Page:Imperialdictiona02eadi Brandeis.pdf/1132

JOH and about the same time he received the offer of a living if he would take orders. He preferred remaining in the condition of layman, probably from the impression that he had not the requisite character and habits for the clerical office. He was too conscientious to enter the priest's office merely as a pecuniary convenience; and although endowed with piety of heart, and a firm believer in the christian faith, he felt that his vocation was not in the pulpit, and honourably preferred still to earn bread by the labours of the pen. In 1755 the great dictionary at length appeared, and was received with an enthusiasm never bestowed on any similar work before or since. Its demerits were not few, but its merits were incomparably greater. The former were at first unobserved or disregarded; and the great fact, patent to all the world, that there was at last a dictionary of the language which could stand as authoritative, outweighed a thousand times the minor considerations of erroneous derivations and the absence of the knowledge of the real sources of the English tongue. The happy quotations; the perspicuity and precision of the definitions; the completeness of the work; and, above all, the amazing amount of conscientious labour everywhere evident—these were the qualities which won for Johnson's Dictionary its thoroughly deserved reputation. Superseded in great measure as it now may be, it was a great national work, entitling its author—for if in any case a dictionary can be said to have an author, it was pre-eminently in the case of Samuel Johnson—to national recognition and national reward. It added greatly to Johnson's fame, but in the meantime little or nothing to his resources; nor was it till 1762 it obtained for the lexicographer a royal pension of £300 a-year—certainly as well deserved as any pension that ever was granted by the British crown. It would be out of place to attempt here a complete list of Johnson's many publications—for that purpose the reader must consult Boswell's Life; but when the dictionary was completed, he still continued to ply his pen systematically; abridged his dictionary; wrote for the Literary Magazine—one of the articles, a review of Soame Jenyns' Inquiry into the Origin of Evil, being esteemed one of the very best of his productions; commenced the "Idler," which went on weekly for two years; and lived a life of laborious literary toil. At this period he lost his mother, and to defray the funeral expenses and some small debts, wrote the curious story of "Rasselas," which was singularly successful, and long remained the most popular of his writings. Anything more absurd than "Rasselas," as matter of fact, could scarcely be conceived; but the places and persons are merely taken to convey certain moral teachings and reflections. Yet "Rasselas" was a genuine expression of Johnson's own style of thought, and certain it is that it must have struck some chord in the public mind, or it never could have attained its remarkable success. To Johnson it seems to bear somewhat the same relation that Werther bears to Göthe.

The year 1762 brought a complete change in Johnson's career. George III. had come to the throne, and the tories were in power. A pension of £300 was granted to the industrious author, now to be industrious no more for a period of years. With ease of circumstances, his native indolence revived, and he abandoned himself to talk. For ten years he wrote nothing except a few pamphlets, which in his laborious days would scarcely have cost him a week's work. But if he did not write he talked, and happily for literature, he soon fell in with a genius for recording his sayings, unsurpassed probably in the whole history of letters. This genius was James Boswell, who formed Johnson's acquaintance in 1763, and photographed him for all after generations. "Everything about him," says Macaulay, "his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus' dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked the 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 orange peel, 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." Such is the picture of the man of literature of the eighteenth century, drawn by the hand of the man of literature of the nineteenth. Johnson had now his period of relaxation, and came into familiar contact with the celebrated men of his day. At his weekly club he met Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Gibbon, Sir William Jones, Topham Beauclerc, Bennet Langton, and James Boswell, and there he laid down the law with a solemnity of diction little less than magnificent. He talked, in fact, better than he wrote, and it is to his talk, not his pen, that he owes the place he holds in the estimation of England. His sledge-hammer style of conversation is altogether unequalled by anything known elsewhere. In 1765 the university of Dublin conferred on him a doctor's degree, but he did not use the title till ten years after, when Oxford was moved to extend the same honour. It was at this period that he took up his residence with Mr. Thrale at Streatham. Henry Thrale was a rich brewer, benevolent and hospitable, whose young wife made it a duty to take care of Johnson, and in many ways to conduce to the comfort of his declining years. He accompanied them to Bath, Brighton, and Wales, and with them made a short excursion to Paris. But he still preserved his home in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, and there his own beneficence was extended to the singular inmates who found in him a protector and a friend. In 1773, when Johnson was sixty-four years of age, Boswell prevailed on him to undertake a journey to Scotland. The account of his journey to the Hebrides has been preserved in one of his best known works. In it he indulged in some caustic observations which made the work less popular in Scotland than England, and also exposed what he considered to be the impudent fraud of Macpherson in palming Ossian off for original poetry. A tory pamphlet against the Americans, called "Taxation no Tyranny," was also published at this time. In 1777 he commenced "The Lives of the English Poets;" and this work, which is probably Johnson's best, appeared in 1779-81.

Age was now approaching, and various warnings were given that he must prepare to quit the scene of earthly labour. For many years Mr. Thrale's house had been his home; but Mr. Thrale was dead, and his wife had fixed her affections on an Italian. Johnson by no means approved of the transfer; and, supposing his presence no longer acceptable, he returned to his house in Bolt Court, where death had also been busy among his dependents. Paralysis sounded the first stroke of the knell in 1783, and in 1784 dropsy came to repeat the summons. Nor were friends unmindful of the old man who, in his better times, had done so much to relieve the calamities of others. The fear of death had haunted him during life, but on the near approach of the grim enemy his faith waxed stronger and his confidence more secure. On the 13th December, 1784, he took his departure from this nether world, and on the 20th his body, with due solemnity, was committed to Westminster abbey. In Poet's corner—near the monument to Shakspeare, and beside the grave of David Garrick—lie the remains of Samuel Johnson.

To explain the vast influence which Dr. Johnson exercised in past times is not now easy. His opinions were once regarded with a reverence that raised him to a species of dictatorship in the world of English letters. That he was a man of probity and of strong convictions is no sufficient explanation. The convictions of a man of small intellect, though of great importance to himself, are of no importance to the public, and never can acquire power over the public mind; but Johnson, though specially distinguished in no branch of scholarship or literature, did attain to singular power over the mind of England, and for that circumstance there must have been a reason. He appears to have represented the England of his day. His very prejudices did not detract from the estimation in which he was held. To the English eye he seemed a large, bulky, powerful man in intellect and moral character, not less than in person—while his pompous sentences gave the appearance of dignity to his utterances, and gratified the ear of those who supposed that wisdom must reside in words so high-sounding and imposing. In the popular mind, he became a sort of champion who could do battle with all comers for the established institutions of the country; and to him the suffrages of the nation were accorded as they are to a great naval or military commander who has fought his way upward, and at last has arrived at the head of his profession. With all his dogmatism, his terrible insolence, and insufferable opinionativeness, he was a man of true and rare benevolence of disposition, of kindly and considerate nature—that acknowledged fellowship with the distressed, and held out a helping hand to the weak and weary.—P. E. D.  JOHNSON,, an industrious botanist of the 