Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies I.djvu/468

 ��Essay on

��/sentiments, and advancing positions, for mere amusement, or

the pleasure of discussion, Criticism has endeavoured to make

Vhim answerable for what, perhaps, he never seriously thought '.

/ His diary, which has been printed, discovers still more. We

( have before us the very heart of the man, with all his inward

\ consciousness. And yet neither in the open paths of life, nor in

nis secret recesses, has any one vice been discovered. We see

him reviewing every year of his life, and severely censuring

himself, for not keeping resolutions, which morbid melancholy,

and other bodily infirmities, rendered impracticable. We see

him for every little defect imposing on himself voluntary penance,

going through the day with only one cup of tea without milk 2 ,

and to the last, amidst paroxysms and remissions of illness,

forming plans of study and resolutions to amend his life 3. Many

of his scruples may be called weaknesses ; but they are the

weaknesses of a good, a pious, and most excellent man.

His person, it is well known, was large and unwieldy 4. His

��1 ' He appeared to have a pleasure in contradiction, especially when any opinion whatever was delivered with an air of confidence; so that there was hardly any topick, if not one of the great truths of Religion and Morality, that he might not have been incited to argue, either for or against.' Life, iii. 24.

2 ' His prayers for the dead and his minute account of the rigour with which he observed church fasts, whether he drank tea or coffee, whether with sugar or without, and whether one or two dishes of either, are the most important items to be found in this childish register of the great Johnson, supreme dictator in the chair of literature, and almost a driveller in his closet.' Cowper's Works, ed. 1836, v. 152.

'Yet he was himself under the tyranny of scruples as unreasonable as those of Hudibras or Ralpho. . . . He has gravely noted down in his

��diary that he once committed the sin of drinking coffee on Good Friday. .... With what a storm of invective he would have overwhelmed any man who had blamed him for cele brating the redemption of mankind with sugarless tea and butterless buns.' Macaulay's Essays, ed. 1843,

i- 394-

Cowper was unaware that his own state was far worse than Johnson's, whose superstition was tempered by great laxness of practice. ' The sin of drinking coffee ' is in Macaulay's article but not in Johnson's diary. See ante, p. 75.

3 Life, iv. 134. Ante, p. 99.

In 1764 he recorded : 'I have now spent fifty-five years in resolving.' Ante, p. 31.

4 The author of the Life of Dr. Johnson, published by Kearsley, says, p. 87 : 'His face was composed of large coarse features, which from a studious turn when composed looked

nerves

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