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even of these same bad qualities that he did his good work; as if it were the very fact of his being among the worst men in the world that had enabled him to write one of the best books therein ! Falser hypothesis, we may venture to say, never rose in human soul. Bad is by its virtue negative, and can do nothing; whatsoever enables us to do anything is by its very nature good. . . . Boswell wrote a good book because he had a heart and an eye to discern wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his love and childlike open-mindedLet every one of us cling to this last article of faith, and know it as the beginning of all knowledge worth the name That neither James Boswell's good book, nor any other good thing, in any time or in any place, was, is, or can be performed by any man in virtue of his badness, but always and solely in spite thereof."

ness.

Carlyle has partly answered Macaulay in the above citation, but it may be well to quote the tribute to Boswell by Macaulay's contemporary, Lord Brougham: "His cleverness, his tact, his skill in drawing forth those he was studying, his admirable good-humor, his strict love of truth, his high and generous principle, his kindness towards his friends, his unvarying but generally rational piety, have scarcely been sufficiently praised by those who, nevertheless, have always been ready, as needs they must be, to acknowledge the debt of gratitude due for the book, of all, perhaps, that were ever written, the most difficult to lay down once it has been taken up."

Macaulay, it will be noticed, is no exception to the last statement; while assailing the character of the author, he by no means depreciates the value of the book. Shortly after his first essay on Johnson, he wrote, "I never was better pleased than when at fourteen I was master of Boswell's Life of Johnson, which I had long been wishing to read." It was mainly by adopting Boswell as an exemplar that Macaulay's own biographer, his nephew Mr. Trevelyan, succeeded so

well, and the Life and Letters of Macaulay has taken its place among the two or three biographies that acknowledge no superior but Boswell's Johnson. The student will never regret the time spent upon Macaulay's Life of Johnson if he is thereby induced to read the fascinating Life of its author and the still more fascinating Life of its subject — two of the most entertaining books in the realm of literature.

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NOTES.

2. 12. This failure undoubtedly accorded with the elder Johnson's political sentiments, if not with his paternal wishes; for, like a true Jacobite, he held that William III. and Anne were usurpers and therefore did not inherit that divine power which alone made the royal touch effectual. A little later, the Jacobite Pretender (son of James II.) took up his residence in Rome, and many years after Boswell ventured to suggest to Johnson that "his mother had not carried him far enough; she should have taken him to Rome." In fact, while the Georges stopped the practice of "touching," it was used on one occasion by the young Pretender (grandson of James II.) in 1745.

3. 13. In his fifty-fourth year, Johnson remarked: "In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now. My judgment, to be sure, was not so good; but I had all the facts." His later reading, he afterward explained, had been hindered by ill health, but his contemporaries testified that " Johnson knew more books than any man alive." The same relative knowledge was possessed by Macaulay, who likewise felt an early attraction for the restorers of learning. At fifteen he preferred Boccaccio to Chaucer, and his earliest writings include criticisms on Dante and Petrarch.

5. 11. There is strong evidence for believing that Johnson remained in continuous residence at Oxford for little more than a year, though his name did not disappear from the college books until 1731. Despite his small obligations to Oxford, Johnson always maintained a warm regard and partiality for his alma mater, and in later years made frequent visits to the University, as "he was nowhere so happy."

6. 8. Four years before Macaulay wrote this Life, he himself owned "to the feeling Dr. Johnson had, of thinking oneself bound sometimes to touch a particular rail or post, and to tread always in the middle of the paving stone." This did not prevent him from considerably exaggerating Johnson's peculiarities, or from describing single, unrepeated acts as the habits of a lifetime. Macaulay's characterizations are always brilliant, but seldom reliable.

8. 14. There is scarcely a single statement in this paragraph that is not open to objection. Macaulay describes Mrs. Porter unqualifiedly in the words of Garrick, as given by Boswell, who adds that he "considerably aggravated the picture," owing to his inherent love of mimicry, and that "she must have had a superiority of understanding and talents, as she certainly inspired Johnson with a more than ordinary passion." In "the kind widow's love and pity for him," says Carlyle, "in Johnson's love and gratitude, there is actually no matter for ridicule." Despite Johnson's "very forbidding" appearance, Mrs. Porter recognized his sterling merit at once, and observed to her daughter, "This is the most sensible man that I ever saw in my life." They were married July 9, 1735, when Mrs. Porter was forty-six and Johnson nearly twenty-six. Macaulay's statement, that he acquired stepchildren as old as himself, is a mere fiction; the two whose birth-dates are known were both much younger than Johnson. Equally untrue is the assertion that Mrs. Porter "was as poor as himself," for there is positive evidence that she possessed a small fortune, probably £800, which enabled Johnson to undertake his next enterprise. Macaulay again errs in saying that he "had seldom or never been in the same room with a woman of real fashion"-a contradiction of Boswell's explicit statement that Johnson "passed much time in his early years in the company of ladies . . . remarkable for good breeding."

9. 12. Johnson was accompanied by Garrick — both together, according to the former's statement later, possessing only fourpence. In the summer, Johnson returned to Lichfield, finished his tragedy, and then removed permanently to London with Mrs. Johnson.

9. 22. During the boyhood of Johnson, Steele was a member of Parliament, the poet Prior was Ambassador to France, and Addison was Secretary of State. (See Essay on Addison.) Further examples are given by Macaulay in his earlier Essay on Johnson, which contains a detailed account of the state of literature at this period. See also Swift's lively poem, Libel on Delany and Carteret.

9. 26. A list of such writers would include Scott, Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, and Macaulay. Scott, indeed, earned this sum (£40,000) in but little over two years; while Macaulay, in the year preceding the date of this sketch, received a check for £20,000 as part of the profits from his History of England.

12. 15. A few days after Johnson became a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine the House of Commons resolved "that it is a high indignity to, and a notorious breach of the privilege of, this House to give any account of the debates, as well during the recess as the sitting of Parliament." Several offenders soon after were imprisoned and fined, and Cave himself was examined before the House of Lords a few years later. The press, however, gradually became too

powerful for the government, and thirty years after Johnson's reports, complete accounts of the parliamentary debates were published without disguise. Shortly afterward were established the earliest great London dailies.

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13. 23. The reference to Laud is from the Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), l. 173. Hampden is called "the zealot of rebellion in the Life of Waller (1778). Macaulay, it will be noticed, deduces Johnson's prejudices not from the Debates, but from his later and better known works.

14. 1. Many years after, however, Johnson wrote that "at this time [1740] a long course of opposition to Sir Robert Walpole [Int., p. xvi.] had filled the nation with clamors for liberty, of which no man felt the want, and with care for liberty, which was not in danger."

14. 14. Macaulay has wrongly interpreted Johnson's remark. Boswell inquired, "Pray, sir, can you trace the cause of your antipathy to the Scotch?" Johnson. "I cannot, sir." Boswell. "Old Mr. Sheridan says, it was because they sold Charles I." Johnson. "Then, sir, old Mr. Sheridan has found out a very good reason!" In Boswell's opinion, Johnson was prejudiced against the Scotch because of their unmerited prosperity in England, their selfish obtrusiveness, and their undue attachment to their own country. This prejudice, however, was of the head, not of the heart," and disappeared almost completely in later years.

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14. 24. Johnson said later "that as soon as he found that the speeches were thought genuine, he determined that he would write no more of them; for he would not be accessary to the propagation of falsehood. And such was the tenderness of his conscience that a short time before his death he expressed his regret for his having been the author of fictions which had passed for realities." Two of these speeches were published in Lord Chesterfield's Works as " specimens of his lordship's eloquence," and another, put into the mouth of Pitt, was afterward praised in Johnson's presence as finer than anything in Demosthenes.

15. 13. Horace, says Minto, was the gay, light-hearted satirist of the foibles of the literary and fashionable society of Rome; whereas Juvenal took a more stern and gloomy view of life, and lashed the vices of his age in a spirit of moral indignation, with bitter and unsparing scorn. Pope, himself in easy circumstances, and the friend of noblemen and statesmen, naturally had most sympathy with Horace's -view of life; while Johnson, then earning a precarious livelihood as a bookseller's drudge, as naturally thought of Juvenal as a model. (See Index, "Juvenal," and Johnson's Ideals, § 1, p. xx.)

19. 14. One of Johnson's friends, doubting his ability to complete his Dictionary in three years, reminded him that the French Academy,

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