The
very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's books have forgotten
their allegiance, and, like those Puritan casuists who
took arms by the authority of the king against his person,
have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings.
very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's books have forgotten
their allegiance, and, like those Puritan casuists who
took arms by the authority of the king against his person,
have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings.
Macaulay
One Scotchman, bent on 15
vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him to the
combat in a detestable Latin hexameter.
"Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum. "
But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had learned,
both from his own observation and from literary history, 20
in which he was deeply read, that the place of books in
the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about
them, but by what is written in them; and that an author
whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to
wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He 25
always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could
be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward,
and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore.
No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine
apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down 30
but by himself.
43. Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the
Journey to the Hebrides, Johnson did what none of his
envious assailants could have done, and to a certain extent
succeeded in writing himself down. The disputes between
England and her American colonies had reached a point at
which no amicable adjustment was possible. Civil war was
evidently impending; and the ministers seem to have thought 5
that the eloquence of Johnson might with advantage be
employed to inflame the nation against the opposition here,
and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic. He had already
written two or three tracts in defence of the foreign and
domestic policy of the government; and those tracts, though 10
hardly worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of
pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon and Stockdale.
But his Taxation no Tyranny was a pitiable failure. The very
title was a silly phrase, which can have been recommended
to his choice by nothing but a jingling alliteration which he 15
ought to have despised. The arguments were such as boys
use in debating societies. The pleasantry was as awkward as
the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even Boswell was forced to
own that, in this unfortunate piece, he could detect no trace
of his master's powers. The general opinion was that the 20
strong faculties which had produced the Dictionary and the
Rambler were beginning to feel the effect of time and of
disease, and that the old man would best consult his credit
by writing no more.
44. But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not 25
because his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote Rasselas
in the evenings of a week, but because he had foolishly
chosen, or suffered others to choose for him, a subject such as
he would at no time have been competent to treat. He was
in no sense a statesman. He never willingly read or thought 30
or talked about affairs of state. He loved biography, literary
history, the history of manners; but political history was
positively distasteful to him. The question at issue between
the colonies and the mother country was a question about
which he had really nothing to say. He failed, therefore, as
the greatest men must fail when they attempt to do that for
which they are unfit; as Burke would have failed if Burke
had tried to write comedies like those of Sheridan; as Reynolds
would have failed if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes 5
like those of Wilson. Happily, Johnson soon had an
opportunity of proving most signally that his failure was not
to be ascribed to intellectual decay.
45. On Easter eve 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting
which consisted of forty of the first booksellers in London, 10
called upon him. Though he had some scruples about doing
business at that season, he received his visitors with much
civility. They came to inform him that a new edition of the English
poets, from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and to ask
him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook 15
the task, a task for which he was pre-eminently qualified.
His knowledge of the literary history of England since the
Restoration was unrivalled. That knowledge he had derived
partly from books, and partly from sources which had long been
closed; from old Grub Street traditions; from the talk of 20
forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers who had long been lying
in parish vaults; from the recollections of such men as Gilbert
Walmesley, who had conversed with the wits of Button's; Cibber,
who had mutilated the plays of two generations of dramatists;
Orrery, who had been admitted to the society of Swift; and 25
Savage, who had rendered services of no very honourable kind
to Pope. The biographer therefore sate down to his task with
a mind full of matter. He had at first intended to give only
a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or five pages
to the greatest name. But the flood of anecdote and criticism 30
overflowed the narrow channel. The work, which was originally
meant to consist only of a few sheets, swelled into ten
volumes, small volumes, it is true, and not closely printed.
The first four appeared in 1779, the remaining six in 1781.
46. 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 5
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 10
very worst, they mean something, a praise to which much of
what is called criticism in our time has no pretensions.
47. Savage's Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had
appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that life, will
turn to the other lives will be struck by the difference of 15
style. Since Johnson had been at ease in his circumstances
he had written little and had talked much. When, therefore,
he, after the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism
which he had contracted while he was in the constant habit
of elaborate composition was less perceptible than formerly; 20
and his diction frequently had a colloquial ease which it had
formerly wanted. The improvement may be discerned by a
skilful critic in the Journey to the Hebrides, and in the Lives
of the Poets is so obvious that it cannot escape the notice of
the most careless reader. 25
48. Among the lives the best are perhaps those of Cowley,
Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, beyond all doubt,
that of Gray.
49. This great work at once became popular. There was,
indeed, much just and much unjust censure: but even those 30
who were loudest in blame were attracted by the book in
spite of themselves. Malone computed the gains of the publishers
at five or six thousand pounds. But the writer was
very poorly remunerated. Intending at first to write very
short prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred guineas.
The booksellers, when they saw how far his performance had
surpassed his promise, added only another hundred. Indeed,
Johnson, though he did not despise, or affect to despise, money,
and though his strong sense and long experience ought to 5
have qualified him to protect his own interests, seems to have
been singularly unskilful and unlucky in his literary bargains.
He was generally reputed the first English writer of his time.
Yet several writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums
such as he never ventured to ask. To give a single instance, 10
Robertson received four thousand five hundred pounds for
the History of Charles V. ; and it is no disrespect to the
memory of Robertson to say that the History of Charles V.
is both a less valuable and a less amusing book than the Lives
of the Poets. 15
50. Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The
infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. That inevitable
event of which he never thought without horror was brought
near to him; and his whole life was darkened by the shadow
of death. He had often to pay the cruel price of longevity. 20
Every year he lost what could never be replaced. The strange
dependents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom,
in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by habit,
dropped off one by one; and, in the silence of his home, he
regretted even the noise of their scolding matches. The kind 25
and generous Thrale was no more; and it would have been
well if his wife had been laid beside him. But she survived
to be the laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and
to draw from the eyes of the old man who had loved her
beyond anything in the world tears far more bitter than he 30
would have shed over her grave. With some estimable and
many agreeable qualities, she was not made to be independent.
The control of a mind more steadfast than her own
was necessary to her respectability. While she was restrained
by her husband, a man of sense and firmness, indulgent to
her taste in trifles, but always the undisputed master of his
house, her worst offences had been impertinent jokes, white
lies, and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny good humour.
But he was gone; and she was left an opulent widow of forty, 5
with strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment.
She soon fell in love with a music-master from Brescia, in
whom nobody but herself could discover anything to admire.
Her pride, and perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard
against this degrading passion. But the struggle irritated her 10
nerves, soured her temper, and at length endangered her
health. Conscious that her choice was one which Johnson
could not approve, she became desirous to escape from his
inspection. Her manner towards him changed. She was
sometimes cold and sometimes petulant. She did not conceal 15
her joy when he left Streatham; she never pressed him
to return; and, if he came unbidden, she received him in a
manner which convinced him he was no longer a welcome
guest. He took the very intelligible hints which she gave.
He read, for the last time, a chapter of the Greek Testament in 20
the library which had been formed by himself. In a solemn
and tender prayer he commended the house and its inmates
to the Divine protection, and, with emotions which choked
his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left for ever that
beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet 25
Street, where the few and evil days which still remained to
him were to run out. Here, in June 1783, he had a paralytic
stroke, from which, however, he recovered, and which
does not appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties.
But other maladies came thick upon him. His asthma 30
tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made
their appearance. While sinking under a complication of
diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been
the chief happiness of sixteen years of his life had married an
Italian fiddler; that all London was crying shame upon her;
and that the newspapers and magazines were filled with
allusions to the Ephesian matron, and the two pictures in
Hamlet. He vehemently said that he would try to forget her
existence. He never uttered her name. Every memorial 5
of her which met his eye he flung into the fire. She meanwhile
fled from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen
and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, hastened
across Mount Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry
Christmas of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that 10
the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated
had ceased to exist.
51. He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily
affliction, clung vehemently to life. The feeling described
in that fine but gloomy paper which closes the series of his 15
Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as his last hour drew
near. He fancied that he should be able to draw his breath
more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have
set out for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense
of the journey. That expense, indeed, he had the means of 20
defraying; for he had laid up about two thousand pounds,
the fruit of labours which had made the fortune of several
publishers. But he was unwilling to break in upon this hoard,
and he seems to have wished even to keep its existence a
secret. Some of his friends hoped that the government might 25
be induced to increase his pension to six hundred pounds a
year, but this hope was disappointed, and he resolved to stand
one English winter more. That winter was his last. His
legs grew weaker; his breath grew shorter; the fatal water
gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, courageous against 30
pain, but timid against death, urged his surgeons to make
deeper and deeper. Though the tender care which had mitigated
his sufferings during months of sickness at Streatham
was withdrawn, he was not left desolate. The ablest physicians
and surgeons attended him, and refused to accept fees from
him. Burke parted from him with deep emotion. Windham
sate much in the sick-room, arranged the pillows, and sent his
own servant to watch at night by the bed. Frances Burney,
whom the old man had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood 5
weeping at the door; while Langton, whose piety eminently
qualified him to be an adviser and comforter at such a time,
received the last pressure of his friend's hand within. When
at length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came
close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson's mind. His 10
temper became unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to
think with terror of death, and of that which lies beyond
death; and he spoke much of the mercy of God, and of the
propitiation of Christ. In this serene frame of mind he died
on the 13th of December 1784. He was laid, a week later, 15
in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he
had been the historian,--Cowley and Denham, Dryden and
Congreve, Gay, Prior, and Addison.
52. Since his death the popularity of his works--the Lives
of the Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human Wishes, 20
excepted--has greatly diminished. His Dictionary has been
altered by editors till it can scarcely be called his. An allusion
to his Rambler or his Idler is not readily apprehended in
literary circles. The fame even of Rasselas has grown somewhat
dim. But, though the celebrity of the writings may have 25
declined, the celebrity of the writer, strange to say, is as great
as ever. Boswell's book has done for him more than the best
of his own books could do. The memory of other authors is
kept alive by their works. But the memory of Johnson keeps
many of his works alive. The old philosopher is still among 30
us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which
ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming
with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing
his tea in oceans. No human being who has been more
than seventy years in the grave is so well known to us. And
it is but just to say that our intimate acquaintance with what
he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect
and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that
he was both a great and a good man. 5
FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY ON CROKER'S EDITION OF BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON
(_Edinburgh Review, September, 1831_)
1. The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great
work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets,
Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists,
Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than
Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has 5
distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth
while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
2. We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the
human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many
of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. 10
Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has
beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his
own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a
man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described
him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality 15
by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written.
Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore.
He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society
which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was
always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and 20
begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always
earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a
crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He
exhibited himself, at the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd
which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat
bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour he
proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known 5
by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent,
shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family
pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born
gentleman, yet stooping to be a tale-bearer, an eavesdropper,
a common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know 10
every body who was talked about, that, Tory and high Churchman
as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction
to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish distinctions,
that when he had been to court, he drove to the office where
his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned 15
all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and
sword; such was this man, and such he was content and proud
to be. Every thing which another man would have hidden,
every thing the publication of which would have made another
man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation 20
to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he said,
what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was
troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how
at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the
prayerbook and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, 25
how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how
he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies
because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how he was
frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted
him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at 30
Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment annoyed
the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle
and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence,
how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent
obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom
laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed
to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride
and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all
the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all 5
his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency,
a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself,
to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history
of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly
he has used nobody so ill as himself. 10
3. That such a man should have written one of the best
books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all.
Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in
active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior
powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was 15
very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an
inspired idiot, and by another as a being
"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll. "
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders
would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But 20
these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses.
Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If
he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a
great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the
jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without 25
the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the
toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have
produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his
servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and
garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled 30
to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of
confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without
sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of
others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and
because he was all this, he has, in an important department
of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus,
Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
4. Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence 5
as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all
his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics,
religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd.
His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade,
and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. 10
To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay
them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable
observations made by himself in the course of conversation.
Of those observations we do not remember one which is above 15
the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed
many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting
or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things
which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were
utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation 20
and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a
man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed
to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce,
a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.
5. Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, 25
are most utterly worthless, are delightful when we read them
as illustrations of the character of the writer. Bad in themselves,
they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of Justice
Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced
consonants of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is the most 30
candid. Other men who have pretended to lay open their
own hearts, Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron, have
evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be
then most distrusted when they seem to be most sincere.
There is scarcely any man who would not rather accuse himself
of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous passions,
than proclaim all his little vanities and wild fancies. It would
be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those
of Cæsar Borgia or Danton, than one who would publish a 5
daydream like those of Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those weaknesses
which most men keep covered up in the most secret
places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship
or of love, were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell
paraded before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because 10
the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirits
prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous.
His book resembles nothing so much as the conversation of
the inmates of the Palace of Truth.
6. His fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt, be 15
lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed
marvellously resembles infamy. We remember no other case in
which the world has made so great a distinction between a
book and its author. In general, the book and the author
are considered as one. To admire the book is to admire the 20
author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the
only exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed
to be interesting, instructive, eminently original: yet it has
brought him nothing but contempt. All the world reads it:
all the world delights in it: yet we do not remember ever to 25
have read or ever to have heard any expression of respect and
admiration for the man to whom we owe so much instruction
and amusement. While edition after edition of his book was
coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of
it, and hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural 30
and reasonable. Sir Alexander saw that, in proportion to the
celebrity of the work, was the degradation of the author.
The
very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's books have forgotten
their allegiance, and, like those Puritan casuists who
took arms by the authority of the king against his person,
have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings.
Mr. Croker, for example, has published two thousand five
hundred notes on the life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever
mentions the biographer whose performance he has taken such 5
pains to illustrate without some expression of contempt.
7. An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the
malignity of the most malignant satirist could scarcely cut
deeper than his thoughtless loquacity. Having himself no
sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it for granted 10
that all others were equally callous. He was not ashamed to
exhibit himself to the whole world as a common spy, a common
tattler, a humble companion without the excuse of poverty,
and to tell a hundred stories of his own pertness and
folly, and of the insults which his pertness and folly brought 15
upon him. It was natural that he should show little discretion
in cases in which the feelings or the honour of others
might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such
stories respecting persons whom he professed to love and
revere. He would infallibly have made his hero as contemptible 20
as he has made himself, had not his hero really
possessed some moral and intellectual qualities of a very high
order. The best proof that Johnson was really an extraordinary
man is that his character, instead of being degraded, has,
on the whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all 25
his vices and weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than
they ever were exposed by Churchill or by Kenrick.
8. Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame
and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known
to us than any other man in history. Every thing about him, his 30
coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's
dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs
which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his
insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his
inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts
as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of
orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations,
his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings,
his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his 5
vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his
queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat
Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the
objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood.
But we have no minute information respecting those years of 10
Johnson's life during which his character and his manners
became immutably fixed. We know him, not as he was known
to the men of his own generation, but as he was known to men
whose father he might have been. That celebrated club of
which he was the most distinguished member contained few 15
persons who could remember a time when his fame was not
fully established and his habits completely formed. He had
made himself a name in literature while Reynolds and the
Wartons were still boys. He was about twenty years older
than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton, about thirty 20
years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton, and about
forty years older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and
Windham. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from
whom we derive most of our knowledge respecting him, never
saw him till long after he was fifty years old, till most of his 25
great works had become classical, and till the pension bestowed
on him by the Crown had placed him above poverty. Of those
eminent men who were his most intimate associates towards the
close of his life, the only one, as far as we remember, who knew
him during the first ten or twelve years of his residence in the 30
capital, was David Garrick; and it does not appear that, during
those years, David Garrick saw much of his fellow-townsman.
9. Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when
the condition of a man of letters was most miserable and
degraded. It was a dark night between two sunny days. The
age of patronage had passed away. The age of general curiosity
and intelligence had not arrived. The number of readers
is at present so great that a popular author may subsist in
comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the 5
reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First,
even such men as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have
been able to live like gentlemen by the mere sale of their
writings. But the deficiency of the natural demand for literature
was, at the close of the seventeenth and at the beginning 10
of the eighteenth century, more than made up by artificial
encouragement, by a vast system of bounties and premiums.
There was, perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of
literary merit were so splendid, at which men who could write
well found such easy admittance into the most distinguished 15
society, and to the highest honours of the state. The chiefs
of both the great parties into which the kingdom was divided
patronised literature with emulous munificence. Congreve,
when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for
his first comedy with places which made him independent for 20
life. Smith, though his Hippolytus and Phædra failed, would
have been consoled with three hundred a year but for his own
folly. Rowe was not only Poet Laureate, but also land-surveyor
of the customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to
the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the 25
Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissions
of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative
Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and
of the Board of Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint.
Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity 30
and importance. Gay, who commenced life as an apprentice
to a silk mercer, became a secretary of legation at five-and-twenty.
It was to a poem on the Death of Charles the Second,
and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed
his introduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and
his Auditorship of the Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable
prejudice of the queen, would have been a bishop.
Oxford, with his white staff in his hand, passed through the
crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that ingenious 5
writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of
stamps and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was
a commissioner of the customs, and auditor of the imprest.
Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison
was secretary of state. 10
10. This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it
seems, by the magnificent Dorset, almost the only noble versifier
in the court of Charles the Second who possessed talents
for composition which were independent of the aid of a coronet.
Montague owed his elevation to the favour of Dorset, and 15
imitated through the whole course of his life the liberality to
which he was himself so greatly indebted. The Tory leaders,
Harley and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs of
the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. But
soon after the accession of the House of Hanover a change 20
took place. The supreme power passed to a man who cared
little for poetry or eloquence. The importance of the House
of Commons was constantly on the increase. The government
was under the necessity of bartering for Parliamentary support
much of that patronage which had been employed in fostering 25
literary merit; and Walpole was by no means inclined to
divert any part of the fund of corruption to purposes which he
considered as idle. He had eminent talents for government
and for debate. But he had paid little attention to books,
and felt little respect for authors. One of the coarse jokes of 30
his friend, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, was far more pleasing
to him than Thomson's Seasons or Richardson's Pamela.
He had observed that some of the distinguished writers
whom the favour of Halifax had turned into statesmen had
been mere encumbrances to their party, dawdlers in office,
and mutes in Parliament. During the whole course of his
administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended a single man
of genius. The best writers of the age gave all their support
to the opposition, and contributed to excite that discontent 5
which, after plunging the nation into a foolish and unjust war,
overthrew the minister to make room for men less able and
equally immoral. The opposition could reward its eulogists
with little more than promises and caresses. St. James's would
give nothing: Leicester House had nothing to give. 10
11. Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his literary
career, a writer had little to hope from the patronage of
powerful individuals. The patronage of the public did not
yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices
paid by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of 15
considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more
than provide for the day which was passing over him. The
lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered
ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvests
was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is 20
squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word
Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow,
familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly
qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common
Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel 25
in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and they well
might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject,
their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of
insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of
stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to 30
translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted
by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another,
from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's
Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's church, to sleep on a
bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December,
to die in a hospital and to be buried in a parish vault,
was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived
thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings
of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, 5
and would have been intrusted with embassies to the
High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have
found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle
Street or in Paternoster Row.
12. As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk 10
of life has its peculiar temptations. The literary character,
assuredly, has always had its share of faults, vanity, jealousy,
morbid sensibility. To these faults were now superadded the
faults which are commonly found in men whose livelihood is
precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the trial of 15
severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar
were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the
wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely less ruinous than
the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a manner
that it was almost certain to be abused. After months of 20
starvation and despair, a full third night or a well-received
dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed
poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with
the images of which his mind had been haunted while he
was sleeping amidst the cinders and eating potatoes at the 25
Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week of taverns soon qualified
him for another year of night-cellars. Such was the life
of Savage, of Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes
blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in
bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper 30
cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking
Champagne and Tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes
standing at the window of an eating-house in Porridge island,
to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste;
they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew
comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a
regular and frugal life with the same aversion which an old
gipsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a stationary abode, and for
the restraints and securities of civilised communities. They 5
were as untameable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom,
as the wild ass. They could no more be broken in to
the offices of social man than the unicorn could be trained to
serve and abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like
beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered 10
to their necessities. To assist them was impossible; and the
most benevolent of mankind at length became weary of giving
relief which was dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon
as it had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the
wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might 15
have supplied him for six months, it was instantly spent in
strange freaks of sensuality, and before forty-eight hours had
elapsed, the poet was again pestering all his acquaintance for
twopence to get a plate of shin of beef at a subterraneous
cook-shop. If his friends gave him an asylum in their houses, 20
those houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and taverns.
All order was destroyed; all business was suspended. The
most good-natured host began to repent of his eagerness to
serve a man of genius in distress when he heard his guest
roaring for fresh punch at five o'clock in the morning. 25
13. A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had
been raised above poverty by the active patronage which, in
his youth, both the great political parties had extended to his
Homer. Young had received the only pension ever bestowed,
to the best of our recollection, by Sir Robert Walpole, as the 30
reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the many poets
who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson in particular
and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the
means of subsistence from their political friends. Richardson,
like a man of sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him,
which his novels, admirable as they are, would scarcely have
done. But nothing could be more deplorable than the state
even of the ablest men, who at that time depended for subsistence
on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding, and 5
Thomson, were certainly four of the most distinguished persons
that England produced during the eighteenth century.
It is well known that they were all four arrested for debt.
14. Into calamities and difficulties such as these Johnson
plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that time till he was 10
three or four and fifty, we have little information respecting
him; little, we mean, compared with the full and accurate
information which we possess respecting his proceedings and
habits towards the close of his life. He emerged at length
from cock-lofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the 15
polished and the opulent. His fame was established. A pension
sufficient for his wants had been conferred on him: and
he came forth to astonish a generation with which he had
almost as little in common as with Frenchmen or Spaniards.
15. In his early years he had occasionally seen the great; 20
but he had seen them as a beggar. He now came among
them as a companion. The demand for amusement and
instruction had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually
increasing. The price of literary labour had risen; and
those rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth 25
to associate were for the most part persons widely different
from those who had walked about with him all night in the
streets for want of a lodging. Burke, Robertson, the Wartons,
Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir William
Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill, were the most distinguished 30
writers of what may be called the second generation of the
Johnsonian age. Of these men Churchill was the only one
in whom we can trace the stronger lineaments of that character
which, when Johnson first came up to London, was common
among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt the pressure
of severe poverty. Almost all had been early admitted
into the most respectable society on an equal footing. They
were men of quite a different species from the dependents of
Curll and Osborne. 5
16. Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of
a past age, the last survivor of the genuine race of Grub
Street hacks; the last of that generation of authors whose
abject misery and whose dissolute manners had furnished
inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of Pope. From 10
nature he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the
earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to
his demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities
appalling to the civilised beings who were the companions 15
of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours,
the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence,
and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence,
contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional 20
ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion
of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of
his life, a complete original. An original he was, undoubtedly,
in some respects. But if we possessed full information
concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should 25
probably find that what we call his singularities of manner
were, for the most part, failings which he had in common
with the class to which he belonged. He ate at Streatham
Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at
St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged 30
clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who,
during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in
doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The
habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation
with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation.
He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner
like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead,
and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He
scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it, he drank it 5
greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated
symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such
deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The
roughness and violence which he showed in society were to
be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, 10
had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want
of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors,
by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools,
by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the
bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome 15
of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the
heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse,
ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and
command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power,
he should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his 20
heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour
in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress
he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent
relief. But for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts
upon a delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of 25
suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry
home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the
streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a
crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other
asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary 30
out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity
seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient
compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He
had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not
affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that
every body ought to be as much hardened to those vexations
as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of
a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust
on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in 5
his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to
be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow.
Goldsmith crying because the Good-natured Man had failed,
inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not
good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary 10
losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary,
moved him very little. People whose hearts had been softened
by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but
all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh.
He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady 15
Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord.
Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and
the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small
children, would not have sobbed herself to death.
17. A person who troubled himself so little about small 20
or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very attentive
to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society.
He could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand
could make any man really unhappy. "My dear doctor,"
said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call 25
him Holofernes? " "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs.
Carter, "who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably? "
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small
things. Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence,
but because small things appeared smaller to him than 30
to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence
halfpenny a day.
18. The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the
union of great powers with low prejudices. If we judged of
him by the best parts of his mind, we should place him almost
as high as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell; if by
the worst parts of his mind, we should place him even below
Boswell himself. Where he was not under the influence of
some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which 5
prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating a subject,
he was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined
to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was
less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument or by
exaggerated statements of fact. But if, while he was beating 10
down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish
prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well-managed
nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment.
His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic
elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been 15
admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished
at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman
in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature
had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might
seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to 20
the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless
slave of the charm of Solomon.
19. Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity
the evidence for all stories which were merely odd. But when
they were not only odd but miraculous, his severity relaxed. 25
He began to be credulous precisely at the point where the
most credulous people begin to be sceptical. It is curious to
observe, both in his writings and in his conversation, the contrast
between the disdainful manner in which he rejects unauthenticated
anecdotes, even when they are consistent with the 30
general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he
mentions the wildest stories relating to the invisible world.
A man who told him of a waterspout or a meteoric stone
generally had the lie direct given him for his pains. A man
who told him of a prediction or a dream wonderfully accomplished
was sure of a courteous hearing. "Johnson," observed
Hogarth, "like king David, says in his haste that all men are
liars. " "His incredulity," says Mrs. Thrale, "amounted almost
to disease. " She tells us how he browbeat a gentleman, who 5
gave him an account of a hurricane in the West Indies, and a
poor quaker who related some strange circumstance about the
red-hot balls fired at the siege of Gibraltar. "It is not so.
It cannot be true. Don't tell that story again. You cannot
think how poor a figure you make in telling it. " He once said, 10
half jestingly we suppose, that for six months he refused to
credit the fact of the earthquake at Lisbon, and that he still
believed the extent of the calamity to be greatly exaggerated.
Yet he related with a grave face how old Mr. Cave of St. John's
Gate saw a ghost, and how this ghost was something of a shadowy 15
being. He went himself on a ghost hunt to Cock Lane, and
was angry with John Wesley for not following up another scent
of the same kind with proper spirit and perseverance.
vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him to the
combat in a detestable Latin hexameter.
"Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum. "
But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had learned,
both from his own observation and from literary history, 20
in which he was deeply read, that the place of books in
the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about
them, but by what is written in them; and that an author
whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to
wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He 25
always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could
be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward,
and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore.
No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine
apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down 30
but by himself.
43. Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the
Journey to the Hebrides, Johnson did what none of his
envious assailants could have done, and to a certain extent
succeeded in writing himself down. The disputes between
England and her American colonies had reached a point at
which no amicable adjustment was possible. Civil war was
evidently impending; and the ministers seem to have thought 5
that the eloquence of Johnson might with advantage be
employed to inflame the nation against the opposition here,
and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic. He had already
written two or three tracts in defence of the foreign and
domestic policy of the government; and those tracts, though 10
hardly worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of
pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon and Stockdale.
But his Taxation no Tyranny was a pitiable failure. The very
title was a silly phrase, which can have been recommended
to his choice by nothing but a jingling alliteration which he 15
ought to have despised. The arguments were such as boys
use in debating societies. The pleasantry was as awkward as
the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even Boswell was forced to
own that, in this unfortunate piece, he could detect no trace
of his master's powers. The general opinion was that the 20
strong faculties which had produced the Dictionary and the
Rambler were beginning to feel the effect of time and of
disease, and that the old man would best consult his credit
by writing no more.
44. But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not 25
because his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote Rasselas
in the evenings of a week, but because he had foolishly
chosen, or suffered others to choose for him, a subject such as
he would at no time have been competent to treat. He was
in no sense a statesman. He never willingly read or thought 30
or talked about affairs of state. He loved biography, literary
history, the history of manners; but political history was
positively distasteful to him. The question at issue between
the colonies and the mother country was a question about
which he had really nothing to say. He failed, therefore, as
the greatest men must fail when they attempt to do that for
which they are unfit; as Burke would have failed if Burke
had tried to write comedies like those of Sheridan; as Reynolds
would have failed if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes 5
like those of Wilson. Happily, Johnson soon had an
opportunity of proving most signally that his failure was not
to be ascribed to intellectual decay.
45. On Easter eve 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting
which consisted of forty of the first booksellers in London, 10
called upon him. Though he had some scruples about doing
business at that season, he received his visitors with much
civility. They came to inform him that a new edition of the English
poets, from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and to ask
him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook 15
the task, a task for which he was pre-eminently qualified.
His knowledge of the literary history of England since the
Restoration was unrivalled. That knowledge he had derived
partly from books, and partly from sources which had long been
closed; from old Grub Street traditions; from the talk of 20
forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers who had long been lying
in parish vaults; from the recollections of such men as Gilbert
Walmesley, who had conversed with the wits of Button's; Cibber,
who had mutilated the plays of two generations of dramatists;
Orrery, who had been admitted to the society of Swift; and 25
Savage, who had rendered services of no very honourable kind
to Pope. The biographer therefore sate down to his task with
a mind full of matter. He had at first intended to give only
a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or five pages
to the greatest name. But the flood of anecdote and criticism 30
overflowed the narrow channel. The work, which was originally
meant to consist only of a few sheets, swelled into ten
volumes, small volumes, it is true, and not closely printed.
The first four appeared in 1779, the remaining six in 1781.
46. 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 5
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 10
very worst, they mean something, a praise to which much of
what is called criticism in our time has no pretensions.
47. Savage's Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had
appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that life, will
turn to the other lives will be struck by the difference of 15
style. Since Johnson had been at ease in his circumstances
he had written little and had talked much. When, therefore,
he, after the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism
which he had contracted while he was in the constant habit
of elaborate composition was less perceptible than formerly; 20
and his diction frequently had a colloquial ease which it had
formerly wanted. The improvement may be discerned by a
skilful critic in the Journey to the Hebrides, and in the Lives
of the Poets is so obvious that it cannot escape the notice of
the most careless reader. 25
48. Among the lives the best are perhaps those of Cowley,
Dryden, and Pope. The very worst is, beyond all doubt,
that of Gray.
49. This great work at once became popular. There was,
indeed, much just and much unjust censure: but even those 30
who were loudest in blame were attracted by the book in
spite of themselves. Malone computed the gains of the publishers
at five or six thousand pounds. But the writer was
very poorly remunerated. Intending at first to write very
short prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred guineas.
The booksellers, when they saw how far his performance had
surpassed his promise, added only another hundred. Indeed,
Johnson, though he did not despise, or affect to despise, money,
and though his strong sense and long experience ought to 5
have qualified him to protect his own interests, seems to have
been singularly unskilful and unlucky in his literary bargains.
He was generally reputed the first English writer of his time.
Yet several writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums
such as he never ventured to ask. To give a single instance, 10
Robertson received four thousand five hundred pounds for
the History of Charles V. ; and it is no disrespect to the
memory of Robertson to say that the History of Charles V.
is both a less valuable and a less amusing book than the Lives
of the Poets. 15
50. Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The
infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. That inevitable
event of which he never thought without horror was brought
near to him; and his whole life was darkened by the shadow
of death. He had often to pay the cruel price of longevity. 20
Every year he lost what could never be replaced. The strange
dependents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom,
in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by habit,
dropped off one by one; and, in the silence of his home, he
regretted even the noise of their scolding matches. The kind 25
and generous Thrale was no more; and it would have been
well if his wife had been laid beside him. But she survived
to be the laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and
to draw from the eyes of the old man who had loved her
beyond anything in the world tears far more bitter than he 30
would have shed over her grave. With some estimable and
many agreeable qualities, she was not made to be independent.
The control of a mind more steadfast than her own
was necessary to her respectability. While she was restrained
by her husband, a man of sense and firmness, indulgent to
her taste in trifles, but always the undisputed master of his
house, her worst offences had been impertinent jokes, white
lies, and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny good humour.
But he was gone; and she was left an opulent widow of forty, 5
with strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment.
She soon fell in love with a music-master from Brescia, in
whom nobody but herself could discover anything to admire.
Her pride, and perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard
against this degrading passion. But the struggle irritated her 10
nerves, soured her temper, and at length endangered her
health. Conscious that her choice was one which Johnson
could not approve, she became desirous to escape from his
inspection. Her manner towards him changed. She was
sometimes cold and sometimes petulant. She did not conceal 15
her joy when he left Streatham; she never pressed him
to return; and, if he came unbidden, she received him in a
manner which convinced him he was no longer a welcome
guest. He took the very intelligible hints which she gave.
He read, for the last time, a chapter of the Greek Testament in 20
the library which had been formed by himself. In a solemn
and tender prayer he commended the house and its inmates
to the Divine protection, and, with emotions which choked
his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left for ever that
beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet 25
Street, where the few and evil days which still remained to
him were to run out. Here, in June 1783, he had a paralytic
stroke, from which, however, he recovered, and which
does not appear to have at all impaired his intellectual faculties.
But other maladies came thick upon him. His asthma 30
tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made
their appearance. While sinking under a complication of
diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been
the chief happiness of sixteen years of his life had married an
Italian fiddler; that all London was crying shame upon her;
and that the newspapers and magazines were filled with
allusions to the Ephesian matron, and the two pictures in
Hamlet. He vehemently said that he would try to forget her
existence. He never uttered her name. Every memorial 5
of her which met his eye he flung into the fire. She meanwhile
fled from the laughter and hisses of her countrymen
and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, hastened
across Mount Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry
Christmas of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that 10
the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated
had ceased to exist.
51. He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily
affliction, clung vehemently to life. The feeling described
in that fine but gloomy paper which closes the series of his 15
Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as his last hour drew
near. He fancied that he should be able to draw his breath
more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have
set out for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense
of the journey. That expense, indeed, he had the means of 20
defraying; for he had laid up about two thousand pounds,
the fruit of labours which had made the fortune of several
publishers. But he was unwilling to break in upon this hoard,
and he seems to have wished even to keep its existence a
secret. Some of his friends hoped that the government might 25
be induced to increase his pension to six hundred pounds a
year, but this hope was disappointed, and he resolved to stand
one English winter more. That winter was his last. His
legs grew weaker; his breath grew shorter; the fatal water
gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, courageous against 30
pain, but timid against death, urged his surgeons to make
deeper and deeper. Though the tender care which had mitigated
his sufferings during months of sickness at Streatham
was withdrawn, he was not left desolate. The ablest physicians
and surgeons attended him, and refused to accept fees from
him. Burke parted from him with deep emotion. Windham
sate much in the sick-room, arranged the pillows, and sent his
own servant to watch at night by the bed. Frances Burney,
whom the old man had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood 5
weeping at the door; while Langton, whose piety eminently
qualified him to be an adviser and comforter at such a time,
received the last pressure of his friend's hand within. When
at length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came
close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson's mind. His 10
temper became unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to
think with terror of death, and of that which lies beyond
death; and he spoke much of the mercy of God, and of the
propitiation of Christ. In this serene frame of mind he died
on the 13th of December 1784. He was laid, a week later, 15
in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he
had been the historian,--Cowley and Denham, Dryden and
Congreve, Gay, Prior, and Addison.
52. Since his death the popularity of his works--the Lives
of the Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human Wishes, 20
excepted--has greatly diminished. His Dictionary has been
altered by editors till it can scarcely be called his. An allusion
to his Rambler or his Idler is not readily apprehended in
literary circles. The fame even of Rasselas has grown somewhat
dim. But, though the celebrity of the writings may have 25
declined, the celebrity of the writer, strange to say, is as great
as ever. Boswell's book has done for him more than the best
of his own books could do. The memory of other authors is
kept alive by their works. But the memory of Johnson keeps
many of his works alive. The old philosopher is still among 30
us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which
ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming
with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing
his tea in oceans. No human being who has been more
than seventy years in the grave is so well known to us. And
it is but just to say that our intimate acquaintance with what
he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect
and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that
he was both a great and a good man. 5
FROM MACAULAY'S ESSAY ON CROKER'S EDITION OF BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON
(_Edinburgh Review, September, 1831_)
1. The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great
work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets,
Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists,
Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than
Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has 5
distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth
while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.
2. We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the
human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many
of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. 10
Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has
beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his
own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a
man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described
him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality 15
by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written.
Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore.
He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society
which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was
always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and 20
begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always
earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a
crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He
exhibited himself, at the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd
which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat
bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour he
proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known 5
by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent,
shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family
pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born
gentleman, yet stooping to be a tale-bearer, an eavesdropper,
a common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know 10
every body who was talked about, that, Tory and high Churchman
as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction
to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish distinctions,
that when he had been to court, he drove to the office where
his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned 15
all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and
sword; such was this man, and such he was content and proud
to be. Every thing which another man would have hidden,
every thing the publication of which would have made another
man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation 20
to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he said,
what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was
troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how
at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the
prayerbook and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, 25
how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how
he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies
because she was not scared at Johnson's ugly face, how he was
frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted
him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at 30
Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment annoyed
the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle
and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence,
how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent
obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom
laughed and fretted at his fooleries; all these things he proclaimed
to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride
and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all
the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all 5
his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency,
a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself,
to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history
of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly
he has used nobody so ill as himself. 10
3. That such a man should have written one of the best
books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all.
Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in
active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior
powers of mind, have left us valuable works. Goldsmith was 15
very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an
inspired idiot, and by another as a being
"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll. "
La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders
would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But 20
these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses.
Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If
he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a
great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the
jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without 25
the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the
toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have
produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his
servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and
garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled 30
to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of
confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without
sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of
others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and
because he was all this, he has, in an important department
of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus,
Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.
4. Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence 5
as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all
his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics,
religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd.
His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade,
and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. 10
To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay
them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable
observations made by himself in the course of conversation.
Of those observations we do not remember one which is above 15
the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed
many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting
or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things
which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were
utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation 20
and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a
man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed
to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce,
a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.
5. Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, 25
are most utterly worthless, are delightful when we read them
as illustrations of the character of the writer. Bad in themselves,
they are good dramatically, like the nonsense of Justice
Shallow, the clipped English of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced
consonants of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is the most 30
candid. Other men who have pretended to lay open their
own hearts, Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron, have
evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be
then most distrusted when they seem to be most sincere.
There is scarcely any man who would not rather accuse himself
of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous passions,
than proclaim all his little vanities and wild fancies. It would
be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those
of Cæsar Borgia or Danton, than one who would publish a 5
daydream like those of Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those weaknesses
which most men keep covered up in the most secret
places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship
or of love, were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell
paraded before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because 10
the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirits
prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous.
His book resembles nothing so much as the conversation of
the inmates of the Palace of Truth.
6. His fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt, be 15
lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed
marvellously resembles infamy. We remember no other case in
which the world has made so great a distinction between a
book and its author. In general, the book and the author
are considered as one. To admire the book is to admire the 20
author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the
only exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed
to be interesting, instructive, eminently original: yet it has
brought him nothing but contempt. All the world reads it:
all the world delights in it: yet we do not remember ever to 25
have read or ever to have heard any expression of respect and
admiration for the man to whom we owe so much instruction
and amusement. While edition after edition of his book was
coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of
it, and hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural 30
and reasonable. Sir Alexander saw that, in proportion to the
celebrity of the work, was the degradation of the author.
The
very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's books have forgotten
their allegiance, and, like those Puritan casuists who
took arms by the authority of the king against his person,
have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings.
Mr. Croker, for example, has published two thousand five
hundred notes on the life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever
mentions the biographer whose performance he has taken such 5
pains to illustrate without some expression of contempt.
7. An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the
malignity of the most malignant satirist could scarcely cut
deeper than his thoughtless loquacity. Having himself no
sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it for granted 10
that all others were equally callous. He was not ashamed to
exhibit himself to the whole world as a common spy, a common
tattler, a humble companion without the excuse of poverty,
and to tell a hundred stories of his own pertness and
folly, and of the insults which his pertness and folly brought 15
upon him. It was natural that he should show little discretion
in cases in which the feelings or the honour of others
might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such
stories respecting persons whom he professed to love and
revere. He would infallibly have made his hero as contemptible 20
as he has made himself, had not his hero really
possessed some moral and intellectual qualities of a very high
order. The best proof that Johnson was really an extraordinary
man is that his character, instead of being degraded, has,
on the whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all 25
his vices and weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than
they ever were exposed by Churchill or by Kenrick.
8. Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame
and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known
to us than any other man in history. Every thing about him, his 30
coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's
dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs
which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his
insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his
inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts
as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of
orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations,
his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings,
his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his 5
vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his
queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat
Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the
objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood.
But we have no minute information respecting those years of 10
Johnson's life during which his character and his manners
became immutably fixed. We know him, not as he was known
to the men of his own generation, but as he was known to men
whose father he might have been. That celebrated club of
which he was the most distinguished member contained few 15
persons who could remember a time when his fame was not
fully established and his habits completely formed. He had
made himself a name in literature while Reynolds and the
Wartons were still boys. He was about twenty years older
than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton, about thirty 20
years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton, and about
forty years older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and
Windham. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from
whom we derive most of our knowledge respecting him, never
saw him till long after he was fifty years old, till most of his 25
great works had become classical, and till the pension bestowed
on him by the Crown had placed him above poverty. Of those
eminent men who were his most intimate associates towards the
close of his life, the only one, as far as we remember, who knew
him during the first ten or twelve years of his residence in the 30
capital, was David Garrick; and it does not appear that, during
those years, David Garrick saw much of his fellow-townsman.
9. Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when
the condition of a man of letters was most miserable and
degraded. It was a dark night between two sunny days. The
age of patronage had passed away. The age of general curiosity
and intelligence had not arrived. The number of readers
is at present so great that a popular author may subsist in
comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the 5
reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First,
even such men as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have
been able to live like gentlemen by the mere sale of their
writings. But the deficiency of the natural demand for literature
was, at the close of the seventeenth and at the beginning 10
of the eighteenth century, more than made up by artificial
encouragement, by a vast system of bounties and premiums.
There was, perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of
literary merit were so splendid, at which men who could write
well found such easy admittance into the most distinguished 15
society, and to the highest honours of the state. The chiefs
of both the great parties into which the kingdom was divided
patronised literature with emulous munificence. Congreve,
when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for
his first comedy with places which made him independent for 20
life. Smith, though his Hippolytus and Phædra failed, would
have been consoled with three hundred a year but for his own
folly. Rowe was not only Poet Laureate, but also land-surveyor
of the customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to
the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the 25
Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissions
of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative
Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and
of the Board of Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint.
Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity 30
and importance. Gay, who commenced life as an apprentice
to a silk mercer, became a secretary of legation at five-and-twenty.
It was to a poem on the Death of Charles the Second,
and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed
his introduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and
his Auditorship of the Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable
prejudice of the queen, would have been a bishop.
Oxford, with his white staff in his hand, passed through the
crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that ingenious 5
writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of
stamps and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was
a commissioner of the customs, and auditor of the imprest.
Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison
was secretary of state. 10
10. This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it
seems, by the magnificent Dorset, almost the only noble versifier
in the court of Charles the Second who possessed talents
for composition which were independent of the aid of a coronet.
Montague owed his elevation to the favour of Dorset, and 15
imitated through the whole course of his life the liberality to
which he was himself so greatly indebted. The Tory leaders,
Harley and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs of
the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. But
soon after the accession of the House of Hanover a change 20
took place. The supreme power passed to a man who cared
little for poetry or eloquence. The importance of the House
of Commons was constantly on the increase. The government
was under the necessity of bartering for Parliamentary support
much of that patronage which had been employed in fostering 25
literary merit; and Walpole was by no means inclined to
divert any part of the fund of corruption to purposes which he
considered as idle. He had eminent talents for government
and for debate. But he had paid little attention to books,
and felt little respect for authors. One of the coarse jokes of 30
his friend, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, was far more pleasing
to him than Thomson's Seasons or Richardson's Pamela.
He had observed that some of the distinguished writers
whom the favour of Halifax had turned into statesmen had
been mere encumbrances to their party, dawdlers in office,
and mutes in Parliament. During the whole course of his
administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended a single man
of genius. The best writers of the age gave all their support
to the opposition, and contributed to excite that discontent 5
which, after plunging the nation into a foolish and unjust war,
overthrew the minister to make room for men less able and
equally immoral. The opposition could reward its eulogists
with little more than promises and caresses. St. James's would
give nothing: Leicester House had nothing to give. 10
11. Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his literary
career, a writer had little to hope from the patronage of
powerful individuals. The patronage of the public did not
yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices
paid by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of 15
considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more
than provide for the day which was passing over him. The
lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered
ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvests
was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is 20
squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word
Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow,
familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly
qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common
Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel 25
in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and they well
might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject,
their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of
insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of
stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to 30
translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted
by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another,
from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's
Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's church, to sleep on a
bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December,
to die in a hospital and to be buried in a parish vault,
was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived
thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings
of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, 5
and would have been intrusted with embassies to the
High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have
found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle
Street or in Paternoster Row.
12. As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk 10
of life has its peculiar temptations. The literary character,
assuredly, has always had its share of faults, vanity, jealousy,
morbid sensibility. To these faults were now superadded the
faults which are commonly found in men whose livelihood is
precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the trial of 15
severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar
were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the
wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely less ruinous than
the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a manner
that it was almost certain to be abused. After months of 20
starvation and despair, a full third night or a well-received
dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed
poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with
the images of which his mind had been haunted while he
was sleeping amidst the cinders and eating potatoes at the 25
Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week of taverns soon qualified
him for another year of night-cellars. Such was the life
of Savage, of Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes
blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in
bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper 30
cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking
Champagne and Tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes
standing at the window of an eating-house in Porridge island,
to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste;
they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew
comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a
regular and frugal life with the same aversion which an old
gipsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a stationary abode, and for
the restraints and securities of civilised communities. They 5
were as untameable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom,
as the wild ass. They could no more be broken in to
the offices of social man than the unicorn could be trained to
serve and abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like
beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered 10
to their necessities. To assist them was impossible; and the
most benevolent of mankind at length became weary of giving
relief which was dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon
as it had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the
wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might 15
have supplied him for six months, it was instantly spent in
strange freaks of sensuality, and before forty-eight hours had
elapsed, the poet was again pestering all his acquaintance for
twopence to get a plate of shin of beef at a subterraneous
cook-shop. If his friends gave him an asylum in their houses, 20
those houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and taverns.
All order was destroyed; all business was suspended. The
most good-natured host began to repent of his eagerness to
serve a man of genius in distress when he heard his guest
roaring for fresh punch at five o'clock in the morning. 25
13. A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had
been raised above poverty by the active patronage which, in
his youth, both the great political parties had extended to his
Homer. Young had received the only pension ever bestowed,
to the best of our recollection, by Sir Robert Walpole, as the 30
reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the many poets
who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson in particular
and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the
means of subsistence from their political friends. Richardson,
like a man of sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him,
which his novels, admirable as they are, would scarcely have
done. But nothing could be more deplorable than the state
even of the ablest men, who at that time depended for subsistence
on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding, and 5
Thomson, were certainly four of the most distinguished persons
that England produced during the eighteenth century.
It is well known that they were all four arrested for debt.
14. Into calamities and difficulties such as these Johnson
plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that time till he was 10
three or four and fifty, we have little information respecting
him; little, we mean, compared with the full and accurate
information which we possess respecting his proceedings and
habits towards the close of his life. He emerged at length
from cock-lofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the 15
polished and the opulent. His fame was established. A pension
sufficient for his wants had been conferred on him: and
he came forth to astonish a generation with which he had
almost as little in common as with Frenchmen or Spaniards.
15. In his early years he had occasionally seen the great; 20
but he had seen them as a beggar. He now came among
them as a companion. The demand for amusement and
instruction had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually
increasing. The price of literary labour had risen; and
those rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth 25
to associate were for the most part persons widely different
from those who had walked about with him all night in the
streets for want of a lodging. Burke, Robertson, the Wartons,
Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir William
Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill, were the most distinguished 30
writers of what may be called the second generation of the
Johnsonian age. Of these men Churchill was the only one
in whom we can trace the stronger lineaments of that character
which, when Johnson first came up to London, was common
among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt the pressure
of severe poverty. Almost all had been early admitted
into the most respectable society on an equal footing. They
were men of quite a different species from the dependents of
Curll and Osborne. 5
16. Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of
a past age, the last survivor of the genuine race of Grub
Street hacks; the last of that generation of authors whose
abject misery and whose dissolute manners had furnished
inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of Pope. From 10
nature he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the
earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to
his demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities
appalling to the civilised beings who were the companions 15
of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours,
the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence,
and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence,
contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional 20
ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion
of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of
his life, a complete original. An original he was, undoubtedly,
in some respects. But if we possessed full information
concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should 25
probably find that what we call his singularities of manner
were, for the most part, failings which he had in common
with the class to which he belonged. He ate at Streatham
Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at
St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged 30
clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who,
during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in
doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The
habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation
with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation.
He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner
like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead,
and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He
scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it, he drank it 5
greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated
symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such
deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The
roughness and violence which he showed in society were to
be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, 10
had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want
of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors,
by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools,
by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the
bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome 15
of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the
heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse,
ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and
command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power,
he should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his 20
heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour
in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress
he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent
relief. But for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts
upon a delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of 25
suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry
home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the
streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a
crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other
asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary 30
out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity
seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient
compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He
had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not
affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that
every body ought to be as much hardened to those vexations
as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of
a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust
on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in 5
his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to
be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow.
Goldsmith crying because the Good-natured Man had failed,
inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not
good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary 10
losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary,
moved him very little. People whose hearts had been softened
by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but
all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh.
He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady 15
Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord.
Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and
the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small
children, would not have sobbed herself to death.
17. A person who troubled himself so little about small 20
or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very attentive
to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society.
He could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand
could make any man really unhappy. "My dear doctor,"
said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call 25
him Holofernes? " "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs.
Carter, "who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably? "
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small
things. Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence,
but because small things appeared smaller to him than 30
to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence
halfpenny a day.
18. The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the
union of great powers with low prejudices. If we judged of
him by the best parts of his mind, we should place him almost
as high as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell; if by
the worst parts of his mind, we should place him even below
Boswell himself. Where he was not under the influence of
some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which 5
prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating a subject,
he was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined
to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was
less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument or by
exaggerated statements of fact. But if, while he was beating 10
down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish
prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well-managed
nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment.
His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic
elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been 15
admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished
at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman
in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature
had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might
seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to 20
the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless
slave of the charm of Solomon.
19. Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity
the evidence for all stories which were merely odd. But when
they were not only odd but miraculous, his severity relaxed. 25
He began to be credulous precisely at the point where the
most credulous people begin to be sceptical. It is curious to
observe, both in his writings and in his conversation, the contrast
between the disdainful manner in which he rejects unauthenticated
anecdotes, even when they are consistent with the 30
general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he
mentions the wildest stories relating to the invisible world.
A man who told him of a waterspout or a meteoric stone
generally had the lie direct given him for his pains. A man
who told him of a prediction or a dream wonderfully accomplished
was sure of a courteous hearing. "Johnson," observed
Hogarth, "like king David, says in his haste that all men are
liars. " "His incredulity," says Mrs. Thrale, "amounted almost
to disease. " She tells us how he browbeat a gentleman, who 5
gave him an account of a hurricane in the West Indies, and a
poor quaker who related some strange circumstance about the
red-hot balls fired at the siege of Gibraltar. "It is not so.
It cannot be true. Don't tell that story again. You cannot
think how poor a figure you make in telling it. " He once said, 10
half jestingly we suppose, that for six months he refused to
credit the fact of the earthquake at Lisbon, and that he still
believed the extent of the calamity to be greatly exaggerated.
Yet he related with a grave face how old Mr. Cave of St. John's
Gate saw a ghost, and how this ghost was something of a shadowy 15
being. He went himself on a ghost hunt to Cock Lane, and
was angry with John Wesley for not following up another scent
of the same kind with proper spirit and perseverance.
