The Lake Library Edition LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON BY JAMES BOSWELL ABRIDGED AND EDITED BY HERBERT VAUGHAN ABBOTT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, SMITH COLLEGE PREFACE No abridgment can hope to do full justice to its original. In the pages of Boswell's Life of Johnson there is a desultory and leisurely gravity, a quaint turn for speculation, a mingling of complacency and sociability, smacking of the times, of which perhaps this volume gives no hint. The truth is, it has a different aim. Its almost sole purpose has been to bring out what is distinctive and of force in Dr. Johnson's own intellectual powers and moral character. A close observer and an industrious recorder of what he himself saw and heard, Boswell was sometimes, where verification was impossible, invitingly credulous, and could easily be fooled with hearsay. There are passages in which he seems to have been the ready victim of witty friends, and certainly into the early life of Johnson he has introduced old wives' tales, which have made what must have been a crude and harsh childhood into one puerile and inane. These opportunities for misleading I have been willing pretty largely to omit. A reader unquestionably can make due allowance for them, but just as surely, a busy reader, curious only to know what manner of man Johnson really was, can reasonably be spared them. Boswell is perhaps as unjust to himself in his Life of Johnson as he is to his subject. He was a preposterous mimic of other men's manners; he was a sedulous seeker of their advice; but he was not essentially servile. He persisted in his own course, regardless of advice, though it was often the course of folly. He reminds one of William Blake's apothegm: "If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise." Boswell was not wise; but at least he retained to the end of his life the force of his own individuality. This fact, hardly discernible in his masterpiece, but evident enough in his lesser writings, I hope I have illustrated clearly in the notes. I have used them also to gather what I have found most significant of Johnson from the anecdotes of his various con |