His face is as familiar to-day as that of Bonaparte, Shakespeare or Mary Queen of Scots. In one private collection of Johnson there are one hundred and fiftythree prints, no two of which are alike; and this collection is known to be incomplete. When the Neophyte comes to this name on his list he will be at a loss where to begin and how soon to stop. He will certainly be tempted to gather as many as his purse will buy.-HUTTON, LAURENCE, 1887, Grangerism and the Grangerites, The Book Buyer, vol. 4, p. 290. The Blaspheming Doctor,-Blinking Sam, The Bolt Court Philosopher,―The Cerberus of Literature, -The Classic Rambler, The Colossus of English Philology, The Giant of Literature, -The Great Bear,-Great Caliban,—The Great Cham of Literature, -The Great Moralist, -The Great Seer, -The Incomprehensible Holofernes,-A Learned Attila,-Our Letter'd Polypheme, -The Leviathan of Literature, -The Literary Anvil, -The Literary Castor,-The Literary Colossus,Our Literary Whale,-Pomposo,-The Respectable Hottentot,-Sir Charles Easy, -Sober,- Surly Sam,-Ursa Major. FREY, ALBERT R., 1888, Sobriquets and Nicknames, p. 426. That dear Old Doctor! fierce of mien, What gentle thoughts his name enfold! So quick to love, so hot to scorn, Kind to all sufferers under heaven- For Hodge the cat. Given thus, on the one hand, a man of vigorous intellect, strong, though controlled passions, and fascinating conversation, and, on the other, a woman of talent, able and quick to appreciate his merits, and let the two be thrown together intimately for the period of sixteen years, nothing would be more natural than for a feeling to spring up, at least on the part of the man, warmer than mere friendship. Difference of age counts for little. in such cases for it is a common saying that the heart never grows old. A man in Johnson's position readily forgets how he actually appears to the woman who flatters and pleases him, and, conscious only of his own youthful feelings, is prone to imagine that he seems to her as young But as he does to himself. There is no proof that Mrs. Thrale ever entertained any sentiment for Johnson other than the esteem which in Madame d'Arblay became reverent adoration. Indeed, when spoken to about her supposed passion for him some years afterwards by Sir James Fellows, she ridiculed the idea, saying that she always felt for Johnson the same respect and veneration as for a Pascal. if the long-continued manifestation of these sentiments, coupled with the most assiduous devotion and tender, wifelike care, had not awakened in him some response beyond mere gratitude, he would have been the most insensible of beings. Love, moreover, is frequently the result of propinquity and habit, and to both these influences Johnson was subjected for more than sixteen years. If he misinterpreted the attentions he received, and was emboldened by them to hope for a return of the passion they aroused, he did only what many a wise man has done under the same circumstances, and will do again.HITCHCOCK, THOMAS, 1891, Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale, Unhappy Loves of Men of Genius, p. 66. Johnson had a tall, well-formed, and massive figure, indicative of great physical strength, but made grotesque by a strange infirmity. Madame d'Arblay speaks of his "vast body in constant agitation, swaying backwards and forwards;" Miss Reynolds describes his apparently unconsciousness "antics," especially when he crossed a threshold. Sometimes when he was reading a book in the fields a mob would gather to stare at his strange gestures. Reynolds mentioned that he could constrain them when he pleased, though Boswell called them St. Vitus's dance. He had queer tricks of touching posts and carefully counting steps, even when on horseback. He was constantly talking or muttering prayers to himself. His face, according to Campbell, had "the aspect of an idiot." He remained in silent abstraction till roused, or, as Tyers said, was like a ghost, who never speaks till he is spoken to. In spite of his infirmities he occasionally indulged in athletic performances. Mrs. Piozzi says that he sometimes hunted with Thrale. He understood boxing, and regretted the decline of prize-fighting, jumped, rowed, and shot, in a "strange and unwieldy" way, to show that he was not tired after a "fifty miles' chase," and, according to Miss Reynolds, swarmed up a tree and beat a young lady in a foot-race when over fifty. Langton described to Best how at the age of fifty-five he had solemnly rolled down a hill. His courage was remarkable; he separated savage dogs, swam into dangerous pools, fired off an overloaded gun, and defended himself against four robbers single-handed. His physical infirmities were partly accountable for roughness of manner. He suffered from deafness and was shortsighted to an extreme degree, although by minute attention he could often perceive objects with an accuracy which surprised his friends. He was thus often unable to observe the failings of his companions. Manners learnt in Grub Street were not delicate; his mode of gratifying a voracious appetite was even disgusting; while his dress was slovenly, and he had "no passion for clean linen." He piqued himself, indeed, upon his courtesy; and, when not provoked by opposition, or unable to perceive the failings of others, was both dignified and polite. Nobody could pay more graceful compliments, especially to ladies, and he was always the first to make advances after a quarrel. His friends never ceased to love him; and their testimony to the singular tenderness which underlay his roughness is unanimous. He loved children, and was even too indulgent to them; he rejoiced greatly when he persuaded Dr. Sumner to abolish holiday tasks, and was most attentive to the wants of his serv He was kind to animals, and bought oysters himself for his cat Hodge, that his servants might not be prejudiced against it. He loved the poor, as Mrs. Piozzi says, as she never saw any one else do; and tended to be indiscriminate in his charity.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1892, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXX, p. 44. Johnson's experiences of Booksellers were very varied. He had not quite the same opinion of Osborne that he had of Davies. But probably poor Osborne could not afford the extravagance of a pretty wife like Tom Davies. The story is well known how, when Johnson was earning the most miserable pittance as a Cataloguer for Osborne, he fell out with his employer, and, knocking him down with a folio, In the whole company of English writers from Chaucer to Carlyle there is no more sharply defined and vigorous personality; none more pronounced, more clearly shown, more easily understood. Evidently the failure of Johnson's work to impress us adequately is in no sense due to lack of individuality behind it; the fact that we are transferring our interest more and more from the work to the man shows clearly enough that the man possessed qualities which his work fails to convey. Johnson's defect as a writer lay in his inability to make his voice distinct; it does not ring clear in perfectly natural tones. When he talked, his words were charged with the electric current of his tremendous personality; when he wrote, the circuit was broken; at some point the current escaped into the air, and the reader never receives any emotion or impulse approaching a shock in intensity. It is probable that the only saving quality in Johnson's work is due to the fact that it helps us to understand him. In most cases we remember the man because of the work he did; in Johnson's case we shall remember the work because of the man who did it. - MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 1893, Essays in Literary Interpretation, p. 21. His brain was as big, or bigger, than his heart; it had made itself felt all over England by long, honest work-by brave, loud speech. He had snubbed the elegant Lord Chesterfield, who would have liked to see his name upon the first page of the great Dictionary. Not an outcast of the neighborhood but had heard of his audacious kindness; not a linkboy but knew him by the chink of his half-pence; not a beggar but had been bettered by his generous dole; not a watchman but knew him by his unwieldly hulk, and his awkward, intrepid walk; and we know him,if we know him at all-not by his "Rambler" and his "Rasselas," so much as by so much as by the story of his life.-MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1895, English Lands Letters and Kings, Queen Anne and the Georges, p. 105. We were engaged at extra-illustrating Boswell's life of Johnson, and had already got together somewhat more than eleven thousand prints when we ran against a snag, an obstacle we never could surmount. We agreed that our work would be incomplete, and therefore vain, unless we secured a picture of the book with which the great lexicographer knocked down Osborne, the bookseller at Gray's Inn Gate.-FIELD, EUGENE, 1895, The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, p, 149. "If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman. Such was the deliberate pronouncement of a philosopher verging on seventy; and, despite the ominous hint about futurity, it is surely one of the finest compliments ever paid to the sex. What is more, it accurately represents, which few compliments do, the honest conviction of the speaker. We know from his own. lips, and the testimony of his friends, that there were two things in which the Doctor's soul delighted-rapid motion, and the society of agreeable young women. Whirling along in a post-chaise was his notion of true enjoyment from a physical point of view; conversing with some sprightly beauty who could understand him and add something to the conversation, his acme of intellectual happiness. For this ordinarily uncouth and quarrelsome old man; this rampaging, browbeating controversialist-who, at other times, betrayed a savage pleasure in flouting the amenities of social intercourse could change himself into a vastly different monster when in the company of women, could sheathe his claws, smooth his bristles, and moderate his roar, when they patted and fondled him. What is stranger, he was always ready to forsake his predatory pursuits to the patting and fondling in question.-CRAIG, W. H., 1895, Doctor Johnson and the Fair Sex, p. 1. All competent critics-and he has occupied the most competent have found it not merely necessary to admit that the man was greater than his works, but not specially easy to indicate the special character of his human greatness. In mere knowledge he might sometimes go wrong; in mere taste, frequently; in crotchet, perpetually. But he was perfectly honest; there was not an atom or a shred of cant in him; his moral nature in his best moments was of the noblest, the kindest, the sanest ever known or even conceivable. We are sometimes told that his greatness is the creation of Boswell. His own age, the age of Burke and Gibbon, was neither foolish nor credulous; it had not read Boswell, and it made no mistake about Johnson. He is not the greatest or the most universal of our men of letters, but he is by far the most English; and very little shame need we take to ourselves so long as we can point to him as our literary embodiment, if not exactly our literary exemplar or masterpiece--SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, Social England, ed. Traill, vol. v, p. 256. Dr. Samuel Johnson's library, which was sold in 1785, was not a very valuable one. It consisted of 650 lots, which sold for £100. Among them was the second Shakespeare folio, now in the possession of Sir Henry Irving.—WHEATLEY, HENRY · B., 1898, Prices of Books, p. 141. POEMS Perused Johnson's "London" and "Vanity of Human Wishes." His numbers are strong in sense, and smooth in flow, but want that varied grace and inextinguishable spirit which constitute the essential charm of Pope's.-GREEN, THOMAS, 1779-1810, Diary of a Lover of Literature. Dr. Johnson, born no doubt with violent passions, yet with the organs of his senses, thro' which the fancy is stored, if not imperfect, surely far from acute, had from a very early age most cultivated his powers of ratiocination, till by degrees he grew to esteem lightly every other species of excellence: and carrying these ideas into poetry, he was too much inclined to think that to reason in verse, when the harmony of numbers, and especially if something of the ornament of poetical language, was added to the force of truth, was to attain the highest praise of the art.-BRYDGES, SIR SAMUEL EGERTON, 1800, ed. Phillips's Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, Preface, p. xlii. The fame of Dr. Johnson would not have been less widely diffused if the few poetical productions contained in the following pages had never been written; and yet the "Two Satires," and the "Prologue for the Opening of Drury Lane Theatre, are noble productions; and would have. been sufficient to throw no mean lustre on the reputation of an ordinary writer. He, like Pope, chose to be the poet of reason; not because he was deficient in imagination, for his Oriental fictions contain much of the elements of the most fanciful poetry, but his mind was so constituted that "he condemned all that had not a direct practical tendency." That he knew how to appreciate the creative faculty of the poet is evident from the character he has drawn of Shakspeare; and he would have done justice to Milton, if his prejudices against the man had not blinded his judgment to the merits of the poet. He had diligently studied the works of Dryden and Pope, and has caught the spirit, vigour and terseness of his great models. Of his lyric effusions much cannot be said: they want the enthusiasm and feeling which is the soul of such compositions. When we recollect the imperfection of two of the senses, sight and hearing, in Johnson, we shall not be surprised that he has not a keen perception of the beauties of nature, or of the powers of harmony; his want of relish for descriptive poetry, and pastoral cannot therefore be wondered at; nor his want of success in his "Odes on the Seasons." He does not paint from nature, but from books.-SINGER, S. W., 1822, British Poets, Chiswick, ed. vol. 67, pp. 148, 149. That his Tragedy ("Irene") was a great failure on the stage has been already related; that it is of extreme dulness, of a monotony altogether insufferable, and therefore tires out the reader's patience quite as much as it did the auditor's, is true; that most of his lesser pieces are only things of easy and of fairly successful execution is likewise certain, with perhaps the exception of his verses on Robert Levett's death, which have a sweetness and a tenderness seldom found in any of his compositions. But had he never written anything after the "Imitations of Juvenal," his name would have gone down to posterity as a poet of great excellence,-one who only did not reach equal celebrity with Pope, because he came after him, and did not assiduously court the muse. In truth, these two pieces are admirable, both for their matter, their diction, and their versification. . Of Johnson's Latin verses it remains to speak, and they assuredly do not rise to the level of his English, nor indeed above mediocrity. The translation of Pope's "Messiah," however, a work of his boyhood, gave a promise not fulfilled in his riper years.-BROUGHAM, HENRY LORD, 1845, Lives of Men of Letters of the Time of George III. His He was a poet of no mean order. resonant lines, informed as they often are with the force of their author's character his strong sense, his fortitude, his gloom-take possession of the memory, and suffuse themselves through one's entire system of thought.-Birrell, AuGUSTINE, 1887, Obiter Dicta, Second Series, p. 130. Dr. Johnson's epitaph on his friend Levett is as prosaic a poem as ever was written, and as strong a one. It is perhaps the only friendly epitaph in the language that contains no compliment to the object of it, in excess of the bare truth, and what Dr. Johnson could do with no other fuel to feed a genius that was never poetic in its essence, than the bare truth, is shown by the splendid culmination of the last four lines. --CRAWFURD, OSWALD, 1896, ed., Lyrical Verse from Elizabeth to Victoria, p. 431, note. His work in verse is very small, and though all of it is scholarly and some elegant, it is universally composed in obedience to a very narrow and jejune theory of English versification and English poetics generally. Nothing perhaps but the beautiful epitaph on his friend Levett, "London" is to me one of those few imitations that have all the ease and all the spirit of an original. The same man's verses on the opening of Garrick's theatre are far from bad.-GRAY, THOMAS, 1751? Letter to Horace Walpole; Works, ed. Gosse, vol. II, p. 220. This poem of Mr. Johnson's is the best imitation of the original that has appeared in our language, being possessed of all the force and satirical resentment of Juvenal. Imitation gives us a much truer idea of the ancients than ever translation could do. GOLDSMITH, OLIVER, 1767, The Beauties of English Poetry. Dr. Johnson's "London, a Satire," is a noble poem. But his great moral genius was constrained in composition by the perpetual parody on his powerful prototype, Juvenal. To have shown so much genius and so much ingenuity at one and the same time, to have been so original even in imitation, places him in the highest order of minds. But his range was here circumscribed; for he had to move parallel with the Roman,-finding out in every passage corresponding and kindred sins, and in order to preserve-which he did wondrously-the similitude "To bridle in his struggling muse with pain, Which long'd to launch into a nobler strain." -WILSON, JOHN, 1828, The Man of Ton, Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 23, p. 835. "London" is marked by genuine public spirit; at the same time we see quite as much of the man as of the moralist in the poet's characteristic allusions to the penalties of poverty, his antipathy to the Whigs, and his dislike of foreigners. The story that "Thales" was meant for Savage, and that the occasion of the poem was the departure of the latter from London after his trial, is confuted by dates, but we may be sure that the poem gives us a real representation of Johnson's feelings as a struggling author and a political partisan. COURTHOPE, WILLIAM JOHN, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, p. 246. LIFE OF SAVAGE 1744 No finer specimen of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead; and a discerning critic might have confidently predicted that the author was destined to be the founder of a new school of English eloquence.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1843, Samuel Johnson, Critical and Historical Essays. In its early days Johnson was the chief contributor to its pages. [The Gentleman's Magazine]. He had a room set apart for him at St. John's Gate, where he wrote as fast as he could drive his pen, throwing the sheets off, when completed, to the "copy" boy. The "Life of Savage" was written anonymously, in 1744, and Mr. Harte spoke in high terms of the book, while dining with Cave. The publisher told him afterwards: "Harte, you made a man very happy the other day at my house by your praise of 'Savage's Life." " "How so? none were present but you and I." Cave replied, "You might observe I sent a plate of victuals behind the screen; there lurked one whose dress was too shabby for him to appear; your praise pleased him much."-CURsellers, p. 59. WEN, HENRY, 1873, A History of Book The best extant illustration of the life of the struggling authors of the time.STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1879, Samuel Johnson (English Men of Letters), p. 29. It is the longest and most elaborate of Johnson's essays in biography, and may still be read with great pleasure, in spite of various patent faults. It recounted, with all detail, a scandal, into the truth of which Johnson had not taken the pains to inquire; it was but careless in the statement of fact which lay easily within the writer's circle of experience; and it treated with extreme indulgence a character which, in a stranger, would have called down the moralist's sternest reproof. The critical passages now escape censure only because so few in the present day read the works examined. But the little book was undeniably lively; it contained several anecdotes admirably narrated, and its graver parts displayed the development of Johnson's studied magnificence of language. Good biography was still rare in England, and "The Account of Savage" attracted |