troubled, and their full exercise suspended at times; but the mind itself was ever entire. As a proof of this, it is only necessary to consider, that when he was at the very worst, he composed that state of his own case, which showed an uncommon vigour, not only of fancy and taste, but of judgement. I am aware that he himself was too ready to call such a complaint by the name of madness; in conformity with which notion, he has traced its gradations, with exquisite nicety, in one of the chapters of his RASSELAS. But there is surely a clear distinction between a disorder which affects only the imagination and spirits, while the judgement is sound, and a disorder by which the judgement itself is impaired. This distinction was made to me by the late Professor Gaubius of Leyden, physician to the Prince of Orange, in a conversation which I had with him several years ago, and he expanded it thus: "If (said he) a man tell me that he is grievously disturbed, for that he imagines he sees a ruffian coming against him with a drawn sword, though at the same time he is conscious it is a delusion, I pronounce him to have a disordered imagination; but if a man tell me that he sees this, and in consternation calls to me to look at it, I pronounce him to be mad."

Amidst the oppression and distraction of a disease which very few have felt in its full extent, but many 3 have experienced in a lighter degree, Johnson, in his writings, and in his conversation, never failed to display all the varieties of intellectual excellence. In his march through this world to a better, his mind still appeared grand and brilliant, and impressed all around him with the truth of Virgil's noble sentiment

“Igneus est ollis vigor et cælestis origo.”

The history of his mind as to religion is an important article. I have mentioned the early impressions made upon his tender imagination by his mother, who continued her pious cares with assiduity, but, in his opinion, not with judgement. "Sunday (said he) was a heavy day to me when I was a boy. My mother confined me on that day, and made me read The Whole Duty of Man,' from a great part of which I could derive no instruction. When, for instance, I had read the chapter on theft, which from my infancy I had been taught was wrong, I was no more convinced that theft was wrong than before; so there was no accession of knowledge. A boy should be introduced to such books, by having his attention directed to the arrangement, to the style, and other excellencies of composition; that the mind being thus engaged by an amusing variety of objects may not grow weary."

It is a common effect of low spirits or melancholy, to make those who are afflicted with it imagine that they are actually suffering those evils which happen to be most He communicated to me the following strongly presented to their minds. Some particulars upon the subject of his religious have fancied themselves to be deprived of progress. "I fell into an inattention to rethe use of their limbs, some to labour under ligion, or an indifference about it, in my acute diseases, others to be in extreme pov-ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in erty; when, in truth, there was not the least reality in any of the suppositions; so that when the vapours were dispelled, they were convinced of the delusion. To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason, the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal apprehension; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgement. That his own diseased imagination should have so far deceived him is strange; but it is stranger still that some of his friends should have given credit to his groundless opinion, when they had such undoubted proofs that it was totally fallacious; though it is by no means surprising that those who wish to depreciate him should, since his death, have laid hold of this circumstance, and insisted upon it with very unfair aggravation 2.

which we had a seat, wanted reparation, so I was to go and find a seat in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I used to go and read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till my fourteenth year; and still I find a great reason for concealing that passage of Mr. Hector's paper which is restored in p. 18, but Johnson himDr. Warton (which will be found under 24 Dec. self was not so scrupulous. He says, in a letter to 1754), "Poor dear Collins! I have been often near his state, and therefore have it in great commiseration." It is wonderful, that Boswell does not see the inconsistency of blaming others for repeating what Johnson himself frequently avowed, and what Boswell himself first told the world. See ante, p. 10.—ED.]

3

[Mr. Boswell himself, as will be seen by his own complaints, and as was well known to his friends, was himself occasionally afflicted with this morbid depression of spirits, and was, at intervals, equally liable to paroxysms of what may be called morbid vivacity. He wrote, as Mr. D'Israeli observes, a Series of Essays in the Lon[Ch. 53. on the Dangerous Prevalence of Im-don Magazine, under the title of the " "Hypoagination.-ED.] chondriac," commencing in 1777, and carried on

[This, it is to be presumed, was Boswell's till 1782.-Ed.]

Hawk.

p. 14..

The particular course of his reading while at Oxford, and during the time of vacation which he passed at home, cannot be traced. [He had but little relish for mathematical learning, and was content with such a degree of knowledge in physicks, as he could not but acquire in the ordinary exercises of the place: his fortunes and circumstances had determined him to no particular course of study, and were such as seemed to exclude him from every one of the learned professions.] Enough has been said of his irregular mode of study. He told me, that from his earliest years he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end; that he read Shakspeare at a period so early, that the speech of the Ghost in Hamlet terrified

reluctance to go to church. I then became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up 'Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,' expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry 1." From this time forward religion was the predominant object of his thoughts; though, with the just sentiments of a conscientious Christian, he lamented that his practice of its duties fell far short of what it ought to be. This instance of a mind such as that of Johnson being first disposed, by an unex-him when he was alone; that Horace's Odes pected incident, to think with anxiety of the momentous concerns of eternity, and of "what he should do to be saved," may for ever be produced in opposition to the superficial and sometimes profane contempt that has been thrown upon those occasional impressions which it is certain many Christians have experienced; though it must be acknowledged that weak minds, from an erroneous supposition, that no man is in a state of grace who has not felt a particular conversion, have, in some cases, brought a degree of ridicule upon them; a ridicule, of which it is inconsiderate or unfair to make a general application.

were the compositions in which he took most delight 3, and it was long before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read solidly at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysicks, but he had not read much, even in that way. I always thought that he did himself injustice in his account of what he had read, and that he must have been speaking with reference to the vast portion of study which is possible, and to which a few scholars in the whole history of literature have attained; for when How seriously Johnson was impressed I once asked him whether a person, whose with a sense of religion, even in the vigour name I have now forgotten, studied hard, of his youth, appears from the follow- he answered, "No, sir. I do not believe ing passage in his minutes kept by way of he studied hard. I never knew a man who dairy: studied hard. I conclude, indeed, from the "Sept. 7, 17362. I have this day enter-effects, that some men have studied hard, as ed upon my 28th year. Mayest thou, O God, enable me, for JESUSCHRIST's sake, to spend this in such a manner, that I may receive comfort from it at the hour of death, and in the day of judgement! Amen."

1 [Mr. Boswell here adds a note, complaining that Mrs. Piozzi had, in her Anecdotes, misrepresented this matter: the misrepresentation, after all, is not great, and the editor therefore omits a long controversial note.-ED.]

Bentley and Clarke." Trying him upon that criterion upon which he formed his judgement of others, we may be absolutely certain, both from his writings and his conversation, that his reading was very extensive. Dr. Adam Smith,4 than whom few were

3 [Though some of his odes are easy, and in what he no doubt thought the Horatian style, we shall see that to Miss Carter he confessed a fondness for Martial, and his epigrams certainly were influenced by that partiality. Dr. Hall has a small volume of Hendecasyllabic poetry, entitled "Poetæ Rusticantis Literatum Otium sive Carmina Andrese Francisci Landesii. Lond. 1713;" which belonged to Johnson, and some peculiarities of the style of these verses may be traced in his college compositions.-ED.]

2 [This Boswell has borrowed, without acknowledgement, from Sir J. Hawkins (p. 163). But it is to be observed, that after a prayer on his birthday in 1738, Johnson (on transcribing it in 1768) adds, "This is the first salemn prayer of which I have a copy; whether I composed any before this, I question." Pr. and Med. p. 3. He had either forgotten the prayer of 1736, or 4 [Boswell might have selected, if not a betconsidered it only an occasional ejaculation, and ter judge, at least better authority, for Adam not a solemn prayer. But serious and pious medi- Smith had comparatively little intercourse with tations and resolutions had been early familiar to Johnson, and the sentence pronounced is one his mind. He writes, in 1764, that "from al- which could only be justified by an intimate litemost the earliest time that he could remem-rary acquaintance. But Boswell's nationality ber, he had been forming schemes for a better life." Pr. and Med. p. 57.-ED.]

(though he fancied he had quite subdued it) inclined him to quote the eminent Scottish professor.

better judges on this subject, once observed to me, that" Johnson knew more books than any man alive." He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end. He had, from the irritability of his constitution, at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote. A certain apprehension arising from novelty, made him write his first exercise at college twice over; but he never took that trouble with any other composition: and we shall see that his most excellent works were struck off at a heat, with rapid exertion 1.

Yet he appears, from his early notes or memorandums in my possession, to have at various times attempted, or at least planned, a methodical course of study, according to computation, of which he was all his life fond, as it fixed his attention steadily upon something without, and prevented his mind from preying upon itself. Thus I find in his hand-writing the number of lines in each of two of Euripides's Tragedies, of the Georgicks of Virgil, of the first six books of the Æneid, of Horace's Art of Poetry, of three of the books of Ovid's Metamorphoses, of some parts of Theocritus, and of the tenth Satire of Juvenal; and a table, showing at the rate of various numbers a day (I suppose, verses to be read), what would be, in each case, the total amount in a week, month and year. [In his Prayers and Meditations there are frequent computations of this kind applied to the Scriptures.

"I resolve to study the Scriptures; I hope in the original languages. Six hundred and forty verses every Sunday will nearly comprise the Scriptures in a year.

"The plan which I formed for reading the Scriptures was to read six hundred verses in the Old Testament, and two hundred in the New, every week."]

heard him uttering this soliloquy in his strong emphatic voice: "Well, I have a mind to see what is done in other places of learning. I'll go and visit the Universities abroad. I'll go to France and Italy. I'll go to Padua. And I'll mind my business. For an Athenian blockhead is the worst of all blockheads 3."

Dr. Adams told me that Johnson, while he was at Pembroke College, "was caressed and loved by all about him, was a gay and frolicksome fellow, and passed there the happiest part of his life." But this is a striking proof of the fallacy of appearances, and how little any of us know of the real internal state even of those whom we see most frequently; for the truth is, that he was then depressed by poverty, and irritated by disease. When I mentioned to him this account as given me by Dr. Adams, he said "Ah, sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority."

The Bishop of Dromore [Percy] observes in a letter to me, "The pleasure he took in vexing the tutors and fellows has been often mentioned. But I have heard him say, what ought to be recorded to the honour of the present venerable master of that college, the Reverend William Adams, D. D. who was then very young, and one of the junior fellows; that the mild but judicious expostulations of this worthy man, whose virtue awed him, and whose learning he revered, made him really ashamed of himself, though I fear (said he) I was too proud to own

it.'

"I have heard from some of his contemporaries that he was generally seen lounging at the college gate, with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit, and keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the college discipline, which in his maturer

No man had a more ardent love of literature, or a higher respect for it, than Johnson. His apartment in Pembroke College was that upon the second floor over the gate-years he so much extolled." way. The enthusiast of learning will ever contemplate it with veneration. One day, while he was sitting in it quite alone, Dr. Panting 2, then master of the College, whom he called "a fine Jacobite fellow," overWe shall see many instances of a similar (not illaudable) disposition.-ED.]

[There are preserved in Pembroke College some of these themes, or exer

He told Dr. Burney, that he never wrote any of his works that were printed twice over. Dr. Burney's wonder at seeing several pages of his "Lives of the Poets" in manuscript, with scarce a blot or erasure, drew this observation from him. -MALONE.

2 [Dr. Matthew Panting, Master of Pembroke, is stated, in the Historical Register, to have died 26th Nov. 1729; but Dr. Hall informs me that his death was certainly in Feb. 1738.-ED.]

VOL. I.

ED.

3 I had this anecdote from Dr. Adams, and Dr. Johnson confirmed it. Bramston, in his "Man of Taste," has the same thought:

"Sure, of all blockheads, scholars are the worst."— BOSWELL.

Johnson's meaning, however, is, that a scholar who is a blockhead, must be the worst of all blockheads, because he is without excuse. But Bramston, in the assumed character of an ignorant coxcomb, maintains, that all scholars are blockheads, on account of their scholarship.-J. BosWELL.

4 [Dr. Adams was about two years older than Johnson, having been born in 1707. He became a Fellow of Pembroke in 1723, D. D. in 1756, and Master of the College in 1775.-HALL.]

cises, both in prose and verse: the following of the many eminent men who had been ing, though the two first lines are awkward, has more point and pleasantry than his epigrams usually have. It may be surmised that the college beer was at this time indif

Tursellinus, in his Life of St. Ignatius Loyola, that this intrepid founder of the order of Jesuits, when he arrived at Goa, after having made a severe pilgrimage through the eastern deserts, persisted in wearing his mis-liteness of manners, might have insensibly erable shattered shoes, and when new ones were offered him, rejected them as an unsuitable indulgence.