SAMUEL JOHNSON.

BORN at Lichfield, 1709. His father was a book-seller, and in his shop the boy was able to indulge his insatiable desire for reading. From 1728 to 1731 Johnson at Oxford was among the poorest of the poor, 'stoically shut up, silently enduring the incurable,' as Carlyle puts it. He left without taking his degree, and after two unsuccessful attempts at school-teaching came to seek his fortune in London, accompanied by his friend Garrick (1737). The next year appeared his poem, London, many passages of which—especially the famous SLOW RISES WORTH BY POVERTY DEPRESSED-reflect his own bitter experiences as a starving author. At this date, twenty-four years of literary hackwork were ahead of Johnson, during which, however, he managed to make at least one 'honest strike for fame' in his poem The Vanity of Human Wishes. His Dictionary, his Rambler, his Rasselas, and his extraordinary conversational powers assisted him to rise to a position of literary dictatorship similar to that held in the seventeenth century by Dryden. In 1762 a small pension bestowed upon him by George III. of unblessed memory relieved him from the unjust ridicule of poverty. During the remainder of his life, he enjoyed a well-earned rest, broken only by the diversions of writing his Visit to the Hebrides and his Lives of the Poets. On this last-named work, it appears that Johnson's reputation as a prose-writer will chiefly rest.

Like to Achilles without his Homer, like to Eneas without his Vergil, like to Henry V. without his Shakespeare- such would Johnson have been to us without his Boswell. From 1763, when Boswell met Johnson, till 1784, when Johnson died, the daily walk and conversation of the great man have been preserved for us in those incomparable sketches which are at once the joy and the despair of all other biographers. To the reading of Boswell we might apply Hazlitt's description of the reading of a good comedy—it is like keeping the best company, where the best things are said and the most amusing things happen. FRIENDS - Garrick, Burke, Goldsmith, Boswell, Reynolds, Robertson, Gibbon, Richardson.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. The best edition of Boswell is that by G. Birbeck Hill (Clarendon Press, 6 vols.). The same editor has also published The Letters of Samuel Johnson (excluding those published in Boswell) and a volume entitled Dr. Johnson, His Friends and his Critics.

A large portion of Leslie Stephen's Johnson (E. M. L.) is a condensation of Boswell, whose 'best things' are skilfully selected. Hawthorne's Our Old Home contains a charming account of his visit to Lichfield, Johnson's birth-place, and

to Uttoxeter, where Johnson did penance in the market-place. For the social life of the times, see Thackeray's Virginians and his George III. in The Four Georges. For the History, Green, Chapter X. Secs. 1-2.

CRITICISM. The best criticism on Johnson has fortunately been brought together within the compass of a single volume by Matthew Arnold. His Johnson's Chief Lives has appended to it Macaulay's and Carlyle's Essays on Boswell's Johnson. Macaulay gives us the man Johnson objectively and materially, Carlyle gives us Johnson subjectively and spiritually. Not the least interesting thing in this book is Arnold's own preface, with his high estimate of Johnson as a prose-writer and his Lacustrine inability to see anything but 'mistaken poetical practice' in the eighteenth century poets.

THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES.

This poem was published in 1749 and is imitated from the Tenth Satire of Juvenal (see Gifford's translation), as is the London from Juvenal's Third Satire. The diction and the constructions in the second poem are more highly Latinized than in the first; the thought is mellower and the tone more resigned.

1-10.

Notice the curious tautology in lines 1-2. Survey (2), Remark (3), watch (4), and say (5) are all infinitives depending upon Let (1). Whitney, §§ 449, 477. Snares is hardly a good metaphor with clouded.

II-20. The clauses beginning with How in 10 and 13 repeat the construction of line 5. Later in the poem the writer gives concrete illustrations of some of the general propositions here advanced. 21-28. the general massacre of gold the general massacre which the desire for wealth causes. Wide wasting pest! The thought and the phraseology in this passage are less from Juvenal than from Vergil, Æneid iii. 56-7.

Quid non mortalia pectora cogis,
Auri sacra fames!

29-36. madded, an obsolete form for 'maddened.' In line 31, notice the abstractness of the diction. This use of abstract terms is

so frequent in Johnson as to amount to a mannerism. Yet he can write very plain strong English when he wants to; see lines 33, 62, 78, 221. the Tow'r the Tower of London, long used as

a state prison.

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37-44. The needy traveller, serene and gay, Walks the wide heath, and sings his toil away. A most happy rendering of one of Juvenal's most famous lines: 'Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator.' Increase; i.e., If you increase his riches you destroy his peace.

45-72. Democritus; notice the accent of this word as determined

mot

by the rhythm. See notes on Epistle to Augustus, 304-337. ley; originally a patch-work dress of highly-colored bits of cloth; the costume of the clown or professional jester. As applied here to life, it implies a sneer as well as a description.

man was of a

piece, that is, when men were more consistent than they are now. Doubtless the satirists of the time of Democritus likewise looked back to some Golden Age that existed only in their imaginations. a new-made mayor's unwieldy state; a reference to the Lord Mayor's Show, a civic parade that still takes place annually in London on the 9th of November, when the new Mayor is inaugurated. Attentive goes with thou (61). robes and veils are subjects of canvass; not in our modern (American) sense of 'to solicit,' but in the old sense of 'to examine,' literally, 'to sift through canvas' (bolting-cloth).

were (65).

73-82. On every stage: on every stage of the suppliants' progress to wealth and power. Love ends with hope: as soon as their hope of patronage is disappointed, their love for their patron ends. Sinking and growing are the emphatic words in their respective sentences.

83-90. the painted face: the portrait of our former hero and patron. palladium: Cl. Myths, p. 305. better; this must be taken sarcastically. For gives the reason for the sarcastic better being degenerate, we are unable to see heroic worth in the features where once we found it. The form distorted (in our pejorative imagination) justifies us in taking down the picture of him who was once our hero; we detest what formerly we loved, and indignantly rid our house of its presence. (I am aware that the subjective interpretation of this difficult passage is not free from objec tions, but an objective interpretation creates even more difficulties, i seems to me, while a mixture of the two methods produces hopeless confusion.)

91-98. remonstrance rings. It is difficult to surmise what period of English History Johnson had in mind, as the Tory party, of which he was a staunch adherent, has never been noted for assaults upon aristocratic and kingly power. Lines 95 and 96 seem to refer to the premiership of Henry Pelham, who, at the time this satire was written, had almost broken up the Opposition that destroyed Walpole by taking into the Cabinet the most distinguished members of that Opposition. septennial. Members of the House of Commons hold office for seven years, unless the Crown orders a dissolution and a new election within that time. This prerogative of the Crown is now lodged practically in the hands of the Prime Minister. full is best taken as an adverb with riot and rail.

the regal palace; London. Wolsey's and the magnifiHampton Court William III.

99-120. Wolsey in this sketch takes the place of Juvenal's Sejanus. For the latter, consult a History of Rome under the years 14-31 A.D. For the idealized Wolsey, see Shakespeare's Henry VIII.; for the real Wolsey, Green, Chapter vi. Sec. 5. Hampton Court, ten miles west of the city of arms are still to be seen above the clock-tower, cent carved roof of the hall was begun by him. was the favorite residence of Cromwell and of 121-134. Villiers: great is hardly an appropriate adjective for George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, the frivolous and unprincipled favorite of James I. and Charles I. He was stabbed to the heart by Felton in 1628. Harley, when a member of the Cabinet (1711), was stabbed with a pen-knife by a French refugee named Guiscard. The wound was not serious and brought Harley a good deal of cheap popularity. Intemperance rather than this wound fixed disease on Harley's closing life. What Johnson, in his Tory fashion, calls the murder of Wentworth (better known as Strafford) was in reality a perfectly legal and richly deserved execution for treason (1641). Hyde. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Prime Minister of Charles II., was impeached in 1667 and fled to France. Refusing to return and stand his trial, he was banished for life. He has left a History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, much admired — by Tory writers.

135-164. the gown. The cap and gown are still worn by students at Oxford and Cambridge. Bodley; Sir Thomas Bodley, an Elizabethan diplomatist who founded the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Bacon's mansion. There is a tradition that the study of Friar Bacon, built on an arch over the bridge, will fall when a man greater than Bacon shall pass under it.'- Johnson. Novelty thy cell refrain Novelty refrain from approaching thy cell. So in the ballad of Robin Hood and Little John (Childs, v. 222):

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the whole train the grove did refrain And unto their caves they did go.

Lines 153-4 are a bit of autobiography.

pause

from

learning, to be wise. Compare Tennyson's Locksley Hall, 143-4;

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers, and he bears a laden breast, Full of sad experience, moving toward the stillness of his rest.

the patron and the jail are placed in admirable juxtaposition. Some six years after writing this Satire, Johnson, in his celebrated letter to Lord Chesterfield, gave 'noble' patronage in Literature a knockdown blow from which it has never recovered. nations

meanly just. 'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say: If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.' Matt. XXIII. 29–30. Lydiat, who died in 1646, suffered persecution not because he was a mathematician, but because he was a Royalist. This is but one instance of others we have noticed, where the good Doctor looks at history through Tory spectacles. Galileo's experiences with the Inquisition are too

well known to call for recital here. He died in 1642.

165-174. Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Persecutor of the Puritans, was executed by order of the House of Commons in 1645. Macaulay, as strong a Whig as Johnson was a Tory, also disapproved of the execution of Laud, but for not exactly the same reasons. 'The severest punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at liberty, and send him to Oxford. There he might have stayed, tortured by his own diabolical temper - hungering for Puritans to pillory and mangle; plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of somebody else to plague, with his peevishness and absurdity; performing grimaces and antics in the Cathedral; continuing that incomparable Diary, which we never see without forgetting the vices of his heart in the imbecility of his intellect, minuting down his dreams, counting the drops of blood which fell from his nose, watching the direction of the salt, and listening for the notes of the screech-owls. Contemptuous mercy was the only vengeance which it became the Parliament to take on such a ridiculous old bigot.'-Essay on Hallam.

175-190. the rapid Greek: Alexander, whose Asiatic conquests were completed between 334 and 323 B.C. This praise, etc., The desire for praise has such power over men that virtue [valor?] scarce incite them to arduous deeds till fame lends her aid. everlasting debt. When Johnson wrote this satire, the English National Debt was about £78,000,000. In 1860, our National Debt was $64,842,287. In 1865 (August 31) it was $2,844,649,626.

can

191-222. Swedish Charles; Charles XII. (1697-1718). His life has been written by Voltaire. Juvenal uses Hannibal as his example of the emptiness of military glory. adamant; one of the finest Surrounding

words in our language. Look up the etymology. kings; Peter the Great (Russia), Augustus (Saxony and Poland), Frederick IV. (Denmark). one capitulate; Frederick iv. in one resign; Augustus. In 1706, Charles compelled him to resign his claim to the Polish crown in favor of Stanislas Lesczinski. Moscow's walls. After his defeat at Smolensk (1708)

1700.