He was doing nothing then." He might, perhaps, have studied more assiduously; but it may be doubted, whether such a mind as his was not more enriched by roaming at large in the fields of literature, than if it had been confined to any single spot. The analogy between body and mind is very general, and the parallel will hold as to their food, as well as any other particular. The flesh of animals who feed excursively is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts, and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks? CHAPTER III. 1728-1731. Where'er they fly their lovers' ghosts pursue, Inflicting all those ills which once they knew; Vexation, Fury, Jealousy, Despair, Vex ev'ry eye, and ev'ry bosom tear; Their foul deformities by all descried, No maid to flatter, and no paint to hide. Then melt, ye fair, while clouds around you sigh, Nor let disdain sit louring in your eye; With pity soften every awful grace, And beauty smile auspicious in each face; To ease their pains exert your milder power, So shall you guiltless reign, and all mankind adore. The two years which he spent at home, after his return from Stourbridge, he passed in what he thought idleness, and was scolded by his father for his want of steady application.' had no settled plan of life, nor looked forward at all, but merely lived from day to day. Yet he read a great deal in a desultory manner, without any scheme of study, as chance threw books in his way, and inclination directed him through them. He used to mention one curious instance of his casual reading, when but a boy. Enters Pembroke College, Oxford.— His College Life. Having imagined that his brother had hid some apples behind a large folio upon an upper shelf in his father's shop, he climbed up to search for them. There were no apples; but the large folio proved to be Petrarch, whom he had seen mentioned, in some preface, as one of the restorers of learning. His curiosity having been thus excited, he sat down with avidity and read a great part of the book. What he read during these two years, he told me, was not works of mere amusement, "not voyages and travels, but all literature, Sir, all ancient writers, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod: but in this irregular manner," added he, "I had looked into a great many books, which were not commonly known at the universities, where they seldom read any books but what are put into their hands by their tutors; so that when I came to Oxford, Dr. Adams, now master of Pembroke College, told me, I was the best qualified for the university that he had ever known come there." In estimating the progress of his mind during these two years, as well as in future periods of his life, we must not regard his own hasty confession of idleness; for we see, when he explains himself, that he was acquiring various stores; and, indeed, he himself concluded the account with saying, "I would not have you think I 1 He probably helped his father in his business. Hawkins heard him say that he himself was able to bind a book, and Dr. Harwood showed me a pocket-book with a parchment cover, said to have been bound by him. CROKER. 2 Probably, the folio edition of Petrarch's Opera Omnia quæ extant, Bas. 1554; which contain both his Latin and Italian works: this accident may have led to Johnson's early though probably slight acquaintance with Italian. (See post, p. 31. n. 4.)- CROKER. 3 Hawkins says that "A neighbouring gentleman, Mr. Andrew Corbett, having a son, who had been educated in the same school with Johnson, whom he was about to send to Pembroke College, in Oxford, a proposal was made and accepted, that Johnson should attend his son thither in quality of assistant in his studies: " but the indisputable dates of Corbett's college life do not tally with the accounts TransCourse of Reading.— Quits -The "Morbid Melancholy" increases. lates Pope's Messiah.College. THAT a man in Mr. Michael Johnson's circumstances should think of sending his son to the expensive university of Oxford, at his own charge, seems very improbable. The subject was too delicate to question Johnson upon : but I have been assured by Dr. Taylor, that the scheme never would have taken place, had not a gentleman of Shropshire, one of his schoolfellows, spontaneously undertaken to support him at Oxford, in the character of his companion; though, in fact, he never received any assistance whatever from that gentleman. 3 He, however, went to Oxford, and was entered a commoner of Pembroke College, on the 31st of October, 1728, being then in his nineteenth year. The Reverend Dr. Adams, who afterwards presided over Pembroke College with universal esteem, told me he was present, and gave me some account of what passed on the night of Johnson's arrival at Oxford. On that evening, his father, who had anxiously accompanied him, found means to have him introduced to Mr. Jorden, who was to be his tutor. His being put under any tutor, reminds us of what Wood says of Robert Burton, author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," when elected student of Christ of either Boswell or Hawkins. Corbett was of the University twenty months before and twelve or thirteen months after Johnson. And, on reference to the college books, it appears that Corbett's residence was so irregular, and so little coincident with Johnson's, that there is no reason to suppose that Johnson was employed either as the private tutor of Corbett, as Hawkins states, or his companion, as Boswell suggests. Much more probable is the statement made in the Memoirs before mentioned, that his godfather Dr. Swinfen and some other gentlemen of the neighbourhood contributed to send him to Oxford. This is corroborated by the facts of his having been sent to Dr. Swinfen's own college, and of his constant and generous protection of Mrs. Desmoulins, Dr. Swinfen's daughter, from whom, indeed, the writer of the Memoirs seems to have derived his information. - CROKER. church; "for form's sake, though he wanted not a tutor, he was put under the tuition of Dr. John Bancroft, afterwards Bishop of Oxon." His father seemed very full of the merits of his son, and told the company he was a good scholar, and a poet, and wrote Latin verses. His figure and manner appeared strange to them; but he behaved modestly, and sat silent, till upon something which occurred in the course of conversation, he suddenly struck in and quoted Macrobius; and thus he gave the first impression of that more extensive reading in which he had indulged himself. His tutor, Mr. Jorden2, fellow of Pembroke, was not, it seems, a man of such abilities as we should conceive requisite for the instructor of Samuel Johnson, who gave me the following account of him : "He was a very worthy man, but a heavy man; and I did not profit much by his instructions. Indeed, I did not attend him much. The first day after I came to college I waited upon him, and then staid away four. On the sixth, Mr. Jorden asked me why I had not attended. I answered, I had been sliding in Christ-church meadow. And this I said with as much nonchalance as I am now talking to you. I had no notion that I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor."- BOSWELL. "That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind." -JOHNSON. "No, Sir; stark insensibility."4 The fifth of November was at that time kept with great solemnity at Pembroke College, and exercises upon the subject of the day were required. Johnson neglected to perform his, which is much to be regretted; for his vivacity of imagination, and force of language, would probably have produced something sublime 1 Athen. Oxon. edit. 1721, i. 627.- BOSWELL. 2 There are, as Dr. Hall informed me, several errors in Mr. Boswell's account of Johnson's college life. He either did not consult Dr. Adams, or must have misunderstood Dr. Adams's information. There are at Pembroke two tutors for the whole college, so that Mr. Jorden was no more the tutor of Johnson than of any other student, and Johnson was equally the pupil of the other college tutor. But a more serious error is that as to the period of Johnson's actual residence at Oxford, which pervades, and, in some important points, falsifies Boswell's narrative. Boswell assumes that the years 1729, 1730, and 1731 were all spent - with only the usual interruption of the college vacations at Oxford, and he adapts all his subsequent statements, and several anecdotes, to this hypothesis; but an examination of the college books proves that Johnson, who entered on the 31st October, 172, remained there, even during the vacations, to the 12th December, 1729, when he personally left the college, and Dever returned-though his name remained on the books till 8th October, 1731. This abrupt termination of his residence was no doubt occasioned by the hypochondriacal illness mentioned (antè, p. 9. n. 1. and post, p. 14.). and it is probable that his name remained on the books in the hope that his bealth and his means might enable him to return. health, we shall see, mended, but the pecuniary resources failed. If Johnson had remained in college in 1730, there were two scholarships to which he would have been eligible, and one of which Dr. Hall did not doubt that he would have obtained. But see, in his visit to Oxford, in 1754, his own opinion that it was fortunate for his literary character that he had been forced out of the routine of a college life. -CROKER. 1 Oxford, March 20. 1776.- Boswell. His upon the Gunpowder Plot. To apologise for his neglect, he gave in a short copy of verses, entitled Somnium, containing a common thought "that the Muse had come to him in his sleep and whispered, that it did not become him to write on such subjects as politics; he should confine himself to humbler themes:" but the versification was truly Virgilian. He had a love and respect for Jorden, not for his literature 5 but for his worth. "Whenever," said he, "a young man becomes Jorden's pupil, he becomes his son." Having given such a specimen of his poetical powers, he was asked by Mr. Jorden to translate Pope's Messiah into Latin verse, as a Christmas exercise. He performed it with uncommon rapidity, and in so masterly a manner, that he obtained great applause from it, which ever after kept him high in the estima tion of his college, and, indeed, of all the university. It is said, that Mr. Pope expressed himself concerning it in terms of strong approbation. Dr. Taylor told me, that it was first printed for old Mr. Johnson, without the knowledge of his son, who was very angry when he heard of it. A Miscellany of Poems, collected by a person of the name of Husbands, was published at Oxford in 1731.7 In that Miscellany, Johnson's Translation of the Messiah appeared, with this modest motto from Scaliger's Poetics, "Ex alieno ingenio poeta, ex suo tantum versificator." I am not ignorant that critical objections have been made to this and other specimens of Johnson's Latin poetry. I acknowledge myself not competent to decide on a question of such extreme nicety. But I am satisfied with Piozzi, he laughed very heartily at his own insolence, and said they endured it from him with a gentleness that, whenever he thought of it, astonished himself. Hawkins, also says, "that he would oftener risk the payment of a small fine than attend his lectures; nor was he studious to conceal the reason of his absence. Upon occasion of one such imposition, he said to Jorden, Sir, you have sconced me twopence for non-attendance at a lecture not worth a penny."" I do not much credit this early specimen of Johnson's antithetical style, and indeed I believe, with Boswell, that all these instances of insurbordination and insolence were very much exaggerated, for he told the same anecdotes to Tom Warton at Oxford in a very different tone, and confessed that he expected his tutor's rebuke with a "beating heart." It would seem as if Johnson had been induced, by the too obsequious deference of his later admirers, to assign to his youthful character a little more of sturdy dignity than, when his recollection was fresher and his ear unspoiled by flattery, he assumed to Mr. Warton. (See post, under July 1754.) - CROKER. 5 Johnson used to say, "He scarcely knew a noun from an adverb."- NICHOLS. Johnson told Mr. Windham that he was so ignorant as to say that the Ramei (the disciples of Ramus) were so called from ramus, a bough.- CROKER. 6 This must have been the Christmas (1728) immediately following his entering into college; for he never spent a second Christmas at Pembroke. - CRoker. 7 John Husbands was a contemporary of Johnson at Pembroke College, having been admitted a Fellow and A.M. in 1726. Hawkins says that the poem having been shown to Pope, by a son of Dr. Arbuthnot, then a gentleman commoner of Christ-church, was read, and returned with this encomium, "The writer of this poem will leave it a question for posterity, whether his or mine be the original." see Pope's own statement, post, p. 41. I do not find that it was again published till twenty-one years later, when it appeared in the Gent. Mag, for 1752 with Johnson's name. — CROKER. But the just and Escrimante Lingy practiced. Escrder, strove to overcome it by forcible exspod k by my friend Mr. Courtena Then with mostile at the fece GUMICIR, And with a Kumar's spacer think and write. da sarri ga culture, art, and toil, max cáo cea and owns the fostering soil; -hides our sau thaigh all its swelling veins, ai grows a native of Britannia's plains." The “morbid melancholy," which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regidar life, which at a very early period ma kod his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful manner. While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he tel: himself overwhelmed with a horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved, and all his labours, and all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence. How wondetal, how unsearchable are the ways of GOD! Johnson, who was blessed with all the powers of genius and understanding in a degree far above the ordinary state of human nature, was at the same time visited with a disorder so afflictive, that they who know it by dire experience will nos envy his exalted endowments. That it was, in some degree, occasioned by a defect in bis nervous system, that inexplicable part of our frames appears highly probable. He told M: Paradiso that he was sometimes so langed and inedicient, that he could not distinged the hour upon the town-clock. པ་ so, upon the first violent attack of this No. 1779, the Ode to Mrs. Thrale, written in Movie draw of the Literary and Moral Character Courtenay, Esq. M.P.- BOSWELL. 13, n. Í CHOKER. BCL. of Oxford, and F.R.S., was of the English consul at Salonica, Tewas educated at Padua, but resided che pesune, pay the London; in the literary circles vc which de wat geniaci kdown and highly esteemed. He ertions. He frequently walked to BirmingBam and back again, and tried many other expedients, but all in vain. His expression concerning it to me was, "I did not then know how to manage it." His distress became so intolerable, that he applied to Dr. Swinfen, physician in Lichfield, his god-father, and put into his hands a state of his case, written in Latin. Dr. Swinfen was so much struck with the extraordinary acuteness, research, and eloquence of this paper, that in his zeal for his godson he showed it to several people. His daughter, Mrs. Desmoulins, who was many years humanely supported in Dr. Johnson's house in London, told me, that upon his discovering that Dr. Swinfen had communicated his case, he was so much offended that he was never afterwards fully reconciled to him. He indeed had good reason to be offended; for though Dr. Swinfen's motive was good, he inconsiderately betrayed a matter deeply interesting and of great delicacy, which had been intrusted to him in confidence; and exposed a complaint of his young friend and patient, which, in the superficial opinion of the generality of mankind, is attended with contempt and disgrace. But let not little men triumph upon knowing that Johnson was an HYPOCHONDRIAC, was subject to what the learned, philosophical, and pious Dr. Cheyne has so well treated under the title of The English Malady." Though he suffered severely from it, he was not therefore degraded. The powers of his great mind might be troubled, and their full exercise suspended at times; but the mind itself was ever entire. As a proof of this, it is only necessary to consider, that, when he was at the very worst, he composed that state of his own case, which showed an uncommon vigour, not only of fancy and taste, but of judgment. I am aware that he himself was too ready to call such a complaint by the name of madness; in conformity with which notion, he has traced its gradations, with exquisite nicety, in one of the chapters of his RASSELAS. 5 But there is surely a clear distinction between a disorder which affects only the imagination and spirits, while the judgment is sound, and a disorder by which the judgment itself is impaired. This distinction was made to me by the late Professor Gaubius 6 of Leyden, physician to the Prince of Orange, in a conversation which I had with him several years ago, and he expanded it thus: "If," said he, "a man tells became intimate with Johnson in the latter portion of the Doctor's life; was a member of his Essex Street club, and attended his funeral. He died Dec. 12. 1795.-CROKER. 5 Chapter 44. "On the dangerous Prevalence of Imagination;" in which Johnson no doubt relates his own sensations. - CROKER. 6 Jerome David Gaubius was born at Heidelberg, in 1705. He died in 1780, leaving several works of considerable value. A translation into English of his Institutiones Pathologie Medicinalis" appeared in 1779.- WRIGHT. me that he is grievously disturbed, for that he imagines he sees a ruffian coming against him with a drawn sword, though at the same time he is conscious it is a delusion, I pronounce him to have a disordered imagination; but if a man tells me that he sees this, and in consternation calls to me to look at it, I pronounce him to be mad." It is a common effect of low spirits or melancholy, to make those who are afflicted with it imagine that they are actually suffering those evils which happen to be most strongly presented to their minds. Some have fancied themselves to be deprived of the use of their limbs, some to labour under acute diseases, others to be in extreme poverty; when, in truth, there was not the least reality in any of the suppositions; so that, when the vapours were dispelled, they were convinced of the delusion. To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason, the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal apprehension; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgment. That his own diseased imagination should have so far deceived him is strange; but it is stranger still that some of his friends should have given credit to his groundless opinion, when they had such undoubted proofs that it was totally fallacious; though it is by no means surprising that those who wish to depreciate him should, since his death, have laid hold of this circumstance, and insisted upon it with very unfair aggravation.' Amidst the oppression and distraction of a disease which very few have felt in its full extent, but many have experienced in a slighter degree, Johnson, in his writings, and in his conversation, never failed to display all the varieties of intellectual excellence. In his march through this world to a better, his mind 1 This, it is to be presumed, was Boswell's reason for concaling that passage of Mr. Hector's paper quoted in p. 9, note 1.; but Johnson himself was not so scrupulous. He said post, Sept. 16. 1778), that he had inherited from his father a vile inelancholy, which had made him mad all his life -at least not sober; and, in a letter to Dr. Warton Dez. 24. 1754), he says of Collins, then insane, " Poor dear Collins! I have been often near his state, and therefore have it in great commiseration."- CROKER. 2 Mr. Boswell was himself occasionally afflicted with this morbid depression of spirits, and was, at intervals, equally able to paroxysms of what may be called morbid vivacity. He wrote a Series of Essays in the London Magazine, under the title of the Hypochondriac," seventy in number, commencing in 1777, and carried on till 1783. CROKER. Jan. 29. 1791, Boswell writes thus to Mr. Malone: -“I have, for some weeks, had the most woful return of melancholy; insomuch that I have not only had no relish of anything, but a continual uneasiness; and all the prospect before Be, for the rest of life, has seemed gloomy and hopeless." Apún, March 8. "In the night between the last of February and first of this month, I had a sudden relief from the mexplicable disorder, which occasionally clouds my mind and makes me miserable."- From the originals in the possession of Mr. Upeott. - WRIGHT. 3 "Hypoch ndriacism has been the complaint of the good, and the wise, and the witty, and even of the gay. Regnard, still appeared grand and brilliant, and impressed all around him with the truth of Virgil's noble sentiment "Igneus est ollis vigor et cælestis origo." The history of his mind as to religion is an important article. I have mentioned the early impressions made upon his tender imagination by his mother, who continued her pious cares with assiduity, but, in his opinion, not with judgment. Sunday," said he, “ was a heavy day to me when I was a boy. My mother confined me on that day, and made me read The Whole Duty of Man,' from a great part of which I could derive no instruction. When, for instance, I had read the chapter on theft, which from my infancy I had been taught was wrong, I was no more convinced that theft was wrong than before; so there was no accession of knowledge. A boy should be introduced to such books, by having his attention directed to the arrangement, to the style, and other excellencies of composition; that the mind being thus engaged by an amusing variety of objects, may not grow weary." He communicated to me the following particulars upon the subject of his religious progress:-"I fell into an inattention to religion, or an indifference about it, in my ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in which we had a seat, wanted reparation 5, so I was to go and find a seat in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I used to go and read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till my fourteenth year; and still I find a great reluctance to go to church. I then became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up 'Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,' expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in the author of the best French comedy after Molière, was atrabilious, and Molière himself saturnine. Dr. Johnson, Gray, and Burns, were all, more or less, affected by it occasionally. It was the prelude to the more awful malady of Collins, Cowper, Swift, and Smart; but it by no means follows that a partial affliction of this disorder is to terminate like theirs." Byron, vol. vi. p. 396.- WRIGHT. This list of superior intellects liable to constitutional, and, as I believe, hereditary disorder, might be largely augmented, and would, in my opinion, include Lord Byron himself.-CROKER, 1846. "in them we trace 4 The fiery vigour of a heavenly race." En. vi. 730. — C. 5 Johnson's parish church, St. Mary's, being in a decayed state, was taken down in 1716, and the present structure was finished and opened in 1721. How important is this otherwise trivial circumstance towards enforcing the habit of church-going! The accidental interruption of this duty shook for a time Johnson's faith, and was felt even in his maturer days. — CROKER. 6 William Law was born 1686, entered, in 1705, of Em. Coll. Cambridge, Fellow in 1711, and A. M. in 1712. On the accession of the Hanover family he refused the oaths. He was tutor to Mr. Gibbon's father, at Putney, and finally retired, with two pious ladies, Mrs. Hutchinson and Mrs. Gibbon, the aunt of the historian, to a kind of conventual seclusion at King's Cliffe, his native place. He died in 1761. — CROKER. earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational enquiry."1 From this time forward religion was the predominant object of his thoughts; though, with the just sentiments of a conscientious Christian, he lamented that his practice of its duties fell far short of what it ought to be. This instance of a mind such as that of Johnson being first disposed, by an unexpected incident, to think with anxiety of the momentous concerns of eternity, and of "what he should do to be saved," may for ever be produced in opposition to the superficial and sometimes profane contempt that has been thrown upon those occasional impressions which it is certain many Christians have experienced: though it must be acknowledged that weak minds, from an erroneous supposition that no man is in a state of grace who has not felt a particular conversion, have, in some cases, brought a degree of ridicule upon them; a ridicule, of which it is inconsiderate or unfair to make a general application. 66 How seriously Johnson was impressed with a sense of religion, even in the vigour of his youth, appears from the following passage in his minutes kept by way of diary:- Sept. 7. 1736. I have this day entered upon my 28th year. Mayest thou, O God, enable me, for Jesus Christ's sake, to spend this in such a manner, that I may receive comfort from it at the hour of death, and in the day of judgment! Amen." The particular course of his reading while at Oxford, and during the time of vacation which he passed at home, cannot be traced. 3 Enough has been said of his irregular mode of study. He told me, that from his earliest years he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end; that he read Shakspeare at a period so early, that the speech of the ghost in Hamlet terrified him when he was 1 Mrs. Piozzi has given a strange fantastical account of the original of Dr. Johnson's belief in our most holy religion. "At the age of ten years his mind was disturbed by scruples of infidelity, which preyed upon his spirits, and made him very uneasy; the more so, as he revealed his uneasiness to none, being naturally (as he said) of a sullen temper, and reserved disposition. He searched, however, diligently, but fruitlessly, for evidences of the truth of revelation; and at length. recollecting a book he had once seen [I suppose at five years old] in his father's shop, entitled De Veritate Religionis,' &c. he began to think himself highly culpable for neglecting such means of information, and took himself severely to task for this sin, adding many acts of voluntary, and to others unknown, penance. The first opportunity which offered, of course, he seized the book with avidity; but, on examination, not finding himself scholar enough to peruse its contents, set his heart at rest; and not thinking to enquire whether there were any English books written on the subject, followed his usual amusements, and considered his conscience as lightened of a crime. He redoubled his diligence to learn the language that contained the information he most wished for; but from the pain which guilt [namely, having omitted to read what he did not understand] had given him, he now began to deduce the soul's immortality [a sensation of pain in this world being an unquestionable proof of existence in another], which was the point that belief first stopped at; and from that moment resolving to be a Christian, became one of the most zealous and pious ones our nation ever produced." (Anecdotes, p. 17.) This is one of the numerous misrepresentations of this lively lady, which it is worth while to correct; for if credit should be given to such a childish, irrational, and ridiculous statement of the founda alone; that Horace's odes were the compositions in which he took most delight, and it was long before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read solidly at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which he was the most fond was metaphysics, but he had not read much, even in that way. I always thought that he did himself injustice in his account of what he had read, and that he must have been speaking with reference to the vast portion of study which is possible, and to which a few scholars in the whole history of literature have attained; for when I once asked him whether a person, whose name I have now forgotten, studied hard, he answered, "No, Sir. I do not believe he studied hard. I never knew a man who studied hard. I conclude, indeed, from the effects, that some men have studied hard, as Bentley and Clarke." Trying him by that criterion upon which he formed his judgment of others, we may be absolutely certain, both from his writings and his conversation, that his reading was very extensive. Dr. Adam Smith, than whom few were better judges 5 on this subject, once observed to me, that "Johnson knew more books than any man alive." He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end. He had, from the irritability of his constitution, at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote. A certain apprehension arising from novelty made him write his first exercise at college twice over; but he never took that trouble with any other composition; and we shall see that his most excellent works were struck off at a heat, with rapid exertion. 6 Yet he appears, from his early notes or memorandums in my possession, to have at tion of Dr. Johnson's faith in Christianity, how little credit would be due to it! Mrs. Piozzi seems to wish, that the world should think Dr. Johnson also under the influence of that easy logic, "Stet pro ratione voluntas." BOSWELL. 2 He was then married and resident at Edial. CROKER. 3 See antè, p. 13. n. 1. 4 Though two or three of his pieces are easy, and in what he perhaps thought the Horatian style, we shall see that to Miss Carter he confessed a fondness for Martial, and his epigrams certainly savour of that partiality. Dr. Hall had a small volume of hendecasyllabic poetry, entitled Poeta Rusticantis Literatum Otium, sive Carmina Andreæ Francisci Landesii. Lond. 1713; which belonged to Johnson, and some peculiarities of the style of these verses may be traced in his college compositions. CROKER. 5 Boswell might have selected, if not a better judge, at least a better authority; for Adam Smith had but a slight acquaintance with Johnson, and the judgment pronounced by Smith is one which could only be justified by an intimate literary intercourse. But Boswell's nationality inclined him to quote the eminent Scottish professor. We shall see many instances of a similar partiality - not illaudable in Boswell, but which the reader ought to bear in mind.- CROKER. He told Dr. Burney, that he never wrote any of his works that were printed, twice over. Dr. Burney's wonder at seeing several pages of his Lives of the Poets, in manuscript, with scarce a blot or erasure, drew this observation from him. MALONE. But he made large corrections in the second edition of the Rambler, and in the third edition of the Lives of the Poets the variations were so considerable, as to be printed in a separate pamphlet, for the use of former purchasers.- CROKER. |