sayings of Johnson's that were related to me by Mr. Price, of Lichfield.
After passing an evening together at Mr. Seward's, the father of the
poetess, where, in the course of conversation, the words "Me miserable!"
in Paradise Lost, had been commended as highly pathetic, they had walked
some way along the street in silence, which the good man was not likely
first to break, when Johnson suddenly stopped, and turning round to him,
exclaimed, "Sir! don't you think that 'Me miserable' is miserable
stuff?" On another occasion he thus whimsically described the different
manner in which he felt himself disposed towards a Whig and a Tory.
"If," said he, "I saw a Whig and a Tory drowning, I would first save the
Tory; and when I saw that he was safe, not till then, I would go and
help the Whig; but the dog should duck first; the dog should duck;"
laughing with pleasure at the thoughts of the Whig's ducking.
The principal charm of the Lives of the Poets is in the store of
information which they contain. He had been, as he says somewhere of his
own father, "no careless observer of the passages of the times." In the
course of a long life, he had heard, and read, and seen much; and this
he communicates with such force and vivacity, and illustrates by
observations so pertinent and striking, that we recur again and again to
his pages as we would to so many portraits traced by the hand of a great
master, in spite of our belief that the originals were often
misrepresented, that some were flattered, and the defects of others
still more overcharged. In his very errors as a critic there is often
shewn more ability than in the right judgments of most other. When he is
most wrong, he gives us some good reason for his being so. He is often
mistaken, but never trivial and insipid. It is more safe to trust to him
when he commends than when he dispraises; when he enlarges the
boundaries of criticism which his predecessors had contracted, than when
he sets up new fences of his own. The higher station we can take, the
more those petty limits will disappear, which confine excellence to
particular forms and systems. The critic who condemns that which the
generality of mankind, or even the few of those more refined in their
taste, have long agreed in admiring, may naturally conclude the fault to
be in himself; that there is in his mind or his organs some want of
capacity for the reception of a certain species of pleasure. When
Johnson rejected pastoral comedy, as being representative of _scenes_
adapted chiefly "to please barbarians and children," he might have
suspected that his own eye-sight, rather than pastoral comedy, was to
blame. When he characterized blank verse, "as verse only to the eye," he
might reasonably have questioned the powers of his own hearing. But
this, and more than this, we may forgive him, for his successful
vindication of Shakspeare from the faults objected to him by the French
critics.
It is in his biographical works that Johnson is most pleasing and most
instructive. His querulousness takes away much both from the
agreeableness and the use of his moral writings. Addison has represented
our nature in its most attractive forms; but Swift makes us turn with
loathing from its deformities, and Johnson causes us to shudder at its
misery.
Like most of the writers of that time, he made use of his poetry only as
the means of introducing himself to the public. We cannot regret, as in
the case of Goldsmith, that he put it to no further service. He took
little delight in those appearances either of nature or art, for which
the poet ought to have the eye of a painter. Nor had he much more sense
of the elegant in numbers and in sound. There were indeed certain rounds
of metrical arrangement which he loved to repeat, but he could not go
beyond them. How very limited his perceptions of this kind were, we may
be convinced by reading his strictures on Dionysius the Halicarnassian
in the Rambler, and the opinions on Milton's versification, which in the
Idler he has put into the mouth of a minute critic, only to ridicule
them, though they are indeed founded in truth. Johnson was not one of
those whom Plato calls the [Greek: philaekooi kai philotheamones], "who
gladly acknowledge the beautiful wherever it is met with, in sounds, and
colours, and figures, and all that is by art compounded from these;"
much less had he ascended "to that abstract notion of beauty" which the
same philosopher considers it so much more difficult to attain.[15]
In his tragedy, the dramatis personae are like so many statues "stept
from their pedestal to take the air." They come on the stage only to
utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid
similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy
mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays
every thing prostrate before him. This style is better suited to his
imitations of the two satires of Juvenal. Of the first of these, "the
London," Gray, in a letter to Horace Walpole, says that "to him it is
one of those few imitations, that has all the ease and all the spirit of
an original." The other is not at all inferior to it. Johnson was not
insensible to such praise; and, could he have known how favourably Gray
had spoken of him, would, I doubt not, have been more just to that poet,
whom, besides the petulant criticism on him in his Life, he presumed in
conversation to call "a heavy fellow."
In his shorter poems it appears as if nature could now and then thrust
herself even into the bosom of Johnson himself, from whom we could
scarcely have looked for such images as are to be found in the following
stanzas.
By gloomy twilight half reveal'd,
With sighs we view the hoary hill,
The leafless wood, the naked field,
The snow-stopp'd cot, the frozen rill.
No music warbles through the grove,
No vivid colours paint the plain;
No more with devious steps I rove
Through verdant paths, now sought in vain.
Aloud the driving tempest roars,
Congeal'd impetuous showers descend;
Haste, close the window, bar the doors,
Fate leaves me Stella and a friend.
Sappho herself might have owned a touch of passionate tenderness, that
he has introduced into another of these little pieces:
--The Queen of night
Round us pours a lambent light,
Light that seems but just to show
Breasts that beat, and cheeks that glow.
His Latin poetry is not without a certain barbaric splendour; but it
discovers, as might be expected, no skill in the more refined graces of
the Augustan age. The verse he quoted to Thomas Warton as his favourite,
from the translation of Pope's Messiah,
Vallis aromaticas fundit Saronica nubes,
evinces that he could be pleased without elegance in a mode of
composition, of which elegance is the chief recommendation. If we wished
to impress foreigners with a favourable opinion of the taste which our
countrymen have formed for the most perfect productions of the Roman
muse, we should send them, not to the pages of Johnson, but rather to
those of Milton, Gray, Warton, and some of yet more recent date.
It was the chance of Johnson to fall upon an age that rated his great
abilities at their full value. His laboriousness had the appearance of
something stupendous, when there were many literary but few very learned
men. His vigour of intellect imposed upon the multitude an opinion of
his wisdom, from the solemn air and oracular tone in which he uniformly
addressed them. He would have been of less consequence in the days of
Elizabeth or of Cromwell.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Bull's Fifth Sermon.
[2] In a note to Johnson's Works, 8vo. Edition, 1810, it is said that
this is rendered improbable by the account given of Colson, by
Davies, in his life of Garrick, which was certainly written under
Dr. Johnson's inspection, and, what relates to Colson, probably from
Johnson's confirmation.
[3] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. v. p. 696. [4] Nichols's Literary
Anecdotes, vol. v, p. 15
[5] Ibid. vol. viii.
[6] Warburton's Letters, 8vo. Edit. p. 369.
[7] This defect has probably been remedied by Mr. Todd's enlargement of
the Dictionary.
[8] Wooll's Life of Joseph Warton, p. 230.
[9] The writers, besides Smart, were Richard Holt, Garrick, and Dr.
Percy. Their papers are signed with the initials of their surnames.
Johnson's are marked by two asterisks.--_See Hawkins's Life of
Johnson_, p.351.
[10] Miss Seward's letters, vol. i. p. 117.
[11] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ii.
[12] Vol. xix. p. 71. Ed. 1815.
[13] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ii. p. 532.
[14] Wooll's Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Warton.
[15] Plato de Republica, 1. v. 476.
* * * * *
JOHN ARMSTRONG.
John Armstrong, the son of a Scotch minister, was born in the parish of
Castleton, in Roxburghshire. The date of his birth has not been
ascertained, nor is there any thing known concerning the earlier part of
his education. The first we hear of it is, that he took a degree in
medicine at Edinburgh, on the fourth of February, 1732; on which
occasion he published his Thesis, as usual, and chose De Tabe Purulenta
for the subject of it. A copy of a Latin letter, which he sent to Sir
Hans Sloane with this essay, is said to be in the British Museum. In an
advertisement prefixed to some verses which he calls Imitations of
Shakspeare, he informs the reader that the first of them was just
finished when Thomson's Winter made its appearance. This was in 1726,
when he was, he himself says, very young. Thomson having heard of this
production by a youth, who was of the same country with himself, desired
to see it, and was so much pleased with the attempt, that he put it into
the hands of Aaron Hill, Mallet, and Young. With Thomson, further than
in the subject, there is no coincidence. The manner is a caricature of
Shakspeare's.
In 1735, we find him in London, publishing a humorous pamphlet, entitled
An Essay for abridging the Study of Physic, which, though he did not
profess himself the writer, Mr. Nichols says [1], he can, on the best
authority, assert to be his. In two years after he published a Medical
Essay. This was soon followed by a licentious poem, which I have not
seen, and the title of which I do not think it necessary to record.--
While thus employed, it was not to be expected that he should rise to
much eminence in his profession. The dying man does not willingly see by
his couch one who has recently disgraced himself by an open act of
profligacy. In January 1741, he solicited Dr. Birch to use his influence
with Mead in recommending him to the appointment of Physician to the
Forces which were then going to the West Indies. It does not appear that
this application was successful; but in five years more, (February
1746,) he was nominated one of the Physicians to the Hospital for
Invalid Soldiers behind Buckingham House; and in 1760, Physician to the
Army in Germany. Meantime (in 1744) he had published his Art of
Preserving Health, a didactic poem, that soon made its way to notice,
and which, by the judiciousness of the precepts, might have tended to
raise some opinion of his medical skill. At the beginning he addresses
Mead:--
--Beloved by all the graceful arts,
And long the favourite of the healing powers.
He had now become intimate with Thomson, to whose Castle of Indolence
he contributed the three stanzas which conclude the first canto. One of
the alterations made in them by Thomson is not for the better. He had
written--
And here the gout, half tyger, half a snake,
Raged with a hundred teeth, a hundred stings;
which was changed to--
The sleepless gout here counts the crowing cocks,
A wolf now gnaws him, now a serpent stings.
When Thomson was seized with the illness of which he died, Armstrong was
one of those who were sent for to attend him.
In 1751, he published Benevolence, an Epistle to Eumenes; and in 1753,
Taste, an Epistle to a Young Critic. In the next year, he wrote the
Forced Marriage, a tragedy, which Garrick did not think fitted for the
stage. It was printed in 1770, with such of his other writings as he
considered worthy of being collected. In this book, which he entitled
Miscellanies, in two volumes, first appeared the second part of Sketches
or Essays on Various Subjects, by Launcelot Temple, Esq.; the former had
been published in 1758. Wilkes was supposed to have contributed
something to these lively trifles, which, under an air of impertinent
levity, are sometimes marked by originality and discernment. His poem
called Day, an epistle which he had addressed to Wilkes in 1761, was not
admitted by the author to take its place among the rest. For the dispute
which gave rise to this omission he was afterwards sorry; and in his
last illness declared, that what he had got in the army he owed to the
kindness of Wilkes; and that although he had been rash and hasty, he
still retained a due sense of gratitude. In attacking Wilkes, he
contrived to exasperate Churchill also, who was not to be provoked with
impunity, and who revenged himself in the Journey. In 1771, he published
a Short Ramble through some parts of France and Italy. In the
neighbourhood of Leghorn he passed a fortnight with Smollett, to whom he
was always tenderly attached. Of his book I regret the more that I
cannot speak from my own knowledge, because the journey which it
narrates is said to have been made in the society of Mr. Fuseli, with
whom it is not easy to suppose that any one could have travelled without
profiting by the elegance and learning of his companion. I have no
better means of bringing my reader acquainted with some Medical Essays
which he published in 1773; but from the manner in which they are spoken
of in the Biographical Dictionary [2], it is to be feared that they did
not conduce to his reputation or advancement. He died in September,
1779, in consequence, as it is said, of a contusion which he received
when he was getting into a carriage. His friends were surprised to find
he had laid by three thousand pounds, which had been saved chiefly out
of his half-pay.
Armstrong appears to have been good-natured and indolent, little versed
in what is called the way of the world, and, with an eagerness of
ostentation which looks like the result of mortified vanity, a despiser
of the vulgar, whether found among the little or the great.
His Art of Preserving Health is the only production by which he is
likely to be remembered. The theme which he has chosen is one, in which
no man who lives long does not at some time or other feel an interest;
and he has handled it with considerable skill. In the first Book, on
Air, he has interwoven very pleasing descriptions both of particular
places and of situations in general, with reference to the effects they
may be supposed to have on health. The second, which treats of Diet, is
necessarily less attractive, as the topic is less susceptible of
ornament; yet in speaking of water, he has contrived to embellish it by
some lines, which are, perhaps, the finest in the poem.
Now come, ye Naiads, to the fountains lead;
Now let me wander through your gelid reign.
I burn to view th' enthusiastic wilds
By mortals else untrod. I hear the din
Of waters thund'ring o'er the ruin'd cliffs.
With holy reverence I approach the rocks
Whence glide the streams renown'd in ancient song.
Here from the desart, down the rumbling steep,
First springs the Nile: here bursts the sounding Po
In angry waves: Euphrates hence devolves
A mighty flood to water half the East:
And there, in Gothic solitude reclin'd,
The cheerless Tanais pours his hoary urn.
What solemn twilight! What stupendous shades
Enwrap these infant floods! Through every nerve
A sacred horror thrills, a pleasing fear
Glides o'er my frame. The forest deepens round;
And more gigantic still th' impending trees
Stretch their extravagant arms athwart the gloom.
Are these the confines of another world?
A land of Genii? Say, beyond these wilds
What unknown regions? If indeed beyond
Aught habitable lies.
This has more majesty, and more to fill the imagination, than the
corresponding paragraph in Thomson's Autumn.
Say then where lurk the vast eternal springs, &c.--771.
Yet it is inferior in beauty to some verses in a Latin poem by a writer
who is now living.
Quippe sub immensis terrae penetralibus altae
Hiscunt in vastum tenebrae: magnarum ibi princeps
labitur undarum Oceanus, quo patre liquoris
Omnigeni latices et mollis lentor aquai
Profluxere, nova nantes aestate superne
Aerii rores nebularum, et liquidus imber.
Fama est perpetuos illinc se erumpere fontes,
Florigerum Ladona, et lubrica vitra Selemni,
Crathidaque, imbriferamque Lycaeis vallibus Hagno,
Et gelidam Panopin et Peirenen lacrymosam,
Illinc et rapido amnes fluere et mare magnum.
In the third book, he once more breathes freely, and in recounting the
various kinds of exercise by which the human frame may be invigorated,
his poetic faculty again finds room to play. Joseph Warton, in his Essay
on Pope, has justly commended the Episode on the Sweating Sickness, with
which it concludes. In the fourth and last, on the Passions, he seems to
have grown weary of his task; for he has here less compression and less
dignity.
His verse is much more compact than Thomson's, whom he resembles most in
the turn of the expression; although he has aimed now and then, but with
an ill-assured and timid hand, at a Miltonic boldness in the numbers or
the phrase. When he takes occasion to speak of the river with which his
remembrances in early life were associated, he has, contrary to his
usual custom, indulged himself with enlarging on his prototype.
Thomson had mentioned incidentally the Tweed and the Jed:
--The Tweed, pure parent stream,
Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed,
With sylvan Jed! thy tributary brook.--_Autumn_, 889.
He has thus expanded it:--
--Such the stream,
On whose Arcadian banks I first drew air,
Liddal; till now, except in Doric lays
Tun'd to her murmurs by her love-sick swains,
Unknown in song: though not a purer stream,
Through meads more flowery, or more romantic groves,
Rolls towards the western main. Hail, sacred flood!
May still thy hospitable swains be blest
In rural innocence; thy mountains still
Teem with the fleecy race; thy tuneful woods
For ever flourish; and thy vales look gay
With painted meadows, and the golden grain!
Oft with thy blooming sons, when life was new,
Sportive and petulant, and charm'd with toys,
In thy transparent eddies have I lav'd;
Oft trac'd with patient steps thy fairy banks,
With the well-imitated fly to hook
The eager trout, and with the slender line
And yielding rod, solicit to the shore
The struggling panting prey; while vernal clouds
And tepid gales obscur'd the ruffled pool,
And from the deeps call'd forth the wanton swarms.
B. iii. v. 96.
What he has here added of his love of fishing is from another passage
in the Seasons [3].
But his imitations of other writers, however frequent, have no semblance
of study or labour. They seem to have been self-suggested, and to have
glided tacitly and insensibly into the current of his thoughts. This is
evinced by the little pains he took to work upon and heighten such
resemblances. As he did not labour the details injudiciously, so he had
a clear conception of his matter as a whole. The consequence is, that
the poem has that unity and just subordination of parts which renders it
easy to be comprehended at one view, and, on that account, more
agreeable than the didactic poems of his contemporaries, which having
detached passages of much more splendour, are yet wanting in those
recommendations. One objection to his subject is, that it is least
pleasing at that period of life when poetry is most so; for it is not
till the glow of youth is gone by, and we begin to feel the infirmities
and the coldness of age, that we are disposed to bestow much attention
on the Art of Preserving Health.
His tragedy is worth but little. It appears from his Essays, that he had
formed a contracted notion of nature, as an object of imitation for the
tragic poet; and he has failed to give a faithful representation of
nature, even according to his own imperfect theory.
The two short epistles on Benevolence and Taste, have ease and vigour
enough to shew that he could, with a little practice, have written as
well in the couplet measure as he did in blank verse. If Armstrong
cannot be styled a man of genius, he is at least one of the most
ingenious of our minor poets.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, Vol. ii. p. 307, &c.
[2] Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 486.
[3] Footnote: Spring, v. 376, &c.
* * * * *
RICHARD JAGO
Richard, the third son of Richard Jago, Rector of Beaudesert, in
Warwickshire, was born on the 1st of October, 1715. His mother was
Margaret, daughter of Wm. Parker, a gentleman of Henley in Arden, a
neighbouring town in the same county. He received the earlier part of
his education at Solihull, under Mr. Crumpton, whom Johnson, in his life
of Shenstone, calls an eminent schoolmaster. Here Shenstone, who was
scarcely one year older, and who, according to Johnson, distinguished
himself by the quickness of his progress, imparted to Jago his love of
letters. As the one, in his Schoolmistress, has delivered to posterity
the old dame who taught him to read; the other has done the same for
their common preceptor, but with less ability and less kindness, in his
Edgehill, where he terms him "Pedagogue morose."
At the usual time he was admitted a servitor of University College,
Oxford. His humble station in the University, though it did not break
off his intimacy with Shenstone, must have hindered them from
associating openly together.
In 1738, he took the degree of Master of Arts, having been first
ordained to the curacy of Snitterfield, a village near the benefice of
his father, who died two years after. Soon after that event, he married
Dorothea Susannah, daughter of John Fancourt, Rector of Kimcote, in
Leicestershire. In 1746, he was instituted to Harbury, where he resided;
and about the same time was presented, by Lord Willoughby de Broke, to
Chesterton, which lay at a short distance; both livings together
amounting to about 100_l._ a year. In 1754, Lord Clare, afterwards Earl
Nugent, obtained for him, from Dr. Madox, Bishop of Worcester, the
vicarage of Snitterfield, worth about 140_l._ After having inserted some
small poems in Dodsley's Collection, he published (in 1767) Edgehill,
for which he obtained a large subscription; and in the following year,
the fable of Labour and Genius. In 1771, his kind patron, Lord
Willoughby de Broke, added to his other preferment the rectory of
Kimcote, worth nearly 300_l._ in consequence of which he resigned
Harbury.
His first wife died in 1751, leaving him seven children. He had known
her from childhood. The attention paid her by Shenstone shews her to
have been an amiable woman. In eight years after, he married Margaret,
daughter of James Underwood, Esq. of Rugeley, in Staffordshire, who
survived him. During the latter part of his life, his infirmities
confined him to the house. He died, after a short illness, on the 8th of
May, 1781, and was buried in the church of Snitterfield. In his person
he was above the middle stature. His manner was reserved before
strangers, but easy even to sprightliness in the society of his friends.
He is said to have discharged blamelessly all the duties of his
profession and of domestic life. As a poet, he is not entitled to very
high commendation. The distinguishing feature of his poetry is the ease
of its diction. Johnson has observed, that if blank verse be not tumid
and gorgeous, it is crippled prose. To disprove this, it would be
sufficient to quote the greater part of that story from the Tatler [1]
of the Young Man restored to Sight, which Jago has introduced into his
Edge-hill. Nothing can be described more naturally, than his feelings
and behaviour on his first recovery.