EDITORIAL NOTES

INTRODUCTORY

THE advertisements prefixed to the first six editions of the Life are printed at the beginning of this volume, and will give the reader a general idea of the early history of Boswell's text. Boswell did not live to see the third edition published, but he seems to have indicated where some part of the fresh matter should be inserted, and though new matter by Malone and others was added, it is probable that the third edition most faithfully represents the work as Boswell left it. On the other hand, some of Johnson's best letters, such, e.g., as those written concerning his mother during her last illness, were communicated to Malone after Boswell's death, and were first published in the fourth edition. If the third edition had been adopted for the present issue, these letters, which Boswell would certainly have published if he had had the opportunity, must either have been omitted, or published in the form of notes or addenda. Moreover, Malone, who had already assisted Boswell by revising the work before it was published, was a specially well qualified editor. Boswell's own testimony to the value of Malone's assistance is emphatic. Writing to his friend Temple (28th November, 1789), he says: "The revision of my Life of Johnson by so acute and knowing a critic as Mr. Malone is of the most essential consequence, especially as he is Johnsonianissimus." Under these circumstances, it has been thought best to adopt the text of the sixth edition, the last published under the editorship of Malone. In the preparation of that edition, great care was taken to render the text as free as possible from errors of the press. A few have nevertheless been discovered and corrected.

With regard to the authorship of the notes at the foot of the page, it is hoped that no difficulty will be felt. All the unsigned notes are by Boswell himself, except a few which, forming part of another writer's contribution to the text, are printed within quotation marks. Those notes for which Boswell is not responsible are printed within square brackets, and signed with the name of the author. For the sake of space, Malone's notes are signed "M.," instead of "Malone." The notes signed "J. Boswell" were written by James Boswell, the author's second son. The references in the sixth edition of the Life to Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides are to the third edition of that work, published in 1786. In the present edition it has been

thought convenient to add references to the date in the Journal. In the case of references to later portions of the Life, it has generally been necessary to substitute a reference to the date for a reference to the volume and page.

During the interval of seven years which elapsed between Johnson's death and the publication of Boswell's Life, many works of biographical interest relating to Johnson were published. Of these Boswell's own Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, published in 1785, is by far the most important. Croker refers to this Journal as "the most original, curious, and amusing portion of the whole biography." In the same year appeared Prayers and Meditations, composed by Samuel Johnson, LL.D, and published by George Strahan, A.M. In 1786 Mrs. Piozzi published Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D., during the last twenty years of his Life, and, in 1788, Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson. In 1787 Sir John Hawkins, one of Johnson's executors, published his Life of Samuel Johnson, three editions appearing within the year. Boswell has much to say about Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes and Hawkins's Life, and he also refers to some less important Memoirs and Anecdotes. The first edition of Boswell's own Life of Johnson was published in 1791, the sixth, which is here reprinted, in 1811.

After the death of Malone, in 1812, the succeeding editions of Boswell's Life were, with some comparatively unimportant exceptions, mere reprints of the sixth, until the famous edition by the Right Hon. John Wilson Croker, in five volumes, was published in 1831. The liberties which Croker took with Boswell's text are well known. Besides printing in their chronological places the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, and Johnson's Diary of a Journey into North Wales (first published in 1816), he incorporated with the text a quantity of extraneous matter derived from Mrs. Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins, and other sources. This course was severely censured by the critics, especially in a very characteristic way by Carlyle; and in a second Croker edition, published in ten volumes in 1835, a change was made, the materials "derived from other pens than those of Dr. Johnson and the original biographer" being either distributed in notes or printed as Johnsoniana in the ninth and tenth volumes. But even in this, and in a later edition published by Croker in one volume in 1848, the text is not fully restored. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and the Diary of a Journey into North Wales still occupy their places in the middle of the Life; extracts from the Thrale Correspondence and a number of letters from Johnson to various persons are inserted; a few expressions are here and there omitted; and the various legal arguments which Johnson wrote for Boswell are relegated from the text to appendices. In the 1835 edition, which was published under the direction of John Wright, Boswell's text was for the first time divided into chapters. Modern editors, while recognising and profiting by Croker's labours, have avoided these errors, and have preferred to present in the form of notes or appendices the very large quantity of material which now exists for supplementing Boswell's narrative.

The quantity of this material has been increased within more or less recent years by the publication of Madame D'Arblay's Diary and Letters (1842),

Dr. Thomas Campbell's Diary of a Visit to England in 1775 (1854), and Letters of James Boswell addressed to the Rev. W. J. Temple (1857).

Among the innumerable post-Crokerian editions of the Life should be mentioned the Rev. A. Napier's (five volumes, 1884), which contains Dr. Campbell's Diary, and the very elaborate edition published by the Clarendon Press (six volumes, 1887), under the editorship of Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill. To his edition of the Life Dr. Hill has added two volumes of Johnson's Letters (1892), and two volumes of Johnsonian Miscellanies (1897).

The following notes consist, to a large extent, of very brief biographical notices of persons mentioned in the Life, and of contemporary, or nearly contemporary, translations of the classical quotations. The index at the end of the third volume is reprinted from that of the sixth edition, with additional topographical references.

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vii. Dr. Clarke. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), author of A Discourse

concerning the Being and Attributes of God, etc., and many other philosophical and theological works is frequently referred to in the Life. vii. Beau Nash. Richard Nash (1674-1762), the Master of Ceremonies at Bath. Goldsmith published a Life of him in 1762.

xii. Sir Joshua Reynolds died on the 23rd February, 1792.

xiii. Quid Virtus, etc. Horace, Ep. i. 2, 17.

"To shew what pious wisdom's power can do,

The poet sets Ulysses in our view."-Francis.

The Rev. Philip Francis (1708-1773) published his translation of
Horace in 1742-6. For Johnson's favourable opinion of it, see under

May 16, 1778.

xiv. Embassy. Lord Macartney (1737-1806) was at this time ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary at Pekin.

xv. The method of distinguishing the notes described here and in the advertisement to the fourth edition was not followed in the sixth edition. See Introductory Note.

xv. The Rev. Thomas Fysche Palmer. The reference here is to the third edition. The mistake was corrected in subsequent editions.

xxi. note.

Boswell never published the edition of Johnson's poems here spoken of as "promised."

2. note. Sir John Hawkins died in 1789.

3. A lady. Mrs. Piozzi.

3. John Toland (1670-1722) published his Life of Milton in 1698, Pierre Desmaizeaux (d. 1745) his Vie de Boileau in 1712.

3. William Mason's Life and Letters of Gray were published in 1774.

4. Upon a former occasion, i.e. in the Tour to the Hebrides.

5. A superannuated lord and lady. The Earl and Countess of Jersey. Mason's Life of Whitehead, prefixed to an edition of his works, was published in 1788.

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5. Thuanus, i.e. Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617), whose History of his own time Johnson had some thought of translating. See post, 1784, Anecdotes by Mr. Nichols.

7. Secker. Thomas Secker (1693-1768), Archbishop of Canterbury. 10. note. Boswell appears never to have seen the papers saved by Johnson's servant, Francis Barber, and published in 1805 under the title of An account of the life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, from his birth to his eleventh year, written by himself. These annals are reprinted by Croker and Napier in their editions of the Life, and by Dr. Birkbeck Hill in his Johnsonian Miscellanies.

14. Thomas Carte (1686-1754), in a note to vol. i. of his History of England (4 vols., 1747-55) ascribed to the Pretender the power of curing by the touch. In consequence of this note the Corporation of London withdrew their subscription to the work.

14. Rome.

Boswell means that Johnson's mother should have taken him to the Pretender to be touched. The Pretender was at this time living in France, not at Rome.

16. Green. Dr. John Green (1706-79), Bishop of Lincoln, one of the writers of the Athenian Letters (4 vols., 1741-3).

16. Congreve. Charles Congreve, of whose latter days see Johnson's striking description, sub. 22 March, 1776. Croker.

17. Dr. Percy. Thomas Percy (1729-1811), editor of the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).

18. note 1. Johnson had an uncle, Cornelius Ford, as well as a cousin of the same name, known as "Parson Ford." The latter was the son of Dr. Joseph Ford, not of Nathaniel Ford. See Notes and Queries, 5th S. v. 13 and Napier's Boswell i. 9, n. 4.

26. The "Gentleman of Shropshire" was Mr. Andrew Corbet (see Hawkins's Life).

28. Mr. Pope. According to Hawkins, Pope said: "The writer of this poem will leave it a question for posterity, whether his or mine be the original."

29. While Sky's wild rocks, etc. For Johnson's verses to Mrs. Thrale, written in Skye, see Tour to the Hebrides, Sept. 6.

32. Igneus est, etc. Virgil, Aeneid vi. 730. Dryden translates this and the two following lines :

"Th' ethereal vigour is in all the same;

And ev'ry soul is filled with equal flame—
As much as earthly limbs, and gross allay
Of mortal members subject to decay

Blunt not the beams of heav'n and edge of day."

32. The Whole Duty of Man, published anonymously in 1658. The authorship is now attributed to Richard Allestree. See the article on Lady Pakington in the Dictionary of National Biography.

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32. William Law's (1686-1761) Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life

was published in 1728. 37. Mr. Croker, after an examination of the College books, came to the conclusion that " Johnson personally left college December 12, 1729, though his name remained on the books till October 8, 1731." In that case Johnson's residence at Pembroke must be reduced from "a little more than three years" to about thirteen months. Dr. Birkbeck Hill, in his Dr. Johnson: His Friends and Critics, discusses the question at length, and comes to the same conclusion as Mr. Croker. It will be observed that if Johnson left college in December, 1729, there are nearly two years of his life of which Boswell gives no account. 40. If Johnson left Oxford in 1729, the reason here given against his having been Anthony Blackwall's assistant has no force.

44.

Politian. Angelo Ambrogini (1454-1494), "a name eminent among the restorers of polite literature (Rambler, No. 127).

44. note 2. In this learned masquerade of Paulus Pelissonius Fontanerius we have some difficulty in detecting Madame de Sévigné's friend, Pelisson. . . . Huet, Bishop of Avranche, wrote Memoirs of his own time, in Latin, from which Boswell has extracted this scrap of pedantry. Croker.

51. Ut pueris, etc. Horace, Sat. i. 1, 25.

"As masters fondly soothe their boys to read

With cakes and sweetmeats."- Francis.

53. Turkish History. Richard Knolles's History of the Turks (1603), praised by Johnson in the Rambler, No. 122.

56. Ofellus. This should be Ofella. See Horace, Sat. ii. 2, 1-4. 67. John Oldham (1653-1683) published his Satires upon the Jesuits in 1681. 72. Mr. Derrick. Samuel Derrick (1724-1769) succeeded Beau Nash as master of the ceremonies at Bath.

72. Robert Dodsley (1703-1764), who wrote several plays, the most successful of which was Cleone (acted 1758), and founded the Annual Register (1758), is perhaps best known by his Select Collection of Old Plays (12 vols., 1744), and his Collection of Poems, by Several Hands (3 vols., 1748; 6 vols., 1758).

72. The collected works of Paul Whitehead (1710-1774) were published in 1777.

72. A riotous and profane club. The monks of Medmenham Abbey. 73. General Oglethorpe. James Edward Oglethorpe (1696-1785), who settled the colony of Georgia, and in reference to whom Pope wrote the couplet:

"One driven by strong benevolence of soul

Shall fly, like Oglethorpe, from pole to pole.'

He held a command in the 1745 Rebellion, but his conduct of it was the subject of a court-martial, and, though he was acquitted, he received