Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/47

Rh sympathy of the writer is given less to Johnson than to certain unnamed virtuous men who have had to content themselves with a smaller share of public approbation. ‘There have been many men, who were more uniformly pious, and more uniformly benevolent, than Dr. Johnson, and who had neither his arrogance, nor his bigotry; and such men, in a moral and religious view, were superior characters. There were such men before the death of this celebrated writer, and there can be no reasonable doubt but that such men are yet remaining.’ What if one of them were Dr. Joseph Towers?

The last of these predecessors of Boswell is Sir John Hawkins, knight, who published his Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1787. Since the early days of The Gentleman’s Magazine, Hawkins had been a friend of Johnson, who called him ‘a most unclubable man,’ but permitted no one else to abuse him. Boswell speaks of his ‘bulky tome’ not without respect—indeed, Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale are the only two biographers of Johnson whom he treats seriously as rivals. If he sometimes seems to envy them, it is envy not of their literary skill, but of their prolonged intimacy with Johnson, and their matchless opportunities. They have both been too much neglected and decried; Boswell has conquered but has not superseded them, and their best reminiscences and anecdotes are almost as good as anything to be found in his own pages.

The stream of independent record was not checked by the appearance of Boswell’s Life. A collected edition of Johnson’s works, in twelve volumes, was published in 1792, with a prefatory Essay on the Life and Genius of Samuel Johnson, written by Arthur Murphy, editor of Fielding, biographer of Garrick, and