Treatise on the Study of Polite Literature, containing the history of
learning, directions for editions, commentaries, &c.
Maxims, Characters, and Sentiments, after the manner of Bruyere,
collected out of ancient authors, particularly the Greek, with
Apophthegms.
Classical Miscellanies, select translations from ancient Greek and Latin
authors.
Lives of Illustrious Persons, as well of the active as the learned, in
imitation of Plutarch.
Judgment of the learned upon English Authors.
Poetical Dictionary of the English Tongue.
Considerations upon the Present State of London.
Collection of Epigrams, with notes and observations.
Observations on the English Language, relating to words, phrases, and
modes of speech.
Minutiae Literariae; miscellaneous reflections, criticisms, emendations,
notes.
History of the Constitution.
Comparison of Philosophical and Christian Morality, by sentences
collected from the moralists and fathers.
Plutarch's Lives, in English, with notes.
_Poetry, and Works of Imagination._
Hymn to Ignorance.
The Palace of Sloth, a vision.
Coluthus, to be translated.
Prejudice, a poetical Essay.
The Palace of Nonsense, a vision.
In his last illness, he told Mr. Nichols [13] that he had thought of
translating Thuanus, and when that worthy man (in whom he had begun to
place much confidence) suggested to him that he would be better employed
in writing a Life of Spenser, by which he might gratify the King, who
was known to be fond of that poet, he replied that he would readily do
it if he could obtain any new materials.
His stature was unusually high, and his person large and well
proportioned, but he was rendered uncouth in his appearance by the scars
which his scrophulous disease had impressed upon him, by convulsive
motions, and by the slovenliness of his garb. His eyes, of which the
sight was very imperfect, were of a light grey colour, yet had withal a
wildness and penetration, and at times a fierceness of expression, that
could not be encountered without a sensation of fear. He had a strange
way of making inarticulate sounds, or of muttering to himself in a voice
loud enough to be overheard, what was passing in his thoughts, when in
company. Thus, one day, when he was on a visit to Davies the bookseller,
whose pretty wife is spoken of by Churchill, he was heard repeating part
of the Lord's Prayer, and, on his saying, lead us not into temptation,
Davies turned round, and whispered his wife, "You are the occasion of
this, my dear."
It is said by Boswell, that "his temperament was so morbid, that he
never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs: when
he walked, it was the struggling gait of one in fetters; when he rode,
he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a
balloon." His daily habits were exceedingly irregular; he took his meals
at unusual hours; and either ate voraciously, or abstained rigorously.
He studied by fits and starts; but when he did read, it was with such
rapidity and eagerness, that, as some one said, it seemed as if he would
tear out the heart of the book he was upon. He could with difficulty
believe any one who spoke of having read any book from the beginning to
the end. His mode of composition was in like manner vigorous and hasty;
though his sentences have all the appearance of being measured; but it
was his custom to speak no less than to write with a studious attention
to the numerousness of his phrase, so that he was enabled to do that by
habit which others usually accomplish by a particular effort.
In matters of fact, his regard to truth was so punctilious, that it was
observed he always talked as if he was talking upon oath; and he was
desirous of exacting the same preciseness from those over whom he had
authority or influence. He had, however, a practice that was not
entirely consistent with this love of veracity; for he would sometimes
defend that side of a question, which he thought wrong, because it
afforded him a more favourable opportunity of exhibiting his reasoning
or his wit. Thus when he began, "Why, Sir, as to the good or evil of
card-playing;" Garrick would make this arch comment on his proem; "Now
he is considering which side he shall take." It may he urged that his
hearers were aware of this propensity which he had
--To make the worse appear
The better argument,
and were therefore in no danger of being misled by it. But an excuse of
the same kind will serve for the common liar, that he is known, and
therefore disbelieved. It behoved him to be the more scrupulous in this
particular, because he knew that Boswell took minutes of his ordinary
conversation. Some of his idle sophisms, which thus became current,
have, I fear, led to serious mischief; such as the opinion that an
author may be at liberty to deny his having written a book to which he
has not affixed his name; his extenuation of incontinence in the master
of a family, and the gloss he put on the crime of covetousness; which
last error was not confined to his conversation, but mingled itself with
his writings, though no one could well be freer from any taint of the
vice in his own life. Many a man may have indulged his inclinations to
evil, with much less compunction, while he has imagined himself
sheltered under the sanction of the moralist who watches one side of the
entrance into the nave of St. Paul's.
There was, in his mind, a strange mixture of credulity and doubtfulness.
He did not disbelieve either in the existence of ghosts, or in the
possibility of commuting other metals into gold; but was very slow to
credit any fact that was at all extraordinary. He would tell of Cave's
having seen an apparition, without much apparent doubt; and, with more
certainty, of his having been himself addressed by the voice of his
absent mother. The deception practised by the girl in Cock Lane, who was
a ventriloquist, is well known to have wrought on him so successfully,
as to make him go and watch in the church, where she pretended the
spirit of a young woman to be, which had disclosed to her the manner of
its having been violently separated from the body. On this occasion,
Boswell endeavours in vain to clear him from the imputation of a
weakness, which was but too agreeable to the rest of his character. Yet
on Hume's argument against miracles, that it is more probable witnesses
should lie or be mistaken than that they should happen, he remarked, as
I think, very judiciously, that Hume, taking the proposition simply, is
right; but that the Christian revelation is not proved by the miracles
alone, but as they are connected with prophecies, and with the doctrines
in confirmation of which the miracles were wrought.
He was devout, moral, and humane; frequent and earnest in his petitions
for the divine succour, anxious to sublime his nature by disengaging it
from worldly soil, and prompt to sympathise with the sorrows, and out of
his scanty means, to relieve the necessities of others; but such is the
imperfection of man, that his piety was apt to degenerate into
superstition; his abstinence yielded to slight temptations, and his
charity was often not proof against a discrepancy of opinion either in
politics or literature.
Among his friends, Beauclerk seems most to have engaged his love,
Langton his respect, and Burke his admiration. The first was conspicuous
for wit, liveliness of feelings, and gaiety; the next for rectitude of
conduct, piety, and learning; the last for knowledge, sagacity, and
eloquence. His praise of Reynolds, that he was the most invulnerable of
men, one of whom, if he had a quarrel with him, he should find it the
most difficult to say any ill, was praise rather of the negative kind.
The younger Warton, he contrived to alienate from him, as is related in
the life of that poet. There was, indeed, an entire harmony in their
political principles; but questions of literature touch an author yet
more sensibly than those of state; and the "idem sentire de republica,"
was an imperfect bond of amity between men who appreciated so
differently the Comus and Lycidas of Milton, and the Bucolics of
Theocritus. To Savage and Goldsmith he was attached by similarity of
fortunes and pursuits. A yet closer bond of sympathy united him with
Collins, as the reader will see in the following extracts from letters
which he wrote to Dr. Warton.
How little can we exult in any intellectual powers or literary
entertainments, when we see the fate of poor Collins. I knew him a few
years ago, full of hopes and full of projects, versed in many languages,
high in fancy, and strong in retention. This busy and forcible mind is
now under the government of those who lately would not have been able to
comprehend the least and most narrow of its designs.--March 8, 1754.
Poor dear Collins. Let me know whether you think it would give him
pleasure that I should write to him. I have often been near his state,
and therefore have it in great commisseration. * * *
What becomes of poor dear Collins? I wrote him a letter which he never
answered. I suppose writing is very troublesome to him. That man is no
common loss. The moralists all talk of the uncertainty of fortune, and
the transitoriness of beauty; but it is yet more dreadful to consider
that the powers of the mind are equally liable to change, that
understanding may make its appearance, and depart, that it may blaze and
expire.--April 15, 1756.[14]
Difference of opinion respecting the American war did not separate him
from Burke and Fox; and when the nation was afterwards divided by the
struggle between the court and populace on one side and the aristocracy
on the other, though his principles determined him to that party in
which he found the person though perhaps not the interests of his
sovereign, yet his affections continued with the great leader in the
House of Commons, who was opposed to it. "I am," said he, "for the King
against Fox; but I am for Fox against Pitt. The King is my master; but I
do not know Pitt; and Fox is my friend;" and to Burke, when he was a
candidate for a seat in the new Parliament, he wished, as he told him
with a smile, "all the success that an honest man could wish him." Even
towards Wilkes his asperity was softened down into good humour by their
meeting together over a plentiful table at the house of Dilly the
bookseller.
When he had offended any by contradiction or rudeness, it was seldom
long before he sought to be reconciled and forgiven. But though his
private enmities were easily appeased, yet where he considered the cause
of truth to be concerned, his resentment was vehement and unrelenting.
That imposture, particularly, which he with good reason supposed
Macpherson to have practised on the world with respect to the poems of
Ossian, provoked him to vengeance, such as the occasion seemed hardly to
demand.
Of his dry pleasantry in conversation there are many instances recorded.
When one of his acquaintances had introduced him to his brother, at the
same time telling him that he would find him become very agreeable after
he had been some time in his company, he replied, "Sir, I can wait." To
a stupid justice of the peace, who had wearied him with a long account
of his having caused four convicts to be condemned to transportation, he
answered, "I heartily wish I were a fifth;" a repartee that calls to our
mind Horace's answer to the impertinent fellow:
Omnes composui; Felices! mine ego resto.
A physician endeavouring to bring to his recollection that he had been
in his company once before, mentioned among other circumstances his
having that day worn so fine a coat, that it could not but have
attracted his notice. "Sir," said Johnson, "had you been dipped in
Pactolus, I should not have noticed you." He could on occasion be more
polite and complimentary. When Mrs. Siddons, with whom, in a letter to
Mrs. Thrale, he expressed himself highly pleased, paid him a visit,
there happened not to be any chair ready for her. "Madam," said he, "you
who so often occasion the want of seats to others will the more readily
excuse the want of one yourself."
His scholarship was rather various than accurate or profound. Yet Dr.
Burney, the younger, supposed him capable of giving a Greek word for
almost every English one. Romances were always a favourite kind of
reading with him. Felixmarte of Hircania was his regular study during
part of a summer which he spent in the country at the parsonage-house of
Dr. Percy. On a journey to Derbyshire, when he had in view his Italian
expedition, he took with him Il Palermino d'Inghilterra, to refresh his
knowledge of the language. To this taste he had been heard to impute his
unsettled disposition, and his averseness from the choice of any
profession. One of the most singular qualities of his mind was the
rapidity with which it was able to seize and master almost any subject,
however abstruse or novel, that was offered to its speculation. To this
quickness of apprehension was joined an extraordinary power of memory,
so that he was able to recall at pleasure most passages of a book, which
had once strongly impressed him. In his sixty-fourth year, he attempted
to acquire the low Dutch language. He had a perpetual thirst of
knowledge; and six months before his death requested Dr. Burney to teach
him the scale of music. "Teach me," said Johnson to him, "at least, the
alphabet of your language." What he knew, he loved to communicate.
According to that description of the stu-[**possibly "student"--rest of
word(s) missing in original] in Chaucer,
Gladly would he teach, and gladly learn.
These endowments were accompanied with a copiousness of words, in which
it would be difficult to name any writer except Barrow that has
surpassed him. Yet his prose style is very far from affording a model
that can safely be proposed for our imitation. He seems to exert his
powers of intellect and of language indiscriminately, and with equal
effort, on the smallest and the most important occasions; and the effect
is something similar to that of a Chinese painting, in which, though all
the objects separately taken are accurately described, yet the whole is
entirely wanting in a proper relief of perspective. What is observed by
Milton of the conduct of life, may be applied to composition, "that
there is a scale of higher and lower duties," and he who confuses it
will infallibly fall short of that proportion which is necessary to
excellence no less in matters of taste than of morals.
He was more intent in balancing the period, than in developing the
thought or image that was present to his mind. Sometimes we find that he
multiplies words without amplifying the sense, and that the ear is
gratified at the expense of the understanding. This is more particularly
the case in the Ramblers, which being called for at short and stated
intervals, were sometimes composed in such haste, that he had not
leasure even to read them before they were printed; nor can we wonder at
the dissatisfaction he expressed some years afterwards, when he
exclaimed that he thought they had been better. In the Idler there is
more brevity, and consequently more compression.
When Johnson trusts to his own strong understanding in a matter of which
he has the full command, and does not aim at setting it off by futile
decorations, he is always respectable, and sometimes great. But when he
attempts the ornamental, he is heavy and inelegant; and the awkwardness
of his efforts is more perceptible from the hugeness of the body that is
put in motion to produce them. He is like the animal whom Milton
describes as making sport for our first parents in Paradise--
--Th' unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might.
It is a good beast for carrying a burden or trampling down a foe, but a
very indifferent one at a lavolta or a coranto.
His swelling style is readily counterfeited. Our common advertisements
have amply revenged themselves for his ridicule of their large promises
in the Idler, by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as
his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At
the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine
our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial
barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations."
The result of his labour is awkward stateliness and irksome uniformity.
In his dread of incongruous idioms he writes almost without any idiom at
all.
He has sometimes been considered as having innovated on our tongue by
introducing big words into it from the Latin: but he commonly does no
more than revive terms which had been employed by our old writers and
afterwards fallen into disuse; nor does he, like them, employ even these
terms in senses which scholars only would be likely to understand.
At the time of writing the Dictionary, he had a notion that our language
"for almost a century had been departing from its original Teutonic
character, and deviating towards a Gallic structure and phraseology,
from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it by making our
ancient volumes the ground-work of style, admitting among the additions
of later times, only such as may supply real deficiencies, such as are
readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with
our native idiom." But a little reflection will shew us the vanity of
this attempt. Since the age of Chaucer, at least, that is for more than
400 years, our language has been increased by continual transfusions
from the French. To these have been added, from time to time, similar
accessions from other languages, both ancient and modern. Thus a
copiousness and a flexibility, which in the instance of the Greek seem
to have arisen out of that subtilty of intellect which gave birth to
endless subdivision and distinction, have been in some measure
compensated in our own by the influxes which it has received from the
languages of many other people; and have been yet further improved by
that liberty which it is to be hoped we shall always retain, each man,
of speaking his thoughts after his own guise, without too much regard to
any set mode or fashion.
He had before said, in this same preface, that "our knowledge of the
northern literature is so scanty, that of words undoubtedly Teutonic the
original is not always to be found in any ancient language; and I have
therefore," he adds, "inserted Dutch or German substitutes, which I
consider not as radical, but parallel; not as the parents, but sisters
of the English." And in his history of the English language, speaking of
our Saxon ancestors, to whom we must, I suppose, go for that Teutonic
original which he so strongly recommends, he observes that, "their
speech having been always cursory and extemporaneous, must have been
artless and unconnected, without any modes of transition or involution
of clauses, which abruptness and inconnection may be found even in their
later writings." Of the additions which have been made to this our
original poverty, who shall say what ought to be rejected, and what
retained? who shall say what deficiencies are real, and what imaginary?
what the genius of our tongue may admit of, and what it must refuse? and
in a word, what that native idiom is, a coalition with which is to be
thus studiously consulted?
Throughout his Lives of the Poets, he constantly betrays a want of
relish for the more abstracted graces of the art. When strong sense and
reasoning were to be judged of, these he was able to appreciate justly.
When the passions or characters were described, he could to a certain
extent decide whether they were described truly or no. But as far as
poetry has relation to the kindred arts of music and painting, to both
of which he was confessedly insensible, it could not be expected that he
should have much perception of its excellences. Of statuary, he said
that its value was owing to its difficulty; and that a fellow will hack
half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that nearly
resembles a man. What shall be thought of his assertion, that before the
time of Dryden there was no poetical diction, no system of words at once
refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness
of terms appropriated to particular arts, and "that words too familiar
or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet?" It might with more show of
reason be affirmed, that in proportion as our writers have adopted such
a system as he speaks of, and have rejected words for no other cause
than that they were either too familiar or too remote, we have been
receding from the proper language of poetry. One of the chief ornaments,
or more properly speaking, the constituents of poetical language, is the
use of metaphors; and metaphors never find their way to the mind more
readily, or affect it more powerfully, than when they are clothed in
familiar words. Even a naked sentiment will lose none of its force from
being conveyed in the most homely terms which our mother tongue can
afford. They are the sounds which we have been used to from our infancy,
which have been early connected with our hopes and fears, and still
continue to meet us in our own homes and by our firesides, that will
most certainly awaken those feelings with which the poet is chiefly
concerned. As for the terms which Johnson calls remote, if I understand
him rightly, they too may be employed occasionally, either when the
attention is to be roused by something unusual, or for the sake of
harmony; or it may be for no other reason than because the poet chooses
thus to diversify his diction, so as to give a stronger relief to that
which is familiar and common, by the juxtaposition of its contrary. Of
this there can be no doubt, that, whoever lays down such arbitrary rules
as Johnson has here prescribed, will find himself mocked at every turn
by the power of genius, which meets with nothing in art or nature that
it cannot convert to its own use, and which delights to produce the
greatest effects by means apparently the most inadequate.
He particularly valued himself on the Life of Cowley, for the sake of
those observations which he had introduced into it on the metaphysical
poets. Here he has mistaken the character of Marino, whom he supposes to
be at the head of them. Marino abounds in puerile conceits; but they are
not far-fetched, like those of Donne and Cowley; they generally lie on
the surface, and often consist of nothing more than a mere play upon
words; so that, if to be a punster is to be a metaphysician, Marino is a
poetical Heraclitus. But Johnson had caught the cant of the age, in
which it was usual to designate almost any thing absurd or extravagant
by the name of metaphysical.
It is difficult to suppose that he had read some of the works on which
he passes a summary sentence. The comedy of Love's Riddle, which he
says, "adds little to the wonders of Cowley's minority," deserved to be
commended at least for the style, which is a specimen of pure and
unaffected English. Of Congreve's novel, he tells us, that he had rather
praise it than read it. Judging from the letters of Congreve, his only
writings in prose which it has been my good fortune to meet with, and
which, as I remember, contain some admirable remarks on the distinction
between wit and humour, I should conclude that one part of his character
as a writer has yet to make its way to the public notice. I have heard
it observed by a lady, that Johnson, in his Life of Milton, is like a
dog incensed and terrified at the presence of some superior creature, at
whom he snarls, then runs away, and then returns to snarl again. If the
comparison be a just one, it may be added, in extenuation of Johnson's
malignity, that he is at least a dog who thinks himself to be attacking
the inveterate foe of his master; for Milton's hostility to a kingly
government was the crime which he could not forgive.