THE

LIFE AND GENIUS

OF

SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

WHEN the works of a great writer, who has bequeathed to posterity a lasting legacy, are presented to the public, it is naturally expected that some account of his life should accompany them. The reader wishes to know as much as possible of the author. The circumstances that attended him, the features of his private character, his conversation, and the means by which he rose to eminence, become the favourite objects of inquiry. Curiosity is excited; and the admires of his works is eager to know his private opinions, his course of study, the particularities of his conduct, and, above all, whether he pursued the wisdom which he recommends, and practised the virtues which his writings inspire. A principle of gratitude is awakened in every generous mind. For the entertainment and instruction which genius and diligence have provided for the world, men of refined and sensible tempers are ready to pay their tribute of praise, and even to form a posthumous friendship with the author.

In reviewing the life of such a writer, there is, besides, a rule of justice to which the public have an undoubted claim. Fond admiration and partial friendship should not be suffered to represent his VOL. I.-B

virtues with exaggeration; nor should malignity be allowed, under a specious disguise, to magnify mere defects, the usual failings of human nature, into vice or gross deformity. The lights and shades of the character should be given; and, if this be done with a strict regard to truth, a just estimate of Dr. Johnson will afford a lesson, perhaps, as valuable as the moral doctrine that speaks with energy in every page of his works.

The present writer enjoyed the conversation and friendship of that excellent man more than thirty years. He thought it an honour to be so connected, and to this hour he reflects on his loss with regret; but regret, he knows, has secret bribes, by which the judgment may be influenced, and partial affection may be carried beyond the bounds of truth. In the present case, however, nothing needs to be disguised, and exaggerated praise is unnecessary. It is an observation of the younger Pliny, in his Epistle to his friend Tacitus, that history ought never to magnify matters of fact, because worthy actions require nothing but the truth. This rule the present biographer promises shall guide his pen throughout the following narrative.

It may be said, the death of Dr. Johnson kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited so much attention; and, when the press has teemed with anecdotes, apophthegms, essays, and publications of every kind, what occasion, it may be asked, for a new tract on the same threadbare subject? The plain truth shall be the answer. The prodigious variety of foreign matter introduced into former biographies of this great man, seemed to overload his memory, and, in the account of his own life, to leave him hardly visible. It was desirable to have a more concise, and, for that reason, perhaps, a more satisfactory account, such as may exhibit a just representation of the man, and keep him the

principal figure in the foreground of his own pic-
ture. To effect that object is the design of this
essay, which the writer undertakes with a trembling
hand. He has no discoveries, no secret anecdotes,
no occasional controversy, no sudden flashes of wit
and humour, no private conversation, and no new
facts, to embellish his work. Everything has been
gleaned. Dr. Johnson said of himself, “I am not
uncandid nor severe: I sometimes say more than I
mean, in jest, and people are apt to think me se-
rious."*
The exercise of that privilege which is
enjoyed by every man in society has not been al-
lowed to him. His fame has given importance even
to trifles; and the zeal of his friends has brought
everything to light. What should be related and
what should not, has been published without_dis-
tinction. Everything that fell from him has been
caught with eagerness by his admirers, who, as he
says in one of his letters, have acted with the dili-
gence of spies upon his conduct. To some of them
the following lines, in Mallet's poem on Verbal Criti- ́
cism, are not inapplicable:

"Such that grave bird in northern seas is found,
Whose name a Dutchman only knows to sound;
Where'er the king of fish moves on before,
This humble friend attends from shore to shore;
With eye still earnest, and with bill inclined,
He picks up what his patron left behind,
With those choice cates his palate to regale,
And is the careful Tibbald of a Whale."

After so many essays and volumes of Johnsoniana, what remains for the present writer? Perhaps what has not yet been attempted; a short, yet full -a faithful, yet temperate, history of Dr. Johnson.

SAMUEL JOHNSON was born at Litchfield, September 7, 1709, O.S. His father, Michael Johnson, was

* Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. ii., p. 465, 4to edit. †This appears in a note to Johnson's Diary, prefixed to the

a bookseller in that city; a man of large, athletic make, and violent passions; wrong-headed, positive, and at times afflicted with a degree of melancholy little short of madness. His mother was sister to Dr. Ford, a practising physician, and father of Cornelius Ford, generally known by the name of PARSON FORD, the same who is represented in Hogarth's Midnight Modern Conversation. In the life of Fenton, Johnson says that "his abilities, instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and the wise." Being chaplain to the Earl of Chesterfield, he wished to attend that nobleman on his embassy to the Hague. Colley Cibber has recorded this anecdote. "You should go," said the witty peer, “if to your many vices you would add one more. 29 66 Pray, my lord, what is that?" Hypocrisy, my dear doctor." Johnson had a younger brother named Nathaniel, who died at the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Michael Johnson, the father, was chosen in the year 1718 under bailiff of Litchfield; and in the year 1725 he served the office of the senior bailiff. He had a brother of the name of Andrew, who for some years kept the ring at Smithfield appropriated to wrestlers and boxers. Our author used to say that he was never thrown or conquered. Michael, the father, died December, 1731, at the age of seventysix; his mother at eighty-nine, of a gradual decay, in the year 1759. Of the family nothing more can be related worthy of notice. Johnson did not delight in talking of his relations. "There is little pleasure," he said to Mrs. Piozzi, "in relating the anecdotes of beggary."

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Johnson derived from his parents, or from an unwholesome nurse, the distemper called the king's first of his prayers. After the alteration of the style, he kept his birthday on the 18th of September, and it is accordingly marked September 7-18.

evil. The Jacobites at that time believed in the efficacy of the royal touch; and accordingly Mrs. Johnson presented her son, when two years old, before Queen Anne, who, for the first time, performed that office, and communicated to her young patient all the healing virtue in her power. He was afterward cut for that scrofulous humour, and the under part of his face was seamed and disfigured by the operation. It is supposed that this disease deprived him of the sight of his left eye, and also impaired his hearing. At eight years old he was placed under Mr. Hawkins, at the freeschool in Litchfield, where he was not remarkable for diligence or regular application. Whatever he read, his tenacious memory made his own. In the fields with his schoolfellows, he talked more to himself than with his companions. In 1725, when he was about sixteen years old, he went on a visit to his cousin Cornelius Ford, who detained him for some months, and in the mean time assisted him in the classics. The general direction for his studies which he then received, he related to Mrs. Piozzi. "Obtain," says Ford, “some general principles of every science; he who can talk only on one subject, or act only in one department, is seldom wanted, and perhaps never wished for; while the man of general knowledge can often benefit and always please." This advice Johnson seems to have pursued with a good inclination. His reading was always desultory, seldom resting on any particular author, but rambling from one book to another, and, by hasty snatches, hoarding up a variety of knowledge. It may be proper in this place to mention another general rule laid down by Ford for Johnson's future conduct: "You will make your way the more easily in the world, as you are contented to dispute no man's claim to conversation excellence; they will, therefore, more willingly allow your pretensions as a writer." But," says Mrs. Piozzi, "the features of peculiarity which mark a character

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