Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies I.djvu/405

 Johnson, with great gravity, ' I soon laid aside my gold-laced hat, lest it should make me proud V The amount of the three benefit nights for the tragedy of Irene, it is to be feared, was not very considerable, as the profit, that stimulating motive, never invited the author to another dramatic attempt 2. Some years afterwards, when the present writer was intimate with Garrick, and knew Johnson to be in distress, he asked the manager why he did not produce another tragedy for his Lichfield friend? Garrick's answer was remarkable : ' When Johnson writes tragedy, declamation roars, and passion sleeps*: when Shakspeare wrote, he dipped his pen in his own heart.'

��There may, perhaps, be a degree of(sameness)in this regular way of tracing an author from one work to another, and the reader may feel the effect of a tedious monotony; but in the life of Johnson there are no other landmarks. He was now forty years old, and had mixed but little with the world 4. He followed no profession, transacted no business, and was a stranger to what is called a town-life. We are now arrived at the brightest period he had hitherto known. His name broke out upon mankind with a degree of lustre that promised a triumph over all his difficulties. The Life of Savage was admired as

1 ' He humourously observed to Till declamation roared whilst Mr. Langton, " that when in that passion slept.'

dress he could not treat people with Johnson's Prologue on the Opening

the same ease as when in his usual of Drury Lane Theatre.

plain clothes." ' Life, i. 200. 4 Boswell, writing of this time,

2 Mr. Croker says that ' it appears says : ' Nothing can be more erro- by a MS. note in Isaac Reed's copy neous than the notion which some of Murphy's Life, that the receipts persons have entertained, that John- of the third, sixth, and ninth nights, son was then a retired authour, igno- after deducting sixty guineas a night rant of the world ; and, of conse- for the expenses of the house, quence, that he wrote only from his amounted to ^195 i"js.: Johnson imagination when he described cleared therefore, with the copy- characters and manners. He said right, very nearly ^300.' to me, that before he wrote that

By his London and Vanity of work [The Rambler}, he had been

Human Wishes he only made twenty- " running about the world," as he

five guineas. Life, i. 124, 193, n. expressed it, more than almost any

3 'From bard to bard the frigid body.' Life,\. 215.

caution crept,

C c 2 a beautiful

�� �