CHAPTER XXII. ETHICAL, POLITICAL, AND THEOLOGICAL WRITERS OF THE LATTER HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH SAMUEL JOHNSON. "A mass of genuine manhood."-Thomas Carlyle. CENTURY. "Johnson, to be sure, has a rough manner; but no man alive has a better heart. He has nothing of the bear but the skin.”— Oliver Goldsmith. "Rabelais and all other wits are nothing compared to him. You may be diverted by them; but Johnson gives you a forcible hug and squeezes laughter out of you, whether you will or no."-David Garrick. "He was distinguished by vigorous understanding and inflexible integrity. His imagination was not more lively than was necessary to illustrate his maxims; his attainments in science were inconsiderable, and in learning far from the first-class; they chiefly consisted in that sort of knowledge which a powerful mind collects from miscellaneous reading and various intercourse with mankind."-Sir James Mackintosh. "If it be asked, who first, in England, at this period, breasted the waves and stemmed the tide of infidelity,-who, enlisting wit and eloquence, together with argument and learning on the side of revealed religion, first turned the literary current in its favor, and mainly prepared the reaction which succeeded-that praise seems most justly to belong to Dr. Samuel Johnson."-Lord Mahon: History of England. "The club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are assembled those heads which live forever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke and the tall thin form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerc and the beaming smile of Garrick; Gibbon, tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling, we hear it puffing; and then comes the 'Why, sir!' and the 'What then, sir?' and the 'No, sir!' and the 'You don't see your way through the question, sir!'"-T. B. Macaulay. HILE the novelists and historians whose works we have been considering were busy with their pens, other writers of prose were making valuable contributions to letters in the department of ethics, politics, and theology. The central figure of the literary men of the period is Samuel Johnson (1709-1784). He was the son of a poor bookseller in Lichfield. From his childhood he had to struggle against disease, and melancholy, and an indolent disposition. In 1728 he was sent to Oxford. There he remained three years, until his dying father had become unable to help him. Leaving the University without his degree, he attempted to support himself by teaching; but he was unsuccessful, and turned his attention to literary work. He was already married to a lady old enough to be his mother. Without fortune and without friends he settled in London in 1737, beginning his thirty years' struggle with labor and want.* The profession he had chosen was then at its lowest ebb, and he was compelled to do its humblest work. He was a bookseller's hack, a mere literary drudge. Poverty attended him. Once, in a note to his employer, he subscribed himself, "Yours, impransus, S. Johnson." He wrote for various publications, and particularly for the Gentleman's Magazine, furnishing criticism, prefaces and translations. In 1738 he made a good name among the booksellers by the sale of his London (215), an admirable paraphrase of the third satire of Juvenal. In 1744 he published A Life of Savage, that unhappy poet whose career was so extraordinary, and whose vices were not less striking than his talents. Johnson had known him well, and they had often wandered supperless and homeless about the streets at midnight. Indeed, no literary life was ever a more correct exemplification than his own of the truth of his majestic line: "Slow rises worth by poverty depressed." * David Garrick, a young man who had been one of his pupils, accompanied Johnson to London, intending to study law at Lincoln's Inn; but the stage attracted him away from the bar, and he soon began his famous career as an actor. From 1747 to 1755 Johnson was engaged in the prepara tion of his most famous work, A Dictionary of the 1755] English Language (211). He had promised to complete it in three years; but the labor was arduous, and seven years were spent in getting its pages ready for the printer. As there was no such work in English literature, it supplied a want that had been long felt. Its success was great, and its compiler was applauded far and wide. Many imperfections may be found in it, especially in its etymologies, for Johnson shared the general English ignorance of the Teutonic languages from which two-thirds of the words of our language are derived. But in the accuracy of its definitions and in the quotations adduced to exemplify the different meanings of words, it could not have been surpassed. While at work upon his dictionary he diverted his mind by the publication of The Vanity of Human Wishes (216), an imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal; and at the same time he brought out upon the stage his tragedy of Irene, a work begun in his earlier years. Johnson founded, and carried on alone, two periodical papers in the style that Addison and Steele had rendered so popular. These were the Rambler, (212) and the Idler; the former was published from 1750 until 1752, and the latter from 1758 until 1760. The ease, grace, pleasantry, and variety which gave such charm to the Tatler and Spectator are totally incompatible with the heavy, antithetical, ponderous manner of Johnson; and his good sense, piety, and sombre tone of morality are but a poor substitute for the knowledge of the world displayed in his models. This species of periodical essay-writing, which exerted so powerful an influence on taste and manners in the eighteenth century, may be said to terminate with the Idler, though continued with gradually decreasing originality by other writers. Johnson's mother died in 1759, and he was without the funds needed to pay the expenses of her funeral. To raise this money he spent the nights of one week in the composition of his once-famous moral tale, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia. The manners and scenery of this story are neither those of an oriental nor of any other country, and the book is but a series of dialogues and reflections, embodying the author's ideas on a great variety of subjects connected with art, literature, society, philosophy, and religion. It was not until 1762, when he was fifty-three years of age, that he escaped from the poverty against which he had long and valiantly struggled. At the accession of George III. the government hoped to gain popularity by showing favor to art and letters. Johnson was recognized as holding a high position among literary workers, and was selected as one who should enjoy the royal bounty. A pension of three hundred pounds placed him above want, and enabled him to indulge his constitutional indolence. His good-fortune was shared with the poor. A blind old woman, a peevish old man, and other helpless people found a home in his dwelling, and in him a patient friend. Johnson's earlier life, with its poverty, its affliction, its toil, is not distinctly pictured by his biographer. Its mingled romance and misery keep us from intimate acquaintance with him before the day of his good-fortune, but from that time he is known as no other man of the past is; * for the year after the pension was decreed to him, he became * Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orangepeel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood."-T. B. Macaulay. acquainted with a young Scotchman, James Boswell, Esq., a vain, tattling, frivolous busybody, whose only claim to respect is that he produced the best biography that had been written in English,—and that was Boswell's Life of Johnson. From the beginning of the acquaintance Boswell revered the sage, listened to him as though his sentences were sacredly inspired, and treasured up every word that he could, as it came from the lips of his saint. Every night he wrote in his note-book the wise sayings of the philosopher, adding notes to the last detail of dialogue and of action, until, at last, his notes gave him the material with which to produce his famous book. He has given not only the most lively and vivid portrait of the person, manners, and conversation of Johnson, but also the most admirable picture of the society amid which he played so brilliant a part. Among the celebrated social meetings of that age of clubs was the society founded by Johnson, in which his friends Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Bishop Percy, Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Beauclerc, and others, were prominent figures. Johnson's powers of conversation were extraordinary, and were famously used in that company. He delighted in discussion, and, by constant practice, had acquired the art of expressing himself with pointed force and elegance. His ponderous expression formed an appropriate vehicle for his weighty thoughts, his apt illustrations, and his immense stores of reading and observation. This was perhaps the most brilliant and the happiest portion of his life. He made the acquaintance of the family of a rich brewer named Thrale, a member of the House of Commons, whose wife was famous for her talents and for the intellectual society she gathered around her. Under their roof Johnson enjoyed all that friendship, respect, and great wealth could give. This acquaintance lasted sixteen years, and gave him the opportunity of frequenting refined society. In the company of the Thrales he made several |