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illness,

with whose name hers is inseparably associated had ceased to exist.1

51. He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily affliction, clung vehemently to life. The feeling deFinal scribed in that fine but gloomy paper which closes 5 the series of his Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as his last hour drew near.2 He fancied that he should be able to draw his breath more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have set out for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense of the 10 journey. That expense, indeed, he had the means of defraying; for he had laid up about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labours which had made the fortune of several publishers. But he was unwilling to break in upon this hoard; and he seems to have wished even to 15 keep its existence a secret. Some of his friends hoped that the Government might be induced to increase his pension to six hundred pounds a year: but this hope was disappointed; and he resolved to stand one English winter more. That winter was his last. His legs grew 20 weaker; his breath grew shorter; the fatal water gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, courageous against pain, but timid against death, urged his surgeons to make deeper and deeper. Though the tender care which had mitigated his sufferings during months of sick- 25 ness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not left desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, and refused to accept fees from him. Burke parted from him with deep emotion. Windham sate much in the sick-room, arranged the pillows, and sent his own servant 3o 1 Note, p. 68. 2 Note, p. 69.

to watch a night by the bed. Frances Burney, whom the old man had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at the door; while Langton, whose piety eminently qualified him to be an adviser and comforter at 5 such a time, received the last pressure of his friend's hand within. When at length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson's mind. His temper became unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to think with terror 10 of death, and of that which lies beyond death; and he spoke much of the mercy of God, and of the pro- and death. pitiation of Christ. In this serene frame of mind

he died on the 13th of December, 1784. He was laid, a week later, in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent 15 men of whom he had been the historian, - Cowley and Denham, Dryden and Congreve,° Gay,° Prior, and Addison.1

52. Since his death the popularity of his works — the Lives of the Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human 20 Wishes, excepted - has greatly diminished. His Johnson, Dictionary has been altered by editors till it can the writer; scarcely be called his. An allusion to his Rambler or his Idler is not readily apprehended in literary circles. The fame even of Rasselas has grown somewhat dim. But, 25 though the celebrity of the writings may have declined, the

celebrity of the writer, strange to say, is as great as ever. Boswell's book has done for him more than the best of his own books could do.2 The memory of other authors is kept alive by their works. But the memory of Johnson 30 keeps many of his works alive. The old philosopher 2 See p. 55.

1 Note, p. 69.

is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, Johnson,

the man.

rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans. No human being who has been more than 5 seventy years in the grave is so well known to us.1 And it is but just to say that our intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man.

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MACAULAY ON BOSWELL.

IN 1831, twenty-five years before the Life reprinted in this volume, Macaulay wrote an Essay on Boswell's Johnson (known also as the Essay on Johnson), inspired by a new edition of that famous biography. It has probably had more readers than the later sketch-a fact to be regretted, since the earlier essay is sweepingly injurious to the memory of Johnson and of his disciple. As in the Essay on Milton, the effect of its remarkable dash and vigor is marred by exaggeration, partial emphasis, and shallow reasoning. These qualities are particularly noticeable in that portion of the essay which elaborates the brilliant but untenable paradox that Boswell wrote one of the greatest of biographies because he was one of the greatest of fools. A few quotations will show the nature of Macaulay's argument:

"The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. . . . We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was . . a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. . . . He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some

eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. Every thing which another man would have hidden, every thing the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. . . . "That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works. . . . But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had

not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book.

"Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. . . . Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal."

Only a few months elapsed before Macaulay's startling theory was completely demolished by Thomas Carlyle, in a famous essay occasioned by the same edition of Boswell's Johnson. "The world," writes Carlyle of Boswell," has been but unjust to him; discerning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass; without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret. . . . Nay, sometimes a strange enough hypothesis has been started of him; as if it were in virtue

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