use a word of two syllables where it was possi- | that they had seriously thought of prosecuting ble to use a word of six, and who could not him. He had with difficulty been prevented make a waiting woman relate her adventures without balancing every noun with another noun, and every epithet with another epithet. Another party, not less zealous, cited with delight numerous passages in which weighty meaning was expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splendor. And both the censure and the praise were merited. from holding up the Lord Privy Seal by name as an example of the meaning of the word “renegade." A pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray his country; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the author of these definitions would himself be pensioned. But that was a time of wonders. George the Third had ascended the throne; and had, in the course of a few months, disgusted many of the old friends, and conciliated many of the old enemies of his house. The city was becoming mutinous. Oxford was becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. Somersets and Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. The head of the treasury was now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no objection to Johnson's Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron of men of letters; and Johnson was one of the most eminent and one of the most needy men of letters in Europe. A About the plan of Rasselas little was said by the critics; and yet the faults of the plan might seem to invite severe criticism. Johnson has frequently blamed Shakspeare for neglecting the proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shakspeare has not sinned in this way more grievously than Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinans of the eighteenth century; for the Europe which Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of gravitation which Newton discov-pension of three hundred a year was graciously ered, and which was not fully received even at offered, and with very little hesitation accepted. Cambridge till the eighteenth century. What This event produced a change in Johnson's a real company of Abyssians would have been whole way of life. For the first time since his may be learned from Bruce's Travels. But boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad urgJohnson, not content with turning filthy saving him to the daily toil. He was at liberty, ages, ignorant of their letters, and gorged with raw steaks cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly accomplished as Mrs. Lennox or Mrs. Sheridan, transferred the whole domestic system of England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of polygamy, a land where women are married without ever being seen, he introduced the flirt-peare; he had lived on those subscriptions durations and jealousies of our ball-rooms. In a land where there is boundless liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the indissoluble compact. "A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of each other. Such," says Rasselas, "is the common process of marriage." Such it may have been, and may still be, in London, but assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who was guilty of such improprieties had little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, and represented Julio Romano as flourishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi, By such exertions as have been described, Johnson supported himself till the year 1762. In that year a great change in his circumstances took place. He had from a child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. His Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited with little disguise both in his works and in his conversation. Even in his massy and elaborate Dictionary, he had, with a strange want of taste and judgment, inserted bitter and contumelious reflections on the Whig party. The excise, which was a favorite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as a hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise in language so coarse after thirty years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning, without fearing either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer. One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to perform. He had received large subscriptions for his promised edition of Shaks ing some years; and he could not without disgrace omit to perform his part of the contract. His friends repeatedly exhorted him to make an effort; and he repeatedly resolved to do so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolutions, month followed month, year followed year, and nothing was done. He prayed fervently against his idleness; he determined, as often as he received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze away and trifle away his time; but the spell under which he lay resisted prayer and sacrament. His private notes at this time are made up of self-reproaches. "My indolence," he wrote on Easter eve in 1764, "has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of strange oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year.' Easter 1765 came, and found him still in the same state. "My time," he wrote, "has been unprofitably spent, and seems as a dream that has left nothing behind. My memory grows confused, and I know not how the days pass over me.' Happily for his honor, the charm which held him captive was at length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He had been weak enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost which haunted a house in Cock Lane, and had actually gone himself, with some of his tractors were noisy and scurrilous. Those who most loved and honored him had little to say in praise of the manner in which he had discharged the duty of a commentator. He had, however, acquitted himself of a debt which had long lain heavy on his conscience, and he sank back into the repose from which the sting of satire had roused him. He long continued to live upon the fame which he had already won. He was friends, at one in the morning, to St. John's | ster, Marlow, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His deChurch, Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiving a communication from the perturbed spirit. But the spirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained obstinately silent; and it soon appeared that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing herself by making fools of so many philosophers. Churchill, who, confident in his powers, drunk with popularity, and burning with party spirit, was looking for some man of established fame and Tory politics to insult, cele-honored by the University of Oxford with a brated the Cock Lane Ghost in three cantons, nicknamed Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was which had been so long promised and so liberally paid for, and directly accused the great moralist of cheating. This terrible word proved effectual; and in October 1765 appeared, after a delay of nine years, the new edition of Shakspeare. cessors. This publication saved Johnson's character for honesty, but added nothing to the fame of his abilities and learning. The preface, though it contains some good passages, is not in his best manner. The most valuable notes are those in which he had an opportunity of showing how attentively he had during many years observed human life and human nature. The best specimen is the note on the character of Polonius. Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm Meister's admirable examination of Hamlet. But here praise must end. It would be difficult to name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great classic. The reader may turn over play after play without finding one happy conjectural emendation, or one ingenious and satisfactory explanation of a passage which had baffled preceding commentators. Johnson had, in his Prospectus, told the world that he was peculiarly fitted for the task which he had undertaken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been under the necessity of taking a wider view of the English language than any of his predeThat his knowledge of our literature was extensive is indisputable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very part of our literature with which it is especially desirable that an editor of Shakspeare should be conversant. It is dangerous to assert a negative. Yet little will be risked by the assertion, that in the two folio volumes of the English Dictionary there is not a single passage quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan age, except Shakspeare and Ben. Even from Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might easily, in a few months, have made himself well acquainted with every old play that was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this was a necessary preparation for the work which he had undertaken. He would doubtless have admitted that it would be the height of absurdity in a man who was not familiar with the works of Eschylus and Euripides to publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition of Shakspeare, without having ever in his life, as far as can be discovered, read a single scene of Massinger, Ford, Decker, Web Doctor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by the King with an interview, in which his Majesty most graciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer would not cease to write. In the interval, however, between 1765 and 1775 Johnson published only two or three political tracts, the longest of which he could have produced in forty-eight hours, if he had worked as he worked on the Life of Savage and on Rasselas. But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was active. The influence exercised by his conversation, directly upon those with whom he lived, and indirectly on the whole literary world, was altogether without a parallel. His colloquial talents were indeed of the highest order. He had strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge of literature and of life, and an infinite store of curious anecdotes. As respected style, he spoke far better than he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from his lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely balanced period of the Rambler. But in his talk there were no pompous triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in osity and ation. All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sontences with a power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis, of which the effect was rather increased than diminished by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit down to his desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in language so exact and so forcible that it might have been printed without the alteration of a word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on any body who would start a subject, on a fellow-passenger in a stage coach, or on the person who sate at the same table with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed themselves into a club, which gradually became a formidable power in the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition instant buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to be quesa day, or to condemn the sheets to the service tioned; and Boswell was eternally catechising of the trunk-maker and the pastry-cook. Nor him on all kinds of subjects, and sometimes proshall we think this strange when we consider pounded such questions as, "What would you what great and various talents and acquire-do, Sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a ments met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith baby?" Johnson was a water drinker and Boswas the representative of poetry and light liter-well was a winebibber, and indeed little better ature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political than a habitual sot. It was impossible that eloquence and political philosophy. There, there should be perfect harmony between two too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian, and such companions. Indeed, the great man was Jones, the greatest linguist, of the age. Gar- sometimes provoked into fits of passion, in which rick brought to the meeting his inexhaustible he said things which the small man, during a pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his few hours, seriously resented. Every quarrel, consummate knowledge of stage effect. Among however, was soon made up. During twenty the most constant attendants were two high-years the disciple continued to worship the born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound master: the master continued to scold the distogether by friendship, but of widely different ciple, to sneer at him, and to love him. The characters and habits: Bennet Langton, distin- two friends ordinarily resided at a great disguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the tance from each other. Boswell practiced in orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity the Parliament House of Edinburgh, and could of his life; and Topham Beauclerk, renowned pay only occasional visits to London. During for his amours, his knowledge of the gay world, those visits his chief business was to watch Johnhis fastidious taste, and his sarcastic wit. To son, to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the predominate over such a society was not easy. conversation to subjects about which Johnson Yet even over such a society Johnson predomin-was likely to say something remarkable, and to ated. Burke might indeed have disputed the supremacy to which others were under the necessity of submitting. But Burke, though not generally a very patient listener, was content to take the second part when Johnson was present; and the club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is to this day popularly designated as Johnson's club. fill quarto note-books with minutes of what Johnson had said. In this way were gathered the materials, out of which was afterward constructed the most interesting biographical work in the world. Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connection less important indeed to his fame, but much more important to his happiAmong the members of this celebrated body ness, than his connection with Boswell. Henry was one to whom it has owed the greater part Thrale, one of the most opulent brewers in the of its celebrity, yet who was regarded with little kingdom, a man of sound and cultivated underrespect by his brethren, and had not without standing, rigid principles, and liberal spirit, was difficulty obtained a seat among them. This married to one of those clever, kind-hearted, was James Boswell, a young Scotch lawyer, engaging, vain, pert, young women, who are heir to an honorable name and a fair estate. perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, right, but who, do or say what they may, are› pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all always agreeable. In 1765 the Thrales became who were acquainted with him. That he could acquainted with Johnson, and the acquaintance not reason, that he had no wit, no humor, no ripened fast into friendship. They were astoneloquence, is apparent from his writings. And ished and delighted by the brilliancy of his conyet his writings are read beyond the Mississippi, versation. They were flattered by finding that and under the Southern Cross, and are likely to a man so widely celebrated preferred their house be read as long as the English exists, either as a to any other in London. Even the peculiariliving or as a dead language. Nature had made ties which seemed to unfit him for civilized sohim a slave and an idolater. His mind resem-ciety, his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffbled those creepers which the botanists call ings, his mutterings, the strange way in which parasites, and which can subsist only by cling- he put on his clothes, ravenous eagerness. ing round the stems and imbibing the juices of with which he devoured his dinner, his fits of stronger plants. He must have fastened him- melancholy, his fits of anger, his frequent rudeself on somebody. He might have fastened ness, his occasional ferocity, increased the inhimself on Wilkes, and have become the fiercest terest which his new associates took in him. patriot in the Bill of Rights Society. He might For these things were the cruel marks left behave fastened himself on Whitfield, and have hind by a life which had been one long conflict become the loudest field preacher among the with disease and with adversity. In a vulgar Calvinistic Methodists. In a happy hour he hack writer, such oddities would have excited fastened himself on Johnson. The pair might only disgust. But in a man of genius, learnseem ill matched. For Johnson had early beening, and virtue, their effect was to add pity to prejudiced against Boswell's country. To a admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an man of Johnson's strong understanding and irri- apartment at the brewery in Southwark, and a table temper, the silly egotism and adulation of still more pleasant apartment at the villa of his Boswell must have been as teasing as the con- friends on Streatham Common. A large part VOL. XIV.-No. 82.-II . bore patiently from mendicants, who, but for his bounty, must have gone to the workhouse, insults more provoking than those for which he had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Desmoulins, Polly and Levett, continued to torment him and to live upon him. of every year he passed in those abodes, abodes | bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron, which must have seemed magnificent and luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in which he had generally been lodged. But his chief pleasures were derived from what the astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called "the endearing elegance of female friendship." Mrs. Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and, if she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses. No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise was wanting to his sick room. He requited her kindness by an affection pure as the affection of a father, yet delicately tinged with a gallantry, which, though awkward, must have been more flattering than the attentions of a crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, now obsolete, of Buck and Maccaroni. It should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during about sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales. He accompanied the family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to Brighton, once to Wales and once to Paris. But he had at the same time a house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was his library, a large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling to pieces and begrimed with dust. On The course of life which has been described was interrupted in Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an important event. He had early read an account of the Hebrides, and had been much interested by learning that there was so near him a land peopled by a race which was still as rude and simple as in the Middle Ages. A wish to become intimately acquainted with a state of society so utterly unlike all that he had ever seen frequently crossed his mind. But it is not probable that his curiosity would have overcome his habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke, the mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell importuned him to attempt the adventure, and offered to be his squire. At length, in August, 1773, Johnson crossed the Highland line, and plunged courageously into what was then considered, by most Englishmen, as a dreary and perilous wilderness. After wandering about two months through the Celtic region, sometimes in rude boats which did not protect him from the rain, and sometimes on small shaggy poneys which could hardly bear his weight, he returned to his old haunts with a mind full of new images and new theories. During the following year he employed himself in recording his adventures. About the beginning of 1775, his Journey to the Hebrides was published, and was, during some weeks, the chief subject of conversation in all circles in which any attention was paid to literature. The book is still read with pleasure. The narrative is entertaining; the speculations, whether sound or unsound, are always ingenious; and the style, though too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier and more graceful than that of his early writings. His prejudice against the Scotch had at length become little more than matter of jest; and whatever remained of the old feeling had been effectually removed by the kind and respectful hospitality with which he had been received in every part of Scotland. was, of course, not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory should praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to the hedgerows and parks of England should not be struck by the bareness of Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even in censure Johnson's Some-tone is not unfriendly. The most enlightened Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well pleased. But some foolish and ignorant Scotchmen were moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy, and assailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of their country with libels much more dishonorable to their country than any thing that he had ever said or written. They published paragraphs in the newspapers, a lower floor he sometimes, but very rarely, re- It articles in the magazines, sixpenny pamphlets, in writing himself down. The disputes between five-shilling books. One scribbler abused John-England and her American colonies had reached son for being blear-eyed; another for being a a point at which no amicable adjustment was pensioner; a third informed the world that one possible. Civil war was evidently impending; of the Doctor's uncles had been convicted of and the ministers seem to have thought that the felony in Scotland, and had found that there eloquence of Johnson might, with advantage, be was in that country one tree capable of support-employed to inflame the nation against the oping the weight of an Englishman. Macpher-position here, and against the rebels beyond the son, whose Fingal had been proved in the Journey to be an impudent forgery, threatened to take vengeance with a cane. The only effect of this threat was that Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery in the most contemptuous terms, and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel, which, if the impostor had not been too wise to encounter it, would assuredly have descended upon him, to borrow the sublime language of his own epic poem, "like a hammer on the red son of the furnace." Of other assailants Johnson took no notice whatever. He had early resolved never to be drawn into controversy; and he adhered to his resolution with a steadfastness which is the more extraordinary because he was, both intellectually and morally, of the stuff of which controversialists are made. In conversation he was a singularly eager, acute, and pertinacious disputant. When at a loss for good reasons, he had recourse to sophistry; and when heated by altercation, he made unsparing use of sarcasm and invective. But when he took his pen in his hand, his whole character seemed to be changed. A hundred bad writers misrepresented him and reviled him; but not one of the hundred could boast of having been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or even of a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNichols, and Hendersons did their best to annoy him, in the hope that he would give them importance by answering them. But the reader will in vain search his works for any allusion to Kenrick or Campbell, to MacNichol or Henderson. One Scotchman, bent on vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him to the combat in a detestable Latin hexameter. "Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum." But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had learned, both from his own observation and from literary history, in which he was deeply read, that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always maintained that fame was a shuttle-cock, which could be kept up only by being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apothegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down but by himself. Atlantic. He had already written two or three tracts in defense of the foreign and domestic policy of the government; and those tracts, though hardly worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon and Stockdale. But his Taxation No Tyranny was a pitiable failure. The very title was a silly phrase, which can have been recommended to his choice by nothing but a jingling alliteration which he ought to have despised. The arguments were such as boys use in debating societies. The pleasantry was as awkward as the gambols of a hippopotamus. Even Boswell was forced to own that, in this unfortunate piece, he could detect no trace of his master's powers. The general opinion was, that the strong faculties which had produced the Dictionary and the Rambler were beginning to feel the effect of time and of disease, and that the old man would best consult his credit by writing no more. But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not because his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote Rasselas in the evenings of a week, but because he had foolishly chosen, or suffered others to choose for him, a subject such as he would at no time have been competent to treat. He was in no sense a statesman. He never willingly read, or thought, or talked about affairs of state. He loved biography, literary history, the history of manners; but political history was positively distasteful to him. The question at issue between the colonies and the mother country was a question about which he had really nothing to say. He failed, therefore, as the greatest men must fail when they attempt to do that for which they are unfit; as Burke would have failed if Burke had tried to write comedies like those of Sheridan; as Reynolds would have failed if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes like those of Wilson. Happily, Johnson soon had an opportunity of proving most signally that his failure was not to be asscribed to intellectual decay. On Easter eve, 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting which consisted of forty of the first booksellers in London, called upon him. Though he had some scruples about doing business at that season, he received his visitors with much civility. They came to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, from Cowley downward, was in contemplation, and to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook the task, a task for which Unhappily, a few months after the appear- he was pre-eminently qualified. His knowledge ance of the Journey to the Hebrides, Johnson of the literary history of England since the Resdid what none of his envious assailants could toration was unrivaled. That knowledge he have done, and, to a certain extent, succeeded had derived partly from books, and partly from |