboured
'to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from
colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combina-
tions. ' At this time he was in the midst of a similar and greater
task in his Dictionary of the English Language. Most of the
earlier English dictionaries, to the beginning of the eighteenth
century, had been dictionaries of 'hard words. ' Then, Nathan
Bailey, in his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721),
had aimed at a record of all English words, irrespective of their
vogue or repute. Johnson purposely omitted 'many terms appro-
priated to particular occupations,' and thought not so much of the
reader as of the writer and the purity of the language. His
Plan clearly states his objects, and it is cleverly supplemented in
Chesterfield's two papers in The World'. He set out to perform,
singlehanded, for the English language what the French Academy,
a century before, had undertaken for French? It was to be 'a
dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be
fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be
preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened. ' So
Johnson hoped ; and Chesterfield was ready to acknowledge him
as a dictator who would free the language from its anarchy. But,
i Nos. 100, 101.
? Cf. the verses in The Gentleman's Magazine for April 1755, ending
And Johnson, well arm’d, like a hero of yore,
Has beat forty French, and will beat forty more.
Cf. , also, the review in Maty's Journal Britannique, 1755, XVII, p. 219 : Mr Johnson
peut se glorifier. . . d'étre en quelque sorte une Académie pour son isle. Adam Smith
reviewed the Dictionary in the first number of The Edinburgh Review of 1755—6.
.


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174
Johnson and Boswell
6
when he came to write the preface, he had found that 'no dic-
tionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since, while it is
hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some
falling away. ' None the less, the mistaken hope gave the Dic-
tionary its peculiar value. By aiming at fixing the language,
he succeeded in giving the standard of reputable use.
Though there are many words in Bailey's dictionary which
Johnson omitted, a hasty comparison will show that he added
a large number.