LIVES OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS.

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

OF no eminent character of any age have we a more ample and accurate account, than of Samuel Johnson during the last twenty years of his life. His figure, his habits, his dress, his gait, are all as familiar to us as those of a personal acquaintance; all the trivial incidents in which he was in any way concerned, we have as faithfully chronicled as if they were of historical importance; his conversations, his tabletalk, even the most casual remarks, have come down to us in a state of the most careful preservation.

tained in an unsuccessful speculation. These, however, were so great, as seriously to straiten his circumstances, and deprive his son of all assistance from that quarter. On the death of his father, Dr. Johnson records the sum of £20, as "all that I expect to receive out of my father's effects, prior to the death of my mother." It is a remarkable evidence of the paucity of readers at that period, and the centralization of all that related to literature in the metropolis, that Michael Johnson's trade was extended over many of the Strongly contrasted with this is the adjacent towns, and that even Birobscurity that involves the whole of his mingham itself was indebted for its previous career. He was upwards of supply of intellectual provender to a fifty years of age when his biographer, stall opened every market day by the Boswell, was introduced to him. He Lichfield bibliopole. Michael Johnson had then already achieved for himself possessed a large, robust frame, a strong a first position in the field of English understanding, remarkably cultivated literature, was renowned as an essayist, for his age and position, with tendencies lexicographer, and poet, was caressed to that morbid melancholy which was and reverenced by a wide circle of the more fully developed in his son. His illustrious of the age, and had just wife was a woman of sense and piety, received a pension sufficiently liberal not lettered, however, like her husband, to secure him thenceforward from pecu- and strongly tinged with superstition. niary embarrassment. Of the man at Thus from both his parents young this period and during the remainder Johnson doubtlessly inherited much of his career, we have the most vivid that afterwards characterized him,and detailed account possible; we de- from his father, his unwieldy body, his siderate nothing; he yet moves and vigorous sense, his fits of gloom and speaks upon Boswell's canvas. But depression; from his mother, his strong of the toil, and struggle, and privation, sense of religion and his tendencies to by which this eminence was achieved, superstition. And what was distempered of the several steps of the slow and in these hereditary dispositions would painful progress, of the influences that perhaps be aggravated by the early had acted upon him and made him the ravages of disease; for he was attacked singular phenomenon he appeared to by the scrofula while yet in infancy, those of a younger generation, we can and retained its hideous scars to the glean but scanty information. Some-close of life. thing has, however, been collected by the diligence of his biographer, and these materials, meagre as they are, may perhaps avail for the present rapid sketch.

SAMUEL JOHNSON was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on the 18th of September, 1709. His father, Michael Johnson, carried on the business of a bookseller in that town, and by his skill and industry would have realized a competent fortune, but for losses sus

There is an element of the mythical generally blended with the early history of the illustrious; and thus legendary feats of infantile precocity are transmitted of our great lexicographer. These, however, we may pass by. At school he appears to have been always a-head of his compeers, and that with little effort of his own. Mingling little in the sports of boyhood, assuming the supremacy over his associates as by a kind of inherent right, irregular in his habits,

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studious and indolent by fits, reading for his Alma Mater. Of his college life

we obtain but a glimpse. The irregular habits upon which we have already commented, appear to have followed him thither. Now we find him diligently reading metaphysics and Greek, the two studies to which he was most partial, now giving way to his constitutional indolence, and now again recording in his diary his remorse and shame and resolves of amendment; at

wit and merriment, or spiriting them up to rebellion against the college discipline, at another, chafed and miserable on account of his extreme poverty, or driven by his morbid temperament to the verge of insanity. It is painful to contemplate how his honest pride was galled by the destitution of his circumstances. At one time, when his shoes were so worn that his feet became visible through them, and a delicate charity had placed a new pair at the door of his chamber, he is said to have flung away the eleemosynary supply.

voraciously everything that came in his way without system or selection, and seldom forgetting anything once read, he appears in his youth to have foreshadowed his after character. "The boy was father to the man." That which was Dr. Johnson's great defect throughout the whole of his career, which enfeebled at times and distorted his otherwise gigantic capacities-awant of discipline, is here already conspicuous. Through- one time enlivening his friends by his out life he studied much in the same way that he indulged his appetites. "Johnson," says Boswell, and it certainly is a little superior to the general inanity of his remarks," though he could be rigidly abstemious was not a temperate man in eating and drinking. He could refrain but he could not use moderately." And so in catering to his mental appetites. He could lay-a-bed till mid-day, and 'hold forth' till midnight at the Mitre tavern; or he could write forty-eight printed octavo pages at a sitting, and compose a hundred lines of poetry in a day and throw off his Rasselas Johnson's college residence is also in the evenings of a week; but he never remarkable on two other accounts. It could discipline himself to a regular and was clouded by one of the earliest and systematic course of study. "I would darkest of those fits of mental depression not advise," he remarks himself, "a ri- to which he was subject throughout life; gid adherence to a particular plan of and then further, those powerful impresstudy. I myself have never persisted sions of religion were renewed which in any plan for two days together. A he had imbibed from his mother (in man ought to read just as inclination | childhood), and which from this time leads him, for what he reads as a task, forward materially influenced his chawill do him little good." The result of this racter. Johnson's melancholy was in was, and thus it ever will be, in the case many respects peculiar. It was not of any one that adopts the precedent, that of a man of lively sensibilities, who that while Johnson laid up in his tena- shrinks from the atmosphere of earth cious memory a vast amount of curious as cold and ungenial, and whose quick information, he displayed on many com- sympathies and tender affections are mon topics, an ignorance that might being perpetually jarred and wounded. shame a school-boy; and his judgment, Of the miseries of such a nature Johnson subtle, and strong where based upon a had no appreciation. He did not besufficient acquaintance with facts, was lieve that such sensitiveness really perpetually perverted by erroneous pre-existed, and harshly judged it to be mises, and cramped by narrow and su- the affectation of maudlin sentiment perficial views of things. Young John- or wounded vanity. Accustomed himson at seventeen knew many things that self to face the world's roughest usage might have puzzled a veteran scholar, and most inclement seasons, trained and and Dr. Johnson at seventy made blun- braced in the hardy school of privation ders which a lad of common information and poverty, his sympathies were no could have corrected. His mind was a more capable of blending with such museum, exhibiting much that is rare refined feelings, than his criticism of and curious, and omitting much that appreciating the more delicate beauties is common and useful. of taste. Nor was Johnson's melancholy, insanity, or anything approaching it. He was not like Cowper a monomaniac. His mental gloom did not shape itself into some one dark and distorted idea,

At nineteen he was placed at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he studied for two years, and throughout life he entertained great fondness and veneration

possessing vivid and solemn views of the probationary character of life, such self-scrutiny overwhelmed him with remorse and dismay. It was not because his conduct was grossly bad, that he was the prey of such emotions, but because his standard of duty was high and his conscience faithful. He felt how strict were the requirements of God, how important were the issues of life, and he could not be satisfied with an imperfect obedience to the one, or an uncertain preparation for the other.

taking possession of the soul, and not to be exorcised by argument or effort. Nor was it that of the man of dreaming imagination, who broods over every trivial incident till he gives it a significance and a magnitude entirely the creation of his own distempered mind. Nor was it, least of all, the affectation of a vain and silly mind, such as Boswell was perpetually annoying him with, and of which he made a happy similitude, when, pointing one evening to a moth that had fluttered into the candle and burned itself, he said quietly, "That Such soul conflicts must ever be the creature was its own tormentor, and I lot of a sincere and earnest mind, imbelieve its name was Boswell!" John-pressed with a powerful sense of religion, son's melancholy was at all events sin- and nothing can meet and pacify such cere, such as became a strong and earn- a condition but a just appreciation of est mind. It was not paraded before the provisions of Christianity. And the world like that of some other wretch-Johnson's religious views were as we ed geniuses, but comes out chiefly in have already intimated, defective. Prihis private diaries; it did not assume mary features in the Christian scheme a tone of misanthropy real or affected, of forgiveness are that it is bestowed but generally that of penitent and re- not at all on account of merit in the remorseful confession. It evinced itself cipient, but altogether on account of in the intense sense he had of his own the propitiation of Christ, and that such deficiences, in the severity of which he forgiveness is a pre-essential to all true records and characterizes his broken re- and acceptable obedience; that is, all solves and defeated struggles, in the obedience, satisfying either the claims of gloom which any personal calamity ap- God, or the requirements of conscience, peared to shed over every object and is a result and not a condition of forpursuit, and more than all in his con- giveness. And this Johnson misunderstant terror of death, and angry impa- stood. He was a sincere Christian, that tience whenever the subject was broach- is, in an age of fashionable infidelity, ed. Probably in so far as it was not he stood stoutly by the Bible, and rested hereditary and physical, the legacy of his hopes on its revelations ;-but those the paternal malady, and the result of revelations he had not clearly apprehendmidnight study and mid-day slumber, ed. Had he done so, we should not it arose from the uneasiness of a sensi- have found him asserting: "No rational tive conscience combined with defective man can die without uneasy apprehenreligious views. sion. His hope of salvation must be founded on the terms on which it is promised that the mediation of our Saviour shall be applied to us, namely, obedience, and where obedience has fail

But what man can say that his obedience has been such as he would approve of in another, or even in himself upon close examination; or that his repentance has not been such as to require being repented of? No man can be sure that his obedience and repentance will obtain salvation."

Johnson's conscience was not indeed well-informed, but it was susceptible even to superstition. He brought the most trivial observances before its bar, and judged them with relentless severity.ed, then as suppletory to it, repentance. And he who considered it a grave of fence to drink milk with his tea on Good Friday, was not likely to regard with complacency what was really defective in his conduct. Accordingly his diary abounds in expressions of the bitterest remorse and the most unsparing self-accusations. Now he reproaches himself with the intemperate indulgence of appetite, now with slothfulness, and the frivolous occupation of time, and now with the desertion of purposes and the violation of vows. Deeply impressed as he was with a sense of religious duty, ever fearfully foreboding death, and

Here is much misapprehension. Repentance is not supplementary to obedience, but an admission of disobedience, a total abnegation of self, and so an essential preliminary to that sentiment of trust in Christ, which, and not obedience, is the condition "on which it is