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 excursions to different parts of England, and once to Paris. His edition of Shakespeare appeared in 1765. It cannot be said to have added to his reputation. With the exception of an occasional happy remark, and a sensible selection from the commentaries of preceding annotators, it is quite unworthy of him. In 1773 Johnson, in company with his friend Boswell, made a journey to the Hebrides (214), which enabled him to become acquainted with Scotland and the Scotch, and thus to dissipate many of his odd prejudices against the country and the people. The volume giving an account of his impressions contains many interesting passages.* * The Lives of the Poets (213), published in 1781, was his last important work. Johnson had undertaken the task of preparing very brief biographical sketches, and a critical preface for a new edition of the English poets. His information was so abundant that the work grew into a volume abounding in passages of the happiest and most original criticism. But no reader should form his opinion of these poets from Johnson. His applause is given to the writers of the artificial school; Cowley, Waller, and Pope filled his vision. Others he could not understand. His criticisms on Milton, Gray, Thomson, Akenside were denounced at the time as monstrous examples of injustice. In uttering his disapproval of Johnson's treatment of Milton even the patient Cowper said, "I could thrash his old jacket till I made the pension jingle in his pocket." On the 13th of December, 1784, this good man and emi * The Journey to the Hebrides was a work re-written from private letters addressed to Mrs. Thrale. A comparison between the original letters and the version expressed in pompous language, such as Johnson considered essential to the dignity of literature, shows many amusing transformations. The following instance furnishes an illustration. "When we were taken up stairs," he says in one of the letters," a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed on which one of us was to lie." In the Journey, the same incident is thus described,-" Out of one of the beds on which we were to repose, started up, at our entrance, a man black as a Cyclops from the forge." nent writer died, and a week afterwards he was buried in Westminster Abbey. For two years he had been 1784] suffering from dropsy and asthma, and had been haunted by his old melancholy. Johnson's style was so peculiar that it has received the distinguishing name of "Johnsonese." There is in it none of Addison's colloquial elegance, none of Swift's idiomatic terseness. Short words had no charm for him. Sonorous Latin derivatives, and carefully elaborated sentences, were marshalled in honor of his thoughts. Whether describing a scene in a tavern, or expatiating on the grandest of moral themes, the same majestic display of language makes his writing monotonous. This was generally thought to be the sign of his genius by the men of letters who bowed before him; though Goldsmith once boldly declared to his face, "If you were to write a fable about little fishes, Doctor, you would make the little fishes talk like whales." "In fact, his phraseology rolls away in solemn and majestic periods, in which every substantive marches ceremoniously, accompanied by its epithet; great, pompous words peal like an organ; every proposition is set forth balanced by a proposition of equal length; thought is developed with the compassed regularity and official splendor of a procession. An oratorical age would recognize him as a master, and attribute to him in eloquence the primacy which it attributed to Pope in verse. "* † Johnson's character shows a blending of prejudice and liberality, of scepticism and credulity, of bigotry and candor. He was an heroic struggler with misfortune. He was one of the invincibles. Throughout his life he was an independent, resolute man; in boyhood he threw away the shoes which pity had sent to him, in manhood he *Taine.t + Johnson's famous letter to Lord Chesterfield (210) is in striking contrast with his general style. |