He had told Johnson his purpose by 1772,
and he had spoken definitely of his Life in a letter of 1775.
and he had spoken definitely of his Life in a letter of 1775.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v10
1, pp.
518—20.
7
## p. 182 (#208) ############################################
182
Johnson and Boswell
>
3
towards Spain and is notable for its picture of the horrors of war
and for its reference to Junius. The best thing in The False
Alarm, his thoughts on the present discontents, is the satirical
picture of the progress of a petition. In Taxation no Tyranny,
his answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American
Congress,' he asks “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for
liberty among the drivers of negroes? '
The prejudice in A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland is of a different kind, and never displeasing. It is only
the natural prejudice of John Bull as a tourist. He makes many
acute observations which even the most perfervid Scot must have
recognised to be just; but his impartiality is occasionally impeded
by a want of knowledge which he himself was the first to admit.
He had been conducted round Scotland by Boswell from August
to November 1773, and the book—which was published in January
1775—is not so much a record of the ninety-four days of vigorous
exertion' as a series of thoughts on a different civilisation. It had
a different purpose from that of Pennant's Tour in Scotland (1771),
which Johnson praised highly. He had taken the opportunity of en-
quiring into the authenticity of the poems of Ossian, and convinced
himself that 'they never existed in any other form than that which
we have seen. This is the best known section of his book; but
the reader may find more interest in the remarks on the super-
stitions of the Highlands, on American emigration and on the
Scottish universities. In July and August 1774, he made a tour
in north Wales with his friends the Thrales, and kept a diary
which might have served as the groundwork of a companion volume
to his Scottish Journey; but he did not make any use of it, and it
remained in MS till 1816. The beauty of the Welsh scenery had
greatly impressed him, and this diary must not be neglected in
any estimate of his feeling for wild landscape. The fragmentary
records of his tour in France with the Thrales in 1775 were left to
be printed by Boswell. Johnson was content to pass the rest of
his days in leisure, working only as the mood prompted, when, on
Easter Eve 1777, a deputation of booksellers asked him to under-
take, at the age of sixty-seven, what was to prove his masterpiece.
The Lives of the Poets arose out of a business venture. The
London booksellers were anxious to drive out of the market an
Edinburgh reprint of the English poets and to protect their own
copyright; and, besides producing an edition superior in accuracy
and elegance, they determined to add biographical prefaces by some
writer of authority. The scheme took some time to mature, and
## p. 183 (#209) ############################################
The Lives of the Poets 183
Percival Stockdale had hopes of the editorship. But Johnson was
given the first offer and at once accepted. Writing to Boswell, on
3 May 1777, he says he is engaged 'to write little Lives and little
Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets. The work
proved so congenial that he wrote at greater length than he had
intended; and, when the edition was completed, the prefaces were
issued without the texts under the title The Lives of the Poets
(1781). Their independent publication, and the title by which they
are now known, were alike afterthoughts; in origin, The Lives
of the Poets is only editorial matter. It is even more important
to remember that this great body of critical opinion—perhaps
the greatest in the English language--was written on invitation
and in conformity with conditions controlled by others. When
he found the complete series labelled 'Johnson's Poets,' he was
moved to write on a scrap of paper which has happily been
preserved : 'It is great impudence to put Johnson's Poets on the
back of books which Johnson neither recommended nor revised. '
Of the fifty-two poets, five, at most, were included on his suggestion.
In the life of Watts, he says that the readers of the collection are
to impute to him whatever pleasure or weariness they may find in
the perusal of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret and Yalden; but it
would also appear from the letter to Boswell cited above that he
' persuaded the booksellers to insert something of Thomson. ' There
is no evidence that he advised any omission. For only one of the
fifty-two lives was he indebted to another hand—the life of Young
by Sir Herbert Croft. He included his early life of Savage, with
insignificant changes, and worked up his article on Roscommon
in The Gentleman's Magazine for May 1748. The other lives he
now wrote specially for the booksellers, availing himself here and
there of what he had written already, such as the 'Dissertation on
Pope's Epitaphs' in The Universal Visiter (1756), and the character
of Collins in Fawkes and Woty's Poetical Calendar (1763).
The original plan had evidently been to include ‘all the English
poets of reputation from Chaucer to the present day. It is no
matter for regret that this scheme was curtailed. The poets of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, besides affording him
ample scope for expounding his views on poetry, possessed for
him the personal interest which was always a stimulus to his
criticism. But, even could be be shown to have recommended
Cowley as the starting point, it would be an error to infer that
this was the limit to his knowledge and appreciation. Such an
1 Memoirs (1809), vol. 11, pp. 193—7.
## p. 184 (#210) ############################################
184 Johnson and Boswell
In an
inference would neglect his preface to Shakespeare, his work on
the Elizabethans for the Dictionary and his statement in The
Idlerl that we consider the whole succession from Spenser to
Pope as superior to any names which the Continent can boast. '
Of the earlier writers, he had not the knowledge possessed by
Thomas Warton and other of his friends. But he wrote on Ascham,
and corresponded on the manuscripts of Sir Thomas More, and
devoted to him a considerable section of the introductory matter
of his Dictionary; and he was always alert to any investigation,
whether in modern English, or Old English, or northern antiquities.
His comprehensive knowledge of English literature may be de-
scribed as beginning with the reign of Henry VIII.
interview with George III, he was enjoined to add Spenser to The
Lives of the Poets; and he would readily have complied, could he
have obtained new material? .
In the earlier interview which Boswell has recorded, many years
before The Lives of the Poets was thought of, George III proposed
that Johnson should undertake the literary biography of his country.
It was a happy courtesy, for, though there had been good lives of
individual poets since Sprat’s Life of Cowley, the collections that
had yet appeared had shown that much remained to be accomplished,
and Johnson was specially fitted to write the lives of authors.
Even had he not said so, we should have suspected that the
biographical part of literature was what he loved most. The best
of these collections had been The Lives of the Poets of Great
Britain and Ireland (1753), nominally by ‘Mr Cibber' (Theophilus),
but really by Robert Shielss, The Royal and Noble Authors (1758),
of Horace Walpole, which is a 'catalogue,' and the literary articles
in the very unequal Biographia Britannica". It was left to
Johnson to impart a sustained excellence to this kind of writing,
and, by engaging in what had not yet occupied an author of his
authority, to raise it to a new level as an English literary form.
The most obvious features of The Lives of the Poets is the
equipoise of biography and criticism. Johnson states the facts
simply, but connects them with his impression of the writer, and,
6
1 No. 91.
? This interview appears to have been unknown to Boswell. The authority for it is
a sentence in the Memoirs of Hannah More (1834, vol. 1, p. 174), and an obvious allusion
in the conversation with John Nichols given towards the end of Boswell's Life.
3 The evidence on the authorship is given in Sir Walter Raleigh's Six Essays on
Johnson (1910), pp. 120–5, note.
* Johnson was asked to undertake the second edition of this work and regretted his
refusal. See Boswell, ed. Hill, G. B, vol. III, p. 174.
## p. 185 (#211) ############################################
The Lives of the Poets
185
when he passes to the examination of poems, he is still thinking of
their relation to the writer's personality. He finds the man behind
the work. The truth is that he was much more interested in the
man than in that part of him which is the author. Of 'mere poets,'
he thought little; and, though he championed the dignity of author-
ship, he claimed for it no exclusive privileges, nor held that the
poet was a man apart to be measured by standards inapplicable
to other men. If the enduring freshness of The Lives of the Poets
is due to any one quality more than to another, it is to Johnson's
inexhaustible interest in the varieties of human nature. As detailed
biographies, they have been superseded, though they remain our
only authority for many facts and anecdotes, and include much
that had been inaccessible. He made researches; but they were
limited to his immediate needs. It is often easy to trace the
sources of his information. He criticised Congreve's plays with-
out having read them for many years, and he refused for a time
to hear Lord Marchmont's recollections of Pope. Though, in
general, he welcomed new details, his aim was to know enough to
describe the man and to bring out his individuality in the estimate
of his work.
The common result of this method in criticism is that the
critic is at his best when he is in sympathy with the writer.
Johnson meant to be scrupulously judicial; but he showed per-
sonal feelings. He disliked the acrimonious politics of Milton, the
querulous sensitiveness of Swift and the timid foppery of Gray.
This personal antipathy underlies his criticisms, though it is
qualified, at times, even generously. Had Gray written often as
in the Elegy, he says "it had been vain to blame and useless to
praise him’; and Paradise Lost “is not the greatest of heroic
poems only because it is not the first. ' Of Dryden and Pope he
wrote in friendship, and there exists no finer criticism of them.
But no critic has been severer on Dryden's negligences, or spoken
more ruthlessly of the Essay on Man.
The passage on Lycidas is generally regarded as an error of
judgment which marks Johnson's limitations as a critic. With
his usual courage, he stated a deliberate opinion. He gave
his reasons—the artificiality of the pastoral convention, the con-
fusion of the allegory with actual fact and sacred truth, and the
absence of the feeling of real sorrow. But there is the further
explanation that he was opposed to some recent tendencies in
English poetry. That he had more than Lycidas in his mind
is shown by the emphasis of his statement. The same ideas
## p. 186 (#212) ############################################
186
Johnson and Boswell
reappear in his criticism of Collins and Gray. He objected to the
habit of inverting the common order of words, and, on one occasion,
cited Thomas Warton's "evening gray’; he might also have cited
'mantle blue. ' It was Warton who occasioned his extempore
verses beginning-
Wherevo'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new;
and Warton imitated, as well as edited, the early poems of Milton.
Warton was one of many in whom he found faults which he traced
to Milton as their original. In criticising Lycidas, he had in mind
his own contemporaries. When the new tendencies had prevailed,
he was said to have judged by a rigorous code of criticism. This
code would have been difficult to reconcile with the preface to
his edition of Shakespeare; with the praise given by him to
Homer's heroes, that they are not described but develop them-
selves? ; with his statement that 'real criticism' shows the beauty
of thought as formed on the workings of the human heart? ; and
with his condemnation of the cant of those who judge by prin-
ciples rather than perception. '
His views on the matter of poetry are shown in his criticism
of Gray's Bard : ‘To select a singular event, and swell it to a
giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions,
has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the probable may always
find the marvellous. ' The common growth of mother earth sufficed
for him as for Wordsworth. The distinction which he draws between
the Elegy and The Bard was that which ultimately divided
Wordsworth and Coleridge. There was enough for him in life as
he knew it. And there was a personal reason why, more than the
other great writers of his century, he should tend to limit nature
to human experience. The tumult in his mind was allowed no
direct expression in his writings; but it made him look upon the
world as the battle ground of thought, and passion, and will.
With the revision of The Lives of the Poets, Johnson's career
as an author closed. In the three years of failing health which
were left to him, he lived his accustomed life, honoured for the
authority of his opinion, generous in his help to younger writers,
and active in domestic benevolence. He revised Crabbe's Village,
and dictated much to Boswell. Death removed some who had
played a great part in his later life Thrale, whose house at
Streatham had been a second home, and two of the pensioners in
1 Boswell, ed. Hill, G. B. vol. v, p. 79.
! Ibid. vol. 11, p. 88.
3 Life of Pope.
## p. 187 (#213) ############################################
>
2
Johnson's Death. His Literary Career 187
his own house at Bolt-court, Levett and Mrs Williams. The tribute
to Levett, noble in its restrained emotion, is the most tender of
his poems. The sadness of loss was embittered by Mrs Thrale's
marriage to Piozzi and the irreparable break in the long and
happy friendship. He had so far recovered from a paralytic seizure
as to be able, at the close of 1783, to found the Essex-Head club.
By its ease of access, the old man sought to supply the need of
new company. He dined at The Club, for the last time, in June
1784. Next month, he set out for his native city, and returned
by Birmingham and Oxford, the cities of his youth. His health had
not found any relief, and, when he reached London in November,
was rapidly declining. He died 13 December, and, on the 20th, was
buried in Westminster abbey. Shortly before his death, he had
destroyed his papers.
His long career had been uniform in its aim and methods, and
the distinctions between his earlier and later writings are those
which come from experience and confidence. The author of the
preface to A Voyage to Abyssinia is unmistakably the author
of The Rambler and The Lives of the Poets, with the same tastes
and habits of thought, but younger, with a shorter reach and less
precision in his skill. There had been no discipleship, and no
time of searching where his strength lay; and no new influences
had modified his purpose. The changes to be found in his work
of forty-five years are those of a natural and undisturbed de-
velopment, so steady that its stages cannot be minutely marked
by us, and were probably imperceptible to himself. As he
grew
older, he related all art more and more to life. Though careful
to give his thoughts their best expression, and severe on impro-
prieties in others, he became impatient of mere proficiency in
technique; and, though a scholar, he recognised the insufficiency
of scholarship and the barrenness of academic pursuits. He had
the purposes of life' ever and increasingly before him, and his
criticisms of the English poets are the richest of his works in
worldly wisdom.
At the same time, his style became more easy. The Latin
element is at its greatest in The Rambler. He was then engaged
on his Dictionary. But he always tended to use long words
most when he wrote in haste; and his revision was towards sim-
plicity? He used them in conversation, where alone he allowed
himself the liberty of a daring coinage. They were in no sense an
1 See, in addition to the alterations in The Rambler, the corrections in The Lives of
the Poets as given in Boswell's lists.
## p. 188 (#214) ############################################
188 Johnson and Boswell
6
embroidery, but part of the very texture of his thought. 'Difference
of thoughts,' he said, 'will produce difference of language. He that
thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger
meaning; he that thinks with subtlety will seek for terms of more
nice discrimination? . ' As we read him and accustom our minds to
move with his, we cease to notice the diction. The strength of his
thought carries the weight of his words. His meaning is never
mistaken, though it may not be fully grasped at a glance; for he
puts much in small compass, and the precision of his language
requires careful reading for its just appreciation. 'Familiar but
not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious'; 'vanity produced
a grotto where necessity enforced a passage'-could the thought
be put more pointedly, or adequately, or shortly? When Latin
diction cannot be changed without loss, or without affecting
the tenor of the thought, it has made good its right. His humour
and irony found an aid in the dignified phraseology. But he also
used simple words. Wit is that which he that never found it
wonders how he missed'; 'what he does best he soon ceases to
do'; 'a rage for saying something when there is nothing to be
said'—these, also, are typical of his style. The letter to Chester-
field reaches its climax in the homeliest of English: 'till I am
known, and do not want it. '
His parodists have been peculiarly unsuccessful. We lose their
meaning in a jumble of pedantries ; and we do not lose Johnson's.
They inflate their phraseology; but Johnson is not tumid. And
they forget that his balance is a balance of thought. His own
explanation still holds good: 'the imitators of my style have not
hit it. Miss Aikin has done it the best ; for she has imitated the
sentiment as well as the diction. This was said in 1777. But
better than Miss Aikin's essay ‘On Romances in the style of The
Rambler, and the best of all the parodies, is A Criticism on the
Elegy written in a Country Church-yard (1783), composed by
John Young, the versatile professor of Greek at Glasgow, and
designed as a continuation of The Life of Gray. The long list
of his serious imitators begins with Hawkesworth and extends to
Jeffrey', who started by training himself in the school of the
periodical essayists. Others, who did not take him as a model,
profited by the example of a style in which nothing is negligent
and nothing superfluous. He was the dominating influence in
1 Idler, no. 70.
? Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose, by J. Aikin and A. L. Aikin (Mrs Barbauld), 1773.
3 See Cockburn, Life of Jeffrey, vol. 1, pp. 31 etc.
## p. 189 (#215) ############################################
Earlier Biographical Accounts of Johnson 189
English prose throughout the second half of the eighteenth
century. The lesson of discipline required to be taught, and it
was learned from him by many whose best work shows no traces
of his manner.
His death, says Murphy, ‘kept the public mind in agitation
beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited
so much attention. ' Collections of stories about him had begun
to appear in his lifetime, and now his friends competed in serious
biography. When Mrs Piozzi wrote her account, she had heard of
nine others already written or in preparation. Her Anecdotes of
the late Samuel Johnson (1786) has a place by itself. It preserves
much that would have been lost; but its importance lies chiefly in
its picture of Johnson's character, and in its illustration of the quali-
ties by which he was attracted. She writes with amiable pride in
the ties that bound him to the hospitality of Streatham, and with
an honest effort to rise above their quarrel. If her detractors can
find evidence of artfulness, no one can deny the clearness of her
vision; and, if, at times, her little vanities prevented her from seeing
the true bearing of Johnson's remarks, she must, at least, be admitted
to have been happy in the selection of what she has recorded.
There is no work of the same size as her Anecdotes that gives a
better portrait of Johnson. In strong contrast is the Life (1787)
by Sir John Hawkins. It is the solid book of an 'unclubbable'
magistrate and antiquary, who has much knowledge and little
intuition. He had known Johnson for over forty years and, on
many points, is our chief authority. Much of the value of his
book lies in the lengthy digressions on contemporary literature.
His lack of sympathy made him unsuited for biography; but
we are under a debt to him for the facts which he threw to-
gether.
The merits of Mrs Piozzi and Hawkins were united and aug-
mented by Boswell. He had been collecting material since his
first interview in 1763.
He had told Johnson his purpose by 1772,
and he had spoken definitely of his Life in a letter of 1775. After
Johnson's death, he set to work in earnest and spared himself no
trouble.
a
You cannot imagine,' he wrote in 1789, what labour, what perplexity, what
vexation I have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials,
in supplying omissions, in searching for papers buried in different masses,
and all this besides the exertion of composing and polishing: many a time
have I thought of giving it up. '
## p. 190 (#216) ############################################
190
Johnson and Boswell
But he was confident in the result. It was to be not merely the
best biography of Johnson, but the best biography ever written.
'I am absolutely certain,' he said, 'that my mode of biography, which gives
not only a History of Johnson's visible progress through the world, and of his
publications, but a view of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the
most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work
that has ever yet appeared. '
When the book at last came out, in May 1791, the same confidence
was expressed in the opening paragraphs. There, he admits that
the idea of interspersing letters had been taken from Mason’s life of
Gray. He had made a careful study of the art of biography; and
the Anecdotes of Mrs Piozzi, which had shown the necessity of a
careful handling of intimate material, and the facts of Hawkins,
which had proved the inadequacy of simple narrative, had reassured
him that he was engaged on the real life of his friend.
Johnson owes much to Boswell; but it was Johnson who gave us
Boswell. His life is the story of failure turned to success by an
irresistible devotion. He had always been attracted by whatever
won the public attention, partly from scientific curiosity, as when he
visited Mrs Rudd, and partly with a view to his own advancement.
In the first of his letters, he says that Hume ‘is a very proper
person for a young man to cultivate an acquaintance with. ' He
comes to know Wilkes, but doubts if it would be proper to keep
a correspondence with a gentleman in his present capacity. ' The
chief pleasure that he foresaw in his continental tour was his
meeting with Voltaire and Rousseau. Then, he proceeded to
Corsica and became the friend and enthusiastic champion of Paoli.
Having received a communication on Corsican affairs from the
earl of Chatham, he asks: ‘Could your lordship find time to honour
me now and then with a letter? ' Again, he is found thinking of
a life of lord Kames and satisfying himself that he has eminence
enough to merit this. There was cause for the sturdy laird of
Auchinleck to complain, according to Sir Walter Scott's anecdote,
that his irresponsible son was always pinning himself to the tail of
somebody or other. But, of all his heroes, Johnson alone brought
out the best qualities in his volatile character, and steadied him to
the worthy use of his rare gifts. When Johnson is absent, his
writings possess no remarkable merit, though they have always the
interest of being the pellucid expression of his singular personality.
The Life is the devoted and flawless recognition of an influence
which he knew that his nature had required.
Born at Edinburgh in 1740, the son of a Scottish advocate who
## p. 191 (#217) ############################################
Boswell's Earlier Life
191
a
6
took his title as a judge from his ancient estate of Auchinleck in
Ayrshire, Boswell reluctantly adopted the family profession of law,
and, after studying at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Utrecht, was called
to the Scottish bar in 1766. His heart was never in a legal career,
and, to the last, he had a fond belief in sudden and splendid suc-
cess in literature or politics. His earliest work appeared in The
Scots Magazine, but has not been identified. He wrote much verse
and published An Elegy on the death of an amiable young lady
(1761), An Ode to Tragedy, dedicated to himself (1761), and The
Cub at Newmarket, a humorous description of his experiences
as the guest of the Jockey club (1762). Several of his earliest
pieces are printed in A Collection of Original Poems, by the
Rev. Mr Blacklock and other Scotch Gentlemen (1760—2), the
second volume of which he edited'. He frequented the literary
society of Edinburgh, founded the jovial “Soaping Club' and
engaged in regular correspondence with his friends. The Letters
between the Hon. Andrew Erskine and James Boswell Esq. , in
which, also, there is much verse, he published in 1763. "They have
made ourselves laugh,' says the advertisement; 'we hope they will
have the same effect upon other people. They were hardly worth
publishing, though we should be sorry now not to have them. In
the description of a long series of daydreams, given with the
characteristic vanity which is always saved by its frankness, he
says:
I am thinking of the perfect knowledge which I shall acquire of men and
manners, of the intimacies which I shall have the honour to form with the
learned and ingenious in every science, and of the many amusing literary
anecdotes which I shall pick up.
This was published, from Flexney's shop in Holborn, in the very
month that he met Johnson in Davies's parlour. Shortly before
this, he had brought out, with Erskine and George Dempster, his
two associates in much of his early work, the rare Critical Stric-
tures on Mallet's Elvira. He returned to Edinburgh from his
continental travels in 1766, and, being admitted to the bar in the
midst of the excitement about the Douglas cause, found in it
material for Dorando (June 1767), which recounts the points at
issue under a Spanish disguise, and appeared immediately before
the thirteen Scottish judges, by a majority of one, arrived at a
decision contrary to his wishes. The little story went into three
1 The manuscripts of many of Boswell's poems written between 1760 and 1768, several
of them unprinted, are in the Bodleian library--MS Douce 193. The collection includes
a 'Plan of a Volume of Poems to be published for me by Becket and Dehorde. '
## p. 192 (#218) ############################################
192 Johnson and Boswell
editions within a fortnight, but it now disappoints the hopes
excited by its rarity. As the case was sent up to the House of
Lords, where the decision was ultimately reversed, Boswell con-
tinued to write about it and brought out the more serious Essence
of the Douglas Cause (November 1767). He took an energetic
part in the riotous controversy concerning the Edinburgh stage
and supplied the prologue for the opening of the first licensed
theatre in Scotland! At the same time, he was engaged on his
Corsican experiences. An Account of Corsica had been read by
Lord Hailes in manuscript in June 1767, and was issued in March
1768. It is Boswell's first considerable book, and, indeed, his only
book, apart from those concerned with Johnson, that had a chance
of being remembered on its merits. It won what he calls 'amazing
celebrity'; he could boast that he was 'really the great man now. '
His head was full of Corsica and was not to be emptied of it, even
on Johnson's advice. He made a collection of twenty letters by
himself and others, and published them under the title British
Essays in favour of the Brave Corsicans (January 1769); and,
in the following September, he appeared at the Shakespeare
festival at Stratford in the dress of an armed Corsican chief and
recited a poem that 'preserved the true Corsican character. ' A
description of the proceedings, an account of himself, and the poem
were immediately contributed by him to The London Magazine.
Two months later, he married, and then tried to settle to his
legal practice. From this time, the influence of Johnson, already
evident in An Account of Corsica, grew steadily stronger. He
was not satisfied with Edinburgh after the splendour of London.
'The unpleasing tone, the rude familiarity, the barren conver-
sation,' he complains, `really hurt my feelings. But he had
to content himself with lengthy visits to London in vacation,
which were the more indispensable when Johnson had procured
his election to The Club, and he had become a proprietor of
The London Magazine. He contributed to it, monthly, a series
of seventy periodical essays called The Hypochondriack (1777–
83), for which he found much material in himself. There is also
much in them that was inspired by the dominating friendship.
They take The Rambler as their model, and are the most John-
sonian of his writings. After the death of his father and his own
1 The prologue was printed in The Scots Magazine for November 1767; see, also, The
European Magazine for May 1791 and Dibdin, J. C. , Annals of the Edinburgh Stage
(1888), pp. 143—8, and 493. The Songs in the Justiciary Opera, privately printed for
Alexander Boswell in 1816, belong to this time.
## p. 193 (#219) ############################################
His Later Life
193
succession to Auchinleck, in 1782, he turned to politics, and carried
out his ambition of becoming a member of the English bar, but to
no purpose. He stood for parliament, and published two letters
'to the people of Scotland'; one, On the Present State of the
Nation (1783), and the other, On the Alarming Attempt to
infringe the Articles of the Union (1785). All he obtained was the
recordership of Carlisle, which he soon resigned. In his last years,
which were saddened by the loss of his wife and troubled with
financial difficulties, he is still found hoping that practice may
come at any time and expecting “a capital prize. ' He confesses
that he no longer lives with a view to have surprising incidents,
though he is still desirous that his life 'should tell. ' But he begins
to waken from the long delusion and, in a melancholy moment,
admits: 'I certainly am constitutionally unfit for any employment
He was then on the point of achievement. His life was to tell
better than he knew, and in another way than he had hoped. His
friendship for Johnson was helping him in these years to do what
he was unable to do for himself. Without Johnson, he relapses to
the level of his early verse in No Abolition of Slavery; or the
Universal Empire of Love (April 1791)? . And, when the effort
of producing the great work is over, there remains only the
record of steady decline, varied by new schemes of matrimony,
and cheered by large sales and the preparation of new editions.
He died in London, 19 May 1795. From 1758 to within a few weeks
of his death, he had corresponded regularly with William Johnson
Temple, a fellow student in the Greek class at Edinburgh who
became vicar of St Gluvias in Cornwall; and these letters, which
had been sold by a hawker at Boulogne and were rescued to be
published in 1857, give us his real autobiography? They tell us
much more than the many descriptions of himself, from his Ode
to Tragedy to the ‘Memoirs’ in the European Magazine of 1791 3.
1 A copy of this rare piece is now in the Bodleian library. It was for long doubt.
ful if it had been published, but a review with copious extracts had been given in The
Gentleman's Magazine for April 1791.
· Boswell thought of an autobiography. “My journal,' he says, “will afford materials
for a very curious narrative' (letter to Temple, 22 May 1789). The first record of a
journal is in his letter to Temple of 16 December 1758. The journal was destroyed;
but a portfolio of papers, each inscribed • Boswelliana,' escaped. They are now in the
possession of the marquess of Crewe, and were edited by Charles Rogers for the
Grampian club in 1874. Boswell thought also of editions of Johnson's poems,
Walton's Lives, and the autobiography of Sir Robert Sibbald; a work maintaining the
merit of Addison's poetry; histories of Sweden, James IV, and the '45; a life of
Thomas Ruddiman; and an account of the Isle of Man. These, and others, are men.
tioned in the Life of Johnson ; and yet other projects are mentioned elsewhere.
3 If he did not write these · Memoirs,' he certainly supplied their material.
13
a
6
E. L. X.
CH. VIII.
## p. 194 (#220) ############################################
194
Johnson and Boswell
6
If they show why his descendants decided on a holocaust of his
papers, they also explain the attraction which he exerted on those
who took the trouble to try to understand him.
But, if Boswell without Johnson would have been forgotten, it
was his own talent that gave the Life its surpassing excellence.
Whenever he writes of Johnson, he succeeds in giving the impres-
sion that he saw things as they were, and not through the spectacles
of his own personality. He never tried to conceal the part that
he played; and yet, despite his vanities, and they were many, he
knew how to make his readers think that they are looking at the
facts for themselves. The very freedom from self-consciousness
which was no help to his career was a great part of the secret of
his skill in description. It also provided him with material denied
to less sympathetic natures. “No man,' he said, “has been more
successful in making acquaintance easily than I have been. I even
bring people quickly on to a degree of cordiality. ' Johnson, too,
tells us that 'Mr Boswell's frankness and gaiety made every body
communicative. ' He never tired of arranging new situations, in
order to see what they would bring forth ; and his interpretations
of what he found are strong testimony to his insight into character
and to his judgment. Minute as his observations are, he never
offers a meaningless detail. It is easy to understand why Johnson
made him postpone the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which
was intended as a supplement to his cwn Journey. He had given
'notions rather than facts'; but Boswell had contrived to make
the facts give Johnson. The reproduction of his sayings and
experiences was too minute to be published during his lifetime,
and was more decently delayed till the year after his death? The
Life does not surpass the Journal in the sense of actuality; but
it is a greater achievement. He had met Johnson only on some
two bundred and seventy days, scattered over twenty-one years,
and his material had to be gathered from many sources.
He
selects and arranges; he places his facts in the light and per-
spective that will create the situation; and Johnson lives in his
pages. And he had the gift of the perfect style for his kind of
biography—a style of no marked individuality, but easy, clear and
flexible, which does its duty without attracting attention, and re-
quires to be examined to have its excellence recognised.
1 The Journal was revised by Malone while it was going through the press. Malone
also revised the Life, and, on Boswell's death, completed the preparation of the third
and final edition.
## p. 195 (#221) ############################################
CHAPTER IX
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
'No man,' wrote that authoritative but autocratic biographer,
John Forster, 'ever put so much of himself into his books as
Goldsmith, from the beginning to the very end of his career. ' To
many authors, this saying is only partly applicable ; but it is
entirely applicable to the author of The Vicar of Wakefield. His
life and his works are intimately connected. They accompany and
interpret each other in such a way as to make them practically
inseparable; and it is, therefore, appropriate, as well as convenient,
to treat them, so to speak, in the piece, rather than to attempt any
distribution of the subject into divisions and sub-divisions of
history and criticism.
Concerning Goldsmith's early years, there is much that is
obscure, or that, in any case, cannot be accepted without rigorous
investigation. He left his native island when he was three-and-
twenty, and never returned to it. Those who, like Glover and
Cooke, wrote accounts of him shortly after his death, were the
humbler associates of his later and more famous years, while the
professedly authentic 'Memoir' drawn up under the nominal
superintendence of bishop Percy, and the much quoted letter
of Annesley Strean in Mangin's Essay on Light Reading, did not
see the light until the first decade of the nineteenth century, when
Goldsmith had long been dead. It follows that much of the
information thus collected after date must have been imperfect
and contradictory, often extracted from persons more familiar
with his obscure beginnings than with his later eminence, and,
possibly, in answer to those unsatisfactory leading questions which
usually elicit not so much the truth as what the querist wishes to
establish.
Goldsmith was born on 10 November 1728; and it is usually
held that the place of his nativity was Pallas, or Pallasmore,
a village near Ballymahon, in the county of Longford, Ireland.
13--2
## p. 196 (#222) ############################################
196
Oliver Goldsmith
But it has also been plausibly contended, though actual proof
is not forthcoming, that his true birthplace was Smith-Hill house,
Elphin, Roscommon, the residence of his mother's father, Oliver
Jones, a clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school. His
own father, Charles Goldsmith, was, likewise, a clergyman of the
established church. When Oliver came into the world, Charles Gold-
smith was acting as assistant to an uncle whose name was Green,
the rector of Kilkenny West, and eking out a scanty subsistence
by farming a few fields. In 1730, Green died; and Charles Gold-
smith, succeeding to the vacant rectorate, transferred his residence
to the hamlet of Lissoy, in Westmeath, a little to the right of the
road from Ballymahon to Athlone. At this time, he had five
children, two sons and three daughters, Oliver being the fifth
child and second son. As already stated, the accounts of his
,
earliest years are contradictory. By some, he was regarded as
thick-witted and sullen ; to others, he seemed alert and intelligent.
That he was an adept at all boyish sports is admitted ; and it is
also recorded that he scribbled verses early. His first notable
instructor was the village schoolmaster, Thomas, or 'Paddy,'
Byrne, who had been a quartermaster in queen Anne's wars.
Byrne was also a local rimer, and had even composed an Irish
version of the Georgics. His endless stories of his continental
adventures, and his inexhaustible legends of ghosts and banshees,
held his pupils spellbound; and, by Goldsmith's family, were, later,
made responsible for much of that wandering and unsettled turn
which so much appeared in his future life. ' When Goldsmith was
seven or eight, he was attacked by confluent smallpox, which
scarred him terribly and probably added not a little to the
'exquisite sensibility of contempt' with which he seems to have
been born. With this, at all events, is connected one of the two
most-repeated anecdotes of his childhood. A ne'er-do-well relation
asked him heartlessly when he meant to grow handsome, to which,
after an awkward silence, he replied, 'I mean to get better, sir,
when you do. ' The other story also illustrates an unexpected gift
of repartee. At a party in his uncle's house, during the pause
between two country-dances, little Oliver capered out, and
executed an extempore hornpipe. His deeply-pitted face and
ungainly figure caused much amusement; and the fiddler, a lad
named Cumming, called out Æsop. ' To which the dancer promptly
answered:
Heralds, proclaim aloud! all saying,
See Esop dancing, and his Monkey playing,
6
## p. 197 (#223) ############################################
The Old House, a New Inn
197
at once transferring the laugh to his side. Whether improvised
or remembered, the retort certainly shows intellectual alacrity.
From Byrne, Goldsmith passed to the school at Elphin, of
which his grandfather had been master; thence to Athlone,
and, finally, to Edgeworthstown, where his preceptor, Patrick
Hughes, seems to have understood him better than his previous
instructors. Hughes penetrated his superficial obtuseness, re-
cognised his exceptionally sensitive temperament, and contrived,
at any rate, to think better of him than some of his playmates
who only succeeded in growing up blockheads. There were
traditions at Edgeworthstown of his studies-his fondness for
Ovid and Horace, his hatred of Cicero and his delight in Livy
and Tacitus ; of his prowess in boyish sports and the occasional
robbing of orchards. It is to the close of his Edgeworthstown
experiences that belongs one of the most popular of the incidents
which exemplify the connection between his life and his work.
Returning to school at the end of his last holiday, full of the
youthful pride begotten of a borrowed mount and a guinea in
his pocket, he lingered on his road, with the intention of putting
up, like a gentleman, at some roadside inn. Night fell, and he
found himself at Ardagh, where, with much importance, he
enquired of a passer-by for 'the best house' (hostelry) in the
neighbourhood. The person thus appealed to, a local wag named
Cornelius Kelly, formerly fencing master to the marquis of
Granby, amused by his boyish swagger, gravely directed him to
the residence of the squire of the place, Mr Featherston. Hither
Goldsmith straightway repaired, ordered supper, invited his host,
according to custom, to drink with him, and, being by that
humourist fooled to the top of his bent, retired to rest, after
giving particular directions as to the preparation of a hot cake
for his breakfast. Not until his departure next morning was it
disclosed that he had been entertained in a private house. The
story is too good to question; and accepted, as it has always been,
supplies a conclusive answer to those after-critics of She Stoops
to Conquer who regarded the central idea of that comedy—the
mistaking of a gentleman's residence for an inn-as unjustifiably
farfetched. Here, in Goldsmith's own life, was the proof of its
probability.
At this date, he must have been between fourteen and fifteen ;
and, whatever his ability, it seems to have been decided that he
should follow his elder brother Henry to Trinity college, Dublin,
though not with the same advantages. Henry Goldsmith, who
## p. 198 (#224) ############################################
198
Oliver Goldsmith
was five or six years his brother's senior, had gone as a pensioner
and obtained a scholarship. For Oliver, this was impracticable.
His father, a poor man, had, from family pride, further crippled
himself by undertaking to portion his second daughter, Catherine,
who had clandestinely married the son of a rich neighbour. In
these circumstances, nothing was open to Goldsmith but to obtain
his university education as a poor scholar, a semi-menial condition
which, to one already morbidly sensitive, could not fail to be
distasteful. For a long time, he fought doggedly against his fate;
but, at length, yielding to the persuasions of a friendly uncle
Contarine, who had himself gone through the same ordeal, he
was admitted to Trinity college as a sizar on 11 June 1744,
taking up his abode in one of the garrets of what was then
the eastern side of Parliament square.
The academic career thus inauspiciously begun was not
worshipful. From the outset, he was dispirited and disappointed,
and, consequently, without energy or enthusiasm. Moreover, he
was unfortunate in his tutor, a clergyman named Theaker Wilder,
who, though his bad qualities may have been exaggerated, was
certainly harsh and unsympathetic. His forte, too, was mathe-
matics, which Goldsmith, like Swift, like Gray, like Johnson,
detested as cordially as he detested the arid logic of 'Dutch
Burgersdyck' and Polish Smiglesius. According to Stubbs's
History of the University of Dublin,
Oliver Goldsmith is recorded on one or two occasions as being remarkably
diligent at Morning Lecture; again, as cautioned for bad answering at
Morning and Greek Lectures; and finally, as put down into the next class
for neglect of his studies.
To this, he added other enormities. He was noted, as was Johnson
at Oxford, for much lounging about the college gate’; and for
his skill on that solace to melancholy and laborum dulce lenimen,
the German flute, of which, as readily as his own “Man in Black,
he had apparently mastered the ‘Ambusheer. ' He became involved
in various scrapes, notably a college riot, including that ducking
of a bailiff afterwards referred to in the first version of The
Double Transformation, on which occasion he was publicly
admonished quod seditioni favisset et tumultuantibus opem
tulisset. Recovering a little from the stigma of this disgrace
by gaining a small (Smythe) exhibition, he was imprudent enough
to celebrate his success by a mixed entertainment, in what only
by courtesy could be called his ‘apartments. ' On these festivities,
the exasperated Wilder made irruption, knocking, down the
## p. 199 (#225) ############################################
9
a
Goldsmith B. A.
199
unfortunate host, who, after forthwith selling his books, ran away,
vaguely bound, as on subsequent occasions, for America. But a
reconciliation with his tutor was patched up by Oliver's brother
Henry; and he returned to his college to enjoy the half-peace
of the half-pardoned. His father was now dead; and he was
;
miserably poor. He managed, however, to take his B. A. degree
on 27 February 1749, and quitted the university without
regret, leaving behind him a scratched signature on a window
pane (still preserved), an old lexicon scored with 'promises to
pay' and a reputation for supplementing his scanty means by the
ballads (unluckily not preserved) which he was accustomed to
write and afterwards sell for five shillings a head at the Reindeer
in Mountrath court, stealing out at nightfall-80 runs the
tradition—to snatch the fearful joy’ of hearing them sung. It
must have been the memory of these things which, years after,
at Sir William Chambers's, made him fling down his cards, and
rush hurriedly into the street to succour a poor ballad-woman,
who had apparently, like Rubini, les larmes dans la voix.
What was to happen next? For a Goldsmith of the Goldsmiths,
there was no career but the church; and he was too young to be
ordained. Thereupon ensued an easy, irresponsible time, which
the new B. A. spent very much to his own satisfaction. He was
supposed to be qualifying for orders; but he had never any great
leaning that way. “To be obliged to wear a long wig, when he
liked a short one, or a black coat, when he generally dressed in
brown,' observes one of his characters in The Citizen of the World,
was 'a restraint upon his liberty. Hence, as his biographer Prior
'
sagaciously says, 'there is reason to believe that at this time he
followed no systematic plan of study. On the contrary, he passed
his time wandering, like Addison's Will Wimble, from one relative
to another, fishing and otter-hunting in the isleted river Inny,
playing the flute to his cousin Jane Contarine's harpsichord, or
presiding at the ‘free and easys' held periodically at George
Conway's inn at Ballymahon, where, for the benefit of posterity,
he doubtless made acquaintance with Jack Slang the horse-doctor,
Dick Muggins the exciseman and that other genteel and punctilious
humourist who never 'danced his bear' except to Arne’s ‘Water
writ:parted? or the minuet in Handel's Ariadne. But these 'violent
delights' could have only one sequel. When, in 1751, he presented
himself to Dr Synge, bishop of Elphin, for ordination, he was
rejected. Whether his college reputation had preceded him ;
whether, as on a later occasion, he was found' not qualified,' or
6
## p.
7
## p. 182 (#208) ############################################
182
Johnson and Boswell
>
3
towards Spain and is notable for its picture of the horrors of war
and for its reference to Junius. The best thing in The False
Alarm, his thoughts on the present discontents, is the satirical
picture of the progress of a petition. In Taxation no Tyranny,
his answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American
Congress,' he asks “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for
liberty among the drivers of negroes? '
The prejudice in A Journey to the Western Islands of
Scotland is of a different kind, and never displeasing. It is only
the natural prejudice of John Bull as a tourist. He makes many
acute observations which even the most perfervid Scot must have
recognised to be just; but his impartiality is occasionally impeded
by a want of knowledge which he himself was the first to admit.
He had been conducted round Scotland by Boswell from August
to November 1773, and the book—which was published in January
1775—is not so much a record of the ninety-four days of vigorous
exertion' as a series of thoughts on a different civilisation. It had
a different purpose from that of Pennant's Tour in Scotland (1771),
which Johnson praised highly. He had taken the opportunity of en-
quiring into the authenticity of the poems of Ossian, and convinced
himself that 'they never existed in any other form than that which
we have seen. This is the best known section of his book; but
the reader may find more interest in the remarks on the super-
stitions of the Highlands, on American emigration and on the
Scottish universities. In July and August 1774, he made a tour
in north Wales with his friends the Thrales, and kept a diary
which might have served as the groundwork of a companion volume
to his Scottish Journey; but he did not make any use of it, and it
remained in MS till 1816. The beauty of the Welsh scenery had
greatly impressed him, and this diary must not be neglected in
any estimate of his feeling for wild landscape. The fragmentary
records of his tour in France with the Thrales in 1775 were left to
be printed by Boswell. Johnson was content to pass the rest of
his days in leisure, working only as the mood prompted, when, on
Easter Eve 1777, a deputation of booksellers asked him to under-
take, at the age of sixty-seven, what was to prove his masterpiece.
The Lives of the Poets arose out of a business venture. The
London booksellers were anxious to drive out of the market an
Edinburgh reprint of the English poets and to protect their own
copyright; and, besides producing an edition superior in accuracy
and elegance, they determined to add biographical prefaces by some
writer of authority. The scheme took some time to mature, and
## p. 183 (#209) ############################################
The Lives of the Poets 183
Percival Stockdale had hopes of the editorship. But Johnson was
given the first offer and at once accepted. Writing to Boswell, on
3 May 1777, he says he is engaged 'to write little Lives and little
Prefaces, to a little edition of the English Poets. The work
proved so congenial that he wrote at greater length than he had
intended; and, when the edition was completed, the prefaces were
issued without the texts under the title The Lives of the Poets
(1781). Their independent publication, and the title by which they
are now known, were alike afterthoughts; in origin, The Lives
of the Poets is only editorial matter. It is even more important
to remember that this great body of critical opinion—perhaps
the greatest in the English language--was written on invitation
and in conformity with conditions controlled by others. When
he found the complete series labelled 'Johnson's Poets,' he was
moved to write on a scrap of paper which has happily been
preserved : 'It is great impudence to put Johnson's Poets on the
back of books which Johnson neither recommended nor revised. '
Of the fifty-two poets, five, at most, were included on his suggestion.
In the life of Watts, he says that the readers of the collection are
to impute to him whatever pleasure or weariness they may find in
the perusal of Blackmore, Watts, Pomfret and Yalden; but it
would also appear from the letter to Boswell cited above that he
' persuaded the booksellers to insert something of Thomson. ' There
is no evidence that he advised any omission. For only one of the
fifty-two lives was he indebted to another hand—the life of Young
by Sir Herbert Croft. He included his early life of Savage, with
insignificant changes, and worked up his article on Roscommon
in The Gentleman's Magazine for May 1748. The other lives he
now wrote specially for the booksellers, availing himself here and
there of what he had written already, such as the 'Dissertation on
Pope's Epitaphs' in The Universal Visiter (1756), and the character
of Collins in Fawkes and Woty's Poetical Calendar (1763).
The original plan had evidently been to include ‘all the English
poets of reputation from Chaucer to the present day. It is no
matter for regret that this scheme was curtailed. The poets of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, besides affording him
ample scope for expounding his views on poetry, possessed for
him the personal interest which was always a stimulus to his
criticism. But, even could be be shown to have recommended
Cowley as the starting point, it would be an error to infer that
this was the limit to his knowledge and appreciation. Such an
1 Memoirs (1809), vol. 11, pp. 193—7.
## p. 184 (#210) ############################################
184 Johnson and Boswell
In an
inference would neglect his preface to Shakespeare, his work on
the Elizabethans for the Dictionary and his statement in The
Idlerl that we consider the whole succession from Spenser to
Pope as superior to any names which the Continent can boast. '
Of the earlier writers, he had not the knowledge possessed by
Thomas Warton and other of his friends. But he wrote on Ascham,
and corresponded on the manuscripts of Sir Thomas More, and
devoted to him a considerable section of the introductory matter
of his Dictionary; and he was always alert to any investigation,
whether in modern English, or Old English, or northern antiquities.
His comprehensive knowledge of English literature may be de-
scribed as beginning with the reign of Henry VIII.
interview with George III, he was enjoined to add Spenser to The
Lives of the Poets; and he would readily have complied, could he
have obtained new material? .
In the earlier interview which Boswell has recorded, many years
before The Lives of the Poets was thought of, George III proposed
that Johnson should undertake the literary biography of his country.
It was a happy courtesy, for, though there had been good lives of
individual poets since Sprat’s Life of Cowley, the collections that
had yet appeared had shown that much remained to be accomplished,
and Johnson was specially fitted to write the lives of authors.
Even had he not said so, we should have suspected that the
biographical part of literature was what he loved most. The best
of these collections had been The Lives of the Poets of Great
Britain and Ireland (1753), nominally by ‘Mr Cibber' (Theophilus),
but really by Robert Shielss, The Royal and Noble Authors (1758),
of Horace Walpole, which is a 'catalogue,' and the literary articles
in the very unequal Biographia Britannica". It was left to
Johnson to impart a sustained excellence to this kind of writing,
and, by engaging in what had not yet occupied an author of his
authority, to raise it to a new level as an English literary form.
The most obvious features of The Lives of the Poets is the
equipoise of biography and criticism. Johnson states the facts
simply, but connects them with his impression of the writer, and,
6
1 No. 91.
? This interview appears to have been unknown to Boswell. The authority for it is
a sentence in the Memoirs of Hannah More (1834, vol. 1, p. 174), and an obvious allusion
in the conversation with John Nichols given towards the end of Boswell's Life.
3 The evidence on the authorship is given in Sir Walter Raleigh's Six Essays on
Johnson (1910), pp. 120–5, note.
* Johnson was asked to undertake the second edition of this work and regretted his
refusal. See Boswell, ed. Hill, G. B, vol. III, p. 174.
## p. 185 (#211) ############################################
The Lives of the Poets
185
when he passes to the examination of poems, he is still thinking of
their relation to the writer's personality. He finds the man behind
the work. The truth is that he was much more interested in the
man than in that part of him which is the author. Of 'mere poets,'
he thought little; and, though he championed the dignity of author-
ship, he claimed for it no exclusive privileges, nor held that the
poet was a man apart to be measured by standards inapplicable
to other men. If the enduring freshness of The Lives of the Poets
is due to any one quality more than to another, it is to Johnson's
inexhaustible interest in the varieties of human nature. As detailed
biographies, they have been superseded, though they remain our
only authority for many facts and anecdotes, and include much
that had been inaccessible. He made researches; but they were
limited to his immediate needs. It is often easy to trace the
sources of his information. He criticised Congreve's plays with-
out having read them for many years, and he refused for a time
to hear Lord Marchmont's recollections of Pope. Though, in
general, he welcomed new details, his aim was to know enough to
describe the man and to bring out his individuality in the estimate
of his work.
The common result of this method in criticism is that the
critic is at his best when he is in sympathy with the writer.
Johnson meant to be scrupulously judicial; but he showed per-
sonal feelings. He disliked the acrimonious politics of Milton, the
querulous sensitiveness of Swift and the timid foppery of Gray.
This personal antipathy underlies his criticisms, though it is
qualified, at times, even generously. Had Gray written often as
in the Elegy, he says "it had been vain to blame and useless to
praise him’; and Paradise Lost “is not the greatest of heroic
poems only because it is not the first. ' Of Dryden and Pope he
wrote in friendship, and there exists no finer criticism of them.
But no critic has been severer on Dryden's negligences, or spoken
more ruthlessly of the Essay on Man.
The passage on Lycidas is generally regarded as an error of
judgment which marks Johnson's limitations as a critic. With
his usual courage, he stated a deliberate opinion. He gave
his reasons—the artificiality of the pastoral convention, the con-
fusion of the allegory with actual fact and sacred truth, and the
absence of the feeling of real sorrow. But there is the further
explanation that he was opposed to some recent tendencies in
English poetry. That he had more than Lycidas in his mind
is shown by the emphasis of his statement. The same ideas
## p. 186 (#212) ############################################
186
Johnson and Boswell
reappear in his criticism of Collins and Gray. He objected to the
habit of inverting the common order of words, and, on one occasion,
cited Thomas Warton's "evening gray’; he might also have cited
'mantle blue. ' It was Warton who occasioned his extempore
verses beginning-
Wherevo'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new;
and Warton imitated, as well as edited, the early poems of Milton.
Warton was one of many in whom he found faults which he traced
to Milton as their original. In criticising Lycidas, he had in mind
his own contemporaries. When the new tendencies had prevailed,
he was said to have judged by a rigorous code of criticism. This
code would have been difficult to reconcile with the preface to
his edition of Shakespeare; with the praise given by him to
Homer's heroes, that they are not described but develop them-
selves? ; with his statement that 'real criticism' shows the beauty
of thought as formed on the workings of the human heart? ; and
with his condemnation of the cant of those who judge by prin-
ciples rather than perception. '
His views on the matter of poetry are shown in his criticism
of Gray's Bard : ‘To select a singular event, and swell it to a
giant's bulk by fabulous appendages of spectres and predictions,
has little difficulty, for he that forsakes the probable may always
find the marvellous. ' The common growth of mother earth sufficed
for him as for Wordsworth. The distinction which he draws between
the Elegy and The Bard was that which ultimately divided
Wordsworth and Coleridge. There was enough for him in life as
he knew it. And there was a personal reason why, more than the
other great writers of his century, he should tend to limit nature
to human experience. The tumult in his mind was allowed no
direct expression in his writings; but it made him look upon the
world as the battle ground of thought, and passion, and will.
With the revision of The Lives of the Poets, Johnson's career
as an author closed. In the three years of failing health which
were left to him, he lived his accustomed life, honoured for the
authority of his opinion, generous in his help to younger writers,
and active in domestic benevolence. He revised Crabbe's Village,
and dictated much to Boswell. Death removed some who had
played a great part in his later life Thrale, whose house at
Streatham had been a second home, and two of the pensioners in
1 Boswell, ed. Hill, G. B. vol. v, p. 79.
! Ibid. vol. 11, p. 88.
3 Life of Pope.
## p. 187 (#213) ############################################
>
2
Johnson's Death. His Literary Career 187
his own house at Bolt-court, Levett and Mrs Williams. The tribute
to Levett, noble in its restrained emotion, is the most tender of
his poems. The sadness of loss was embittered by Mrs Thrale's
marriage to Piozzi and the irreparable break in the long and
happy friendship. He had so far recovered from a paralytic seizure
as to be able, at the close of 1783, to found the Essex-Head club.
By its ease of access, the old man sought to supply the need of
new company. He dined at The Club, for the last time, in June
1784. Next month, he set out for his native city, and returned
by Birmingham and Oxford, the cities of his youth. His health had
not found any relief, and, when he reached London in November,
was rapidly declining. He died 13 December, and, on the 20th, was
buried in Westminster abbey. Shortly before his death, he had
destroyed his papers.
His long career had been uniform in its aim and methods, and
the distinctions between his earlier and later writings are those
which come from experience and confidence. The author of the
preface to A Voyage to Abyssinia is unmistakably the author
of The Rambler and The Lives of the Poets, with the same tastes
and habits of thought, but younger, with a shorter reach and less
precision in his skill. There had been no discipleship, and no
time of searching where his strength lay; and no new influences
had modified his purpose. The changes to be found in his work
of forty-five years are those of a natural and undisturbed de-
velopment, so steady that its stages cannot be minutely marked
by us, and were probably imperceptible to himself. As he
grew
older, he related all art more and more to life. Though careful
to give his thoughts their best expression, and severe on impro-
prieties in others, he became impatient of mere proficiency in
technique; and, though a scholar, he recognised the insufficiency
of scholarship and the barrenness of academic pursuits. He had
the purposes of life' ever and increasingly before him, and his
criticisms of the English poets are the richest of his works in
worldly wisdom.
At the same time, his style became more easy. The Latin
element is at its greatest in The Rambler. He was then engaged
on his Dictionary. But he always tended to use long words
most when he wrote in haste; and his revision was towards sim-
plicity? He used them in conversation, where alone he allowed
himself the liberty of a daring coinage. They were in no sense an
1 See, in addition to the alterations in The Rambler, the corrections in The Lives of
the Poets as given in Boswell's lists.
## p. 188 (#214) ############################################
188 Johnson and Boswell
6
embroidery, but part of the very texture of his thought. 'Difference
of thoughts,' he said, 'will produce difference of language. He that
thinks with more extent than another will want words of larger
meaning; he that thinks with subtlety will seek for terms of more
nice discrimination? . ' As we read him and accustom our minds to
move with his, we cease to notice the diction. The strength of his
thought carries the weight of his words. His meaning is never
mistaken, though it may not be fully grasped at a glance; for he
puts much in small compass, and the precision of his language
requires careful reading for its just appreciation. 'Familiar but
not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious'; 'vanity produced
a grotto where necessity enforced a passage'-could the thought
be put more pointedly, or adequately, or shortly? When Latin
diction cannot be changed without loss, or without affecting
the tenor of the thought, it has made good its right. His humour
and irony found an aid in the dignified phraseology. But he also
used simple words. Wit is that which he that never found it
wonders how he missed'; 'what he does best he soon ceases to
do'; 'a rage for saying something when there is nothing to be
said'—these, also, are typical of his style. The letter to Chester-
field reaches its climax in the homeliest of English: 'till I am
known, and do not want it. '
His parodists have been peculiarly unsuccessful. We lose their
meaning in a jumble of pedantries ; and we do not lose Johnson's.
They inflate their phraseology; but Johnson is not tumid. And
they forget that his balance is a balance of thought. His own
explanation still holds good: 'the imitators of my style have not
hit it. Miss Aikin has done it the best ; for she has imitated the
sentiment as well as the diction. This was said in 1777. But
better than Miss Aikin's essay ‘On Romances in the style of The
Rambler, and the best of all the parodies, is A Criticism on the
Elegy written in a Country Church-yard (1783), composed by
John Young, the versatile professor of Greek at Glasgow, and
designed as a continuation of The Life of Gray. The long list
of his serious imitators begins with Hawkesworth and extends to
Jeffrey', who started by training himself in the school of the
periodical essayists. Others, who did not take him as a model,
profited by the example of a style in which nothing is negligent
and nothing superfluous. He was the dominating influence in
1 Idler, no. 70.
? Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose, by J. Aikin and A. L. Aikin (Mrs Barbauld), 1773.
3 See Cockburn, Life of Jeffrey, vol. 1, pp. 31 etc.
## p. 189 (#215) ############################################
Earlier Biographical Accounts of Johnson 189
English prose throughout the second half of the eighteenth
century. The lesson of discipline required to be taught, and it
was learned from him by many whose best work shows no traces
of his manner.
His death, says Murphy, ‘kept the public mind in agitation
beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited
so much attention. ' Collections of stories about him had begun
to appear in his lifetime, and now his friends competed in serious
biography. When Mrs Piozzi wrote her account, she had heard of
nine others already written or in preparation. Her Anecdotes of
the late Samuel Johnson (1786) has a place by itself. It preserves
much that would have been lost; but its importance lies chiefly in
its picture of Johnson's character, and in its illustration of the quali-
ties by which he was attracted. She writes with amiable pride in
the ties that bound him to the hospitality of Streatham, and with
an honest effort to rise above their quarrel. If her detractors can
find evidence of artfulness, no one can deny the clearness of her
vision; and, if, at times, her little vanities prevented her from seeing
the true bearing of Johnson's remarks, she must, at least, be admitted
to have been happy in the selection of what she has recorded.
There is no work of the same size as her Anecdotes that gives a
better portrait of Johnson. In strong contrast is the Life (1787)
by Sir John Hawkins. It is the solid book of an 'unclubbable'
magistrate and antiquary, who has much knowledge and little
intuition. He had known Johnson for over forty years and, on
many points, is our chief authority. Much of the value of his
book lies in the lengthy digressions on contemporary literature.
His lack of sympathy made him unsuited for biography; but
we are under a debt to him for the facts which he threw to-
gether.
The merits of Mrs Piozzi and Hawkins were united and aug-
mented by Boswell. He had been collecting material since his
first interview in 1763.
He had told Johnson his purpose by 1772,
and he had spoken definitely of his Life in a letter of 1775. After
Johnson's death, he set to work in earnest and spared himself no
trouble.
a
You cannot imagine,' he wrote in 1789, what labour, what perplexity, what
vexation I have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials,
in supplying omissions, in searching for papers buried in different masses,
and all this besides the exertion of composing and polishing: many a time
have I thought of giving it up. '
## p. 190 (#216) ############################################
190
Johnson and Boswell
But he was confident in the result. It was to be not merely the
best biography of Johnson, but the best biography ever written.
'I am absolutely certain,' he said, 'that my mode of biography, which gives
not only a History of Johnson's visible progress through the world, and of his
publications, but a view of his mind in his letters and conversations, is the
most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work
that has ever yet appeared. '
When the book at last came out, in May 1791, the same confidence
was expressed in the opening paragraphs. There, he admits that
the idea of interspersing letters had been taken from Mason’s life of
Gray. He had made a careful study of the art of biography; and
the Anecdotes of Mrs Piozzi, which had shown the necessity of a
careful handling of intimate material, and the facts of Hawkins,
which had proved the inadequacy of simple narrative, had reassured
him that he was engaged on the real life of his friend.
Johnson owes much to Boswell; but it was Johnson who gave us
Boswell. His life is the story of failure turned to success by an
irresistible devotion. He had always been attracted by whatever
won the public attention, partly from scientific curiosity, as when he
visited Mrs Rudd, and partly with a view to his own advancement.
In the first of his letters, he says that Hume ‘is a very proper
person for a young man to cultivate an acquaintance with. ' He
comes to know Wilkes, but doubts if it would be proper to keep
a correspondence with a gentleman in his present capacity. ' The
chief pleasure that he foresaw in his continental tour was his
meeting with Voltaire and Rousseau. Then, he proceeded to
Corsica and became the friend and enthusiastic champion of Paoli.
Having received a communication on Corsican affairs from the
earl of Chatham, he asks: ‘Could your lordship find time to honour
me now and then with a letter? ' Again, he is found thinking of
a life of lord Kames and satisfying himself that he has eminence
enough to merit this. There was cause for the sturdy laird of
Auchinleck to complain, according to Sir Walter Scott's anecdote,
that his irresponsible son was always pinning himself to the tail of
somebody or other. But, of all his heroes, Johnson alone brought
out the best qualities in his volatile character, and steadied him to
the worthy use of his rare gifts. When Johnson is absent, his
writings possess no remarkable merit, though they have always the
interest of being the pellucid expression of his singular personality.
The Life is the devoted and flawless recognition of an influence
which he knew that his nature had required.
Born at Edinburgh in 1740, the son of a Scottish advocate who
## p. 191 (#217) ############################################
Boswell's Earlier Life
191
a
6
took his title as a judge from his ancient estate of Auchinleck in
Ayrshire, Boswell reluctantly adopted the family profession of law,
and, after studying at Edinburgh, Glasgow and Utrecht, was called
to the Scottish bar in 1766. His heart was never in a legal career,
and, to the last, he had a fond belief in sudden and splendid suc-
cess in literature or politics. His earliest work appeared in The
Scots Magazine, but has not been identified. He wrote much verse
and published An Elegy on the death of an amiable young lady
(1761), An Ode to Tragedy, dedicated to himself (1761), and The
Cub at Newmarket, a humorous description of his experiences
as the guest of the Jockey club (1762). Several of his earliest
pieces are printed in A Collection of Original Poems, by the
Rev. Mr Blacklock and other Scotch Gentlemen (1760—2), the
second volume of which he edited'. He frequented the literary
society of Edinburgh, founded the jovial “Soaping Club' and
engaged in regular correspondence with his friends. The Letters
between the Hon. Andrew Erskine and James Boswell Esq. , in
which, also, there is much verse, he published in 1763. "They have
made ourselves laugh,' says the advertisement; 'we hope they will
have the same effect upon other people. They were hardly worth
publishing, though we should be sorry now not to have them. In
the description of a long series of daydreams, given with the
characteristic vanity which is always saved by its frankness, he
says:
I am thinking of the perfect knowledge which I shall acquire of men and
manners, of the intimacies which I shall have the honour to form with the
learned and ingenious in every science, and of the many amusing literary
anecdotes which I shall pick up.
This was published, from Flexney's shop in Holborn, in the very
month that he met Johnson in Davies's parlour. Shortly before
this, he had brought out, with Erskine and George Dempster, his
two associates in much of his early work, the rare Critical Stric-
tures on Mallet's Elvira. He returned to Edinburgh from his
continental travels in 1766, and, being admitted to the bar in the
midst of the excitement about the Douglas cause, found in it
material for Dorando (June 1767), which recounts the points at
issue under a Spanish disguise, and appeared immediately before
the thirteen Scottish judges, by a majority of one, arrived at a
decision contrary to his wishes. The little story went into three
1 The manuscripts of many of Boswell's poems written between 1760 and 1768, several
of them unprinted, are in the Bodleian library--MS Douce 193. The collection includes
a 'Plan of a Volume of Poems to be published for me by Becket and Dehorde. '
## p. 192 (#218) ############################################
192 Johnson and Boswell
editions within a fortnight, but it now disappoints the hopes
excited by its rarity. As the case was sent up to the House of
Lords, where the decision was ultimately reversed, Boswell con-
tinued to write about it and brought out the more serious Essence
of the Douglas Cause (November 1767). He took an energetic
part in the riotous controversy concerning the Edinburgh stage
and supplied the prologue for the opening of the first licensed
theatre in Scotland! At the same time, he was engaged on his
Corsican experiences. An Account of Corsica had been read by
Lord Hailes in manuscript in June 1767, and was issued in March
1768. It is Boswell's first considerable book, and, indeed, his only
book, apart from those concerned with Johnson, that had a chance
of being remembered on its merits. It won what he calls 'amazing
celebrity'; he could boast that he was 'really the great man now. '
His head was full of Corsica and was not to be emptied of it, even
on Johnson's advice. He made a collection of twenty letters by
himself and others, and published them under the title British
Essays in favour of the Brave Corsicans (January 1769); and,
in the following September, he appeared at the Shakespeare
festival at Stratford in the dress of an armed Corsican chief and
recited a poem that 'preserved the true Corsican character. ' A
description of the proceedings, an account of himself, and the poem
were immediately contributed by him to The London Magazine.
Two months later, he married, and then tried to settle to his
legal practice. From this time, the influence of Johnson, already
evident in An Account of Corsica, grew steadily stronger. He
was not satisfied with Edinburgh after the splendour of London.
'The unpleasing tone, the rude familiarity, the barren conver-
sation,' he complains, `really hurt my feelings. But he had
to content himself with lengthy visits to London in vacation,
which were the more indispensable when Johnson had procured
his election to The Club, and he had become a proprietor of
The London Magazine. He contributed to it, monthly, a series
of seventy periodical essays called The Hypochondriack (1777–
83), for which he found much material in himself. There is also
much in them that was inspired by the dominating friendship.
They take The Rambler as their model, and are the most John-
sonian of his writings. After the death of his father and his own
1 The prologue was printed in The Scots Magazine for November 1767; see, also, The
European Magazine for May 1791 and Dibdin, J. C. , Annals of the Edinburgh Stage
(1888), pp. 143—8, and 493. The Songs in the Justiciary Opera, privately printed for
Alexander Boswell in 1816, belong to this time.
## p. 193 (#219) ############################################
His Later Life
193
succession to Auchinleck, in 1782, he turned to politics, and carried
out his ambition of becoming a member of the English bar, but to
no purpose. He stood for parliament, and published two letters
'to the people of Scotland'; one, On the Present State of the
Nation (1783), and the other, On the Alarming Attempt to
infringe the Articles of the Union (1785). All he obtained was the
recordership of Carlisle, which he soon resigned. In his last years,
which were saddened by the loss of his wife and troubled with
financial difficulties, he is still found hoping that practice may
come at any time and expecting “a capital prize. ' He confesses
that he no longer lives with a view to have surprising incidents,
though he is still desirous that his life 'should tell. ' But he begins
to waken from the long delusion and, in a melancholy moment,
admits: 'I certainly am constitutionally unfit for any employment
He was then on the point of achievement. His life was to tell
better than he knew, and in another way than he had hoped. His
friendship for Johnson was helping him in these years to do what
he was unable to do for himself. Without Johnson, he relapses to
the level of his early verse in No Abolition of Slavery; or the
Universal Empire of Love (April 1791)? . And, when the effort
of producing the great work is over, there remains only the
record of steady decline, varied by new schemes of matrimony,
and cheered by large sales and the preparation of new editions.
He died in London, 19 May 1795. From 1758 to within a few weeks
of his death, he had corresponded regularly with William Johnson
Temple, a fellow student in the Greek class at Edinburgh who
became vicar of St Gluvias in Cornwall; and these letters, which
had been sold by a hawker at Boulogne and were rescued to be
published in 1857, give us his real autobiography? They tell us
much more than the many descriptions of himself, from his Ode
to Tragedy to the ‘Memoirs’ in the European Magazine of 1791 3.
1 A copy of this rare piece is now in the Bodleian library. It was for long doubt.
ful if it had been published, but a review with copious extracts had been given in The
Gentleman's Magazine for April 1791.
· Boswell thought of an autobiography. “My journal,' he says, “will afford materials
for a very curious narrative' (letter to Temple, 22 May 1789). The first record of a
journal is in his letter to Temple of 16 December 1758. The journal was destroyed;
but a portfolio of papers, each inscribed • Boswelliana,' escaped. They are now in the
possession of the marquess of Crewe, and were edited by Charles Rogers for the
Grampian club in 1874. Boswell thought also of editions of Johnson's poems,
Walton's Lives, and the autobiography of Sir Robert Sibbald; a work maintaining the
merit of Addison's poetry; histories of Sweden, James IV, and the '45; a life of
Thomas Ruddiman; and an account of the Isle of Man. These, and others, are men.
tioned in the Life of Johnson ; and yet other projects are mentioned elsewhere.
3 If he did not write these · Memoirs,' he certainly supplied their material.
13
a
6
E. L. X.
CH. VIII.
## p. 194 (#220) ############################################
194
Johnson and Boswell
6
If they show why his descendants decided on a holocaust of his
papers, they also explain the attraction which he exerted on those
who took the trouble to try to understand him.
But, if Boswell without Johnson would have been forgotten, it
was his own talent that gave the Life its surpassing excellence.
Whenever he writes of Johnson, he succeeds in giving the impres-
sion that he saw things as they were, and not through the spectacles
of his own personality. He never tried to conceal the part that
he played; and yet, despite his vanities, and they were many, he
knew how to make his readers think that they are looking at the
facts for themselves. The very freedom from self-consciousness
which was no help to his career was a great part of the secret of
his skill in description. It also provided him with material denied
to less sympathetic natures. “No man,' he said, “has been more
successful in making acquaintance easily than I have been. I even
bring people quickly on to a degree of cordiality. ' Johnson, too,
tells us that 'Mr Boswell's frankness and gaiety made every body
communicative. ' He never tired of arranging new situations, in
order to see what they would bring forth ; and his interpretations
of what he found are strong testimony to his insight into character
and to his judgment. Minute as his observations are, he never
offers a meaningless detail. It is easy to understand why Johnson
made him postpone the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which
was intended as a supplement to his cwn Journey. He had given
'notions rather than facts'; but Boswell had contrived to make
the facts give Johnson. The reproduction of his sayings and
experiences was too minute to be published during his lifetime,
and was more decently delayed till the year after his death? The
Life does not surpass the Journal in the sense of actuality; but
it is a greater achievement. He had met Johnson only on some
two bundred and seventy days, scattered over twenty-one years,
and his material had to be gathered from many sources.
He
selects and arranges; he places his facts in the light and per-
spective that will create the situation; and Johnson lives in his
pages. And he had the gift of the perfect style for his kind of
biography—a style of no marked individuality, but easy, clear and
flexible, which does its duty without attracting attention, and re-
quires to be examined to have its excellence recognised.
1 The Journal was revised by Malone while it was going through the press. Malone
also revised the Life, and, on Boswell's death, completed the preparation of the third
and final edition.
## p. 195 (#221) ############################################
CHAPTER IX
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
'No man,' wrote that authoritative but autocratic biographer,
John Forster, 'ever put so much of himself into his books as
Goldsmith, from the beginning to the very end of his career. ' To
many authors, this saying is only partly applicable ; but it is
entirely applicable to the author of The Vicar of Wakefield. His
life and his works are intimately connected. They accompany and
interpret each other in such a way as to make them practically
inseparable; and it is, therefore, appropriate, as well as convenient,
to treat them, so to speak, in the piece, rather than to attempt any
distribution of the subject into divisions and sub-divisions of
history and criticism.
Concerning Goldsmith's early years, there is much that is
obscure, or that, in any case, cannot be accepted without rigorous
investigation. He left his native island when he was three-and-
twenty, and never returned to it. Those who, like Glover and
Cooke, wrote accounts of him shortly after his death, were the
humbler associates of his later and more famous years, while the
professedly authentic 'Memoir' drawn up under the nominal
superintendence of bishop Percy, and the much quoted letter
of Annesley Strean in Mangin's Essay on Light Reading, did not
see the light until the first decade of the nineteenth century, when
Goldsmith had long been dead. It follows that much of the
information thus collected after date must have been imperfect
and contradictory, often extracted from persons more familiar
with his obscure beginnings than with his later eminence, and,
possibly, in answer to those unsatisfactory leading questions which
usually elicit not so much the truth as what the querist wishes to
establish.
Goldsmith was born on 10 November 1728; and it is usually
held that the place of his nativity was Pallas, or Pallasmore,
a village near Ballymahon, in the county of Longford, Ireland.
13--2
## p. 196 (#222) ############################################
196
Oliver Goldsmith
But it has also been plausibly contended, though actual proof
is not forthcoming, that his true birthplace was Smith-Hill house,
Elphin, Roscommon, the residence of his mother's father, Oliver
Jones, a clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school. His
own father, Charles Goldsmith, was, likewise, a clergyman of the
established church. When Oliver came into the world, Charles Gold-
smith was acting as assistant to an uncle whose name was Green,
the rector of Kilkenny West, and eking out a scanty subsistence
by farming a few fields. In 1730, Green died; and Charles Gold-
smith, succeeding to the vacant rectorate, transferred his residence
to the hamlet of Lissoy, in Westmeath, a little to the right of the
road from Ballymahon to Athlone. At this time, he had five
children, two sons and three daughters, Oliver being the fifth
child and second son. As already stated, the accounts of his
,
earliest years are contradictory. By some, he was regarded as
thick-witted and sullen ; to others, he seemed alert and intelligent.
That he was an adept at all boyish sports is admitted ; and it is
also recorded that he scribbled verses early. His first notable
instructor was the village schoolmaster, Thomas, or 'Paddy,'
Byrne, who had been a quartermaster in queen Anne's wars.
Byrne was also a local rimer, and had even composed an Irish
version of the Georgics. His endless stories of his continental
adventures, and his inexhaustible legends of ghosts and banshees,
held his pupils spellbound; and, by Goldsmith's family, were, later,
made responsible for much of that wandering and unsettled turn
which so much appeared in his future life. ' When Goldsmith was
seven or eight, he was attacked by confluent smallpox, which
scarred him terribly and probably added not a little to the
'exquisite sensibility of contempt' with which he seems to have
been born. With this, at all events, is connected one of the two
most-repeated anecdotes of his childhood. A ne'er-do-well relation
asked him heartlessly when he meant to grow handsome, to which,
after an awkward silence, he replied, 'I mean to get better, sir,
when you do. ' The other story also illustrates an unexpected gift
of repartee. At a party in his uncle's house, during the pause
between two country-dances, little Oliver capered out, and
executed an extempore hornpipe. His deeply-pitted face and
ungainly figure caused much amusement; and the fiddler, a lad
named Cumming, called out Æsop. ' To which the dancer promptly
answered:
Heralds, proclaim aloud! all saying,
See Esop dancing, and his Monkey playing,
6
## p. 197 (#223) ############################################
The Old House, a New Inn
197
at once transferring the laugh to his side. Whether improvised
or remembered, the retort certainly shows intellectual alacrity.
From Byrne, Goldsmith passed to the school at Elphin, of
which his grandfather had been master; thence to Athlone,
and, finally, to Edgeworthstown, where his preceptor, Patrick
Hughes, seems to have understood him better than his previous
instructors. Hughes penetrated his superficial obtuseness, re-
cognised his exceptionally sensitive temperament, and contrived,
at any rate, to think better of him than some of his playmates
who only succeeded in growing up blockheads. There were
traditions at Edgeworthstown of his studies-his fondness for
Ovid and Horace, his hatred of Cicero and his delight in Livy
and Tacitus ; of his prowess in boyish sports and the occasional
robbing of orchards. It is to the close of his Edgeworthstown
experiences that belongs one of the most popular of the incidents
which exemplify the connection between his life and his work.
Returning to school at the end of his last holiday, full of the
youthful pride begotten of a borrowed mount and a guinea in
his pocket, he lingered on his road, with the intention of putting
up, like a gentleman, at some roadside inn. Night fell, and he
found himself at Ardagh, where, with much importance, he
enquired of a passer-by for 'the best house' (hostelry) in the
neighbourhood. The person thus appealed to, a local wag named
Cornelius Kelly, formerly fencing master to the marquis of
Granby, amused by his boyish swagger, gravely directed him to
the residence of the squire of the place, Mr Featherston. Hither
Goldsmith straightway repaired, ordered supper, invited his host,
according to custom, to drink with him, and, being by that
humourist fooled to the top of his bent, retired to rest, after
giving particular directions as to the preparation of a hot cake
for his breakfast. Not until his departure next morning was it
disclosed that he had been entertained in a private house. The
story is too good to question; and accepted, as it has always been,
supplies a conclusive answer to those after-critics of She Stoops
to Conquer who regarded the central idea of that comedy—the
mistaking of a gentleman's residence for an inn-as unjustifiably
farfetched. Here, in Goldsmith's own life, was the proof of its
probability.
At this date, he must have been between fourteen and fifteen ;
and, whatever his ability, it seems to have been decided that he
should follow his elder brother Henry to Trinity college, Dublin,
though not with the same advantages. Henry Goldsmith, who
## p. 198 (#224) ############################################
198
Oliver Goldsmith
was five or six years his brother's senior, had gone as a pensioner
and obtained a scholarship. For Oliver, this was impracticable.
His father, a poor man, had, from family pride, further crippled
himself by undertaking to portion his second daughter, Catherine,
who had clandestinely married the son of a rich neighbour. In
these circumstances, nothing was open to Goldsmith but to obtain
his university education as a poor scholar, a semi-menial condition
which, to one already morbidly sensitive, could not fail to be
distasteful. For a long time, he fought doggedly against his fate;
but, at length, yielding to the persuasions of a friendly uncle
Contarine, who had himself gone through the same ordeal, he
was admitted to Trinity college as a sizar on 11 June 1744,
taking up his abode in one of the garrets of what was then
the eastern side of Parliament square.
The academic career thus inauspiciously begun was not
worshipful. From the outset, he was dispirited and disappointed,
and, consequently, without energy or enthusiasm. Moreover, he
was unfortunate in his tutor, a clergyman named Theaker Wilder,
who, though his bad qualities may have been exaggerated, was
certainly harsh and unsympathetic. His forte, too, was mathe-
matics, which Goldsmith, like Swift, like Gray, like Johnson,
detested as cordially as he detested the arid logic of 'Dutch
Burgersdyck' and Polish Smiglesius. According to Stubbs's
History of the University of Dublin,
Oliver Goldsmith is recorded on one or two occasions as being remarkably
diligent at Morning Lecture; again, as cautioned for bad answering at
Morning and Greek Lectures; and finally, as put down into the next class
for neglect of his studies.
To this, he added other enormities. He was noted, as was Johnson
at Oxford, for much lounging about the college gate’; and for
his skill on that solace to melancholy and laborum dulce lenimen,
the German flute, of which, as readily as his own “Man in Black,
he had apparently mastered the ‘Ambusheer. ' He became involved
in various scrapes, notably a college riot, including that ducking
of a bailiff afterwards referred to in the first version of The
Double Transformation, on which occasion he was publicly
admonished quod seditioni favisset et tumultuantibus opem
tulisset. Recovering a little from the stigma of this disgrace
by gaining a small (Smythe) exhibition, he was imprudent enough
to celebrate his success by a mixed entertainment, in what only
by courtesy could be called his ‘apartments. ' On these festivities,
the exasperated Wilder made irruption, knocking, down the
## p. 199 (#225) ############################################
9
a
Goldsmith B. A.
199
unfortunate host, who, after forthwith selling his books, ran away,
vaguely bound, as on subsequent occasions, for America. But a
reconciliation with his tutor was patched up by Oliver's brother
Henry; and he returned to his college to enjoy the half-peace
of the half-pardoned. His father was now dead; and he was
;
miserably poor. He managed, however, to take his B. A. degree
on 27 February 1749, and quitted the university without
regret, leaving behind him a scratched signature on a window
pane (still preserved), an old lexicon scored with 'promises to
pay' and a reputation for supplementing his scanty means by the
ballads (unluckily not preserved) which he was accustomed to
write and afterwards sell for five shillings a head at the Reindeer
in Mountrath court, stealing out at nightfall-80 runs the
tradition—to snatch the fearful joy’ of hearing them sung. It
must have been the memory of these things which, years after,
at Sir William Chambers's, made him fling down his cards, and
rush hurriedly into the street to succour a poor ballad-woman,
who had apparently, like Rubini, les larmes dans la voix.
What was to happen next? For a Goldsmith of the Goldsmiths,
there was no career but the church; and he was too young to be
ordained. Thereupon ensued an easy, irresponsible time, which
the new B. A. spent very much to his own satisfaction. He was
supposed to be qualifying for orders; but he had never any great
leaning that way. “To be obliged to wear a long wig, when he
liked a short one, or a black coat, when he generally dressed in
brown,' observes one of his characters in The Citizen of the World,
was 'a restraint upon his liberty. Hence, as his biographer Prior
'
sagaciously says, 'there is reason to believe that at this time he
followed no systematic plan of study. On the contrary, he passed
his time wandering, like Addison's Will Wimble, from one relative
to another, fishing and otter-hunting in the isleted river Inny,
playing the flute to his cousin Jane Contarine's harpsichord, or
presiding at the ‘free and easys' held periodically at George
Conway's inn at Ballymahon, where, for the benefit of posterity,
he doubtless made acquaintance with Jack Slang the horse-doctor,
Dick Muggins the exciseman and that other genteel and punctilious
humourist who never 'danced his bear' except to Arne’s ‘Water
writ:parted? or the minuet in Handel's Ariadne. But these 'violent
delights' could have only one sequel. When, in 1751, he presented
himself to Dr Synge, bishop of Elphin, for ordination, he was
rejected. Whether his college reputation had preceded him ;
whether, as on a later occasion, he was found' not qualified,' or
6
## p.
