440 An address to the Electors of Southwark. [A.D. 1780. in parliament of the borough of Southwark, and Johnson kindly lent him his assistance, by writing advertisements and letters for him. I shall insert one as a specimen :* 'TO THE WORTHY ELECTORS OF THE BOROUGH OF SOUTHWARK. 'GENTLEMEN, 'A new Parliament being now called, I again solicit the honour of being elected for one of your representatives; and solicit it with the greater confidence, as I am not conscious of having neglected my duty, or of having acted otherwise than as becomes the independent representative of independent constituents; superiour to fear, hope, and expectation, who has no private purposes to promote, and whose prosperity is involved in the prosperity of his country. As my recovery from a very severe distemper is not yet perfect, I have declined to attend the Hall, and hope an omission so necessary will not be harshly censured. 'I can only send my respectful wishes, that all your deliberations may tend to the happiness of the kingdom, and the peace of the borough. 'I am, Gentlemen, 'Your most faithful 'And obedient servant, 'HENRY THRALE.' 'Southwark, Sept. 5, 1780.' On his birth-day, Johnson has this note: 'I am now beginning the seventy-second year of my life, with more strength of body, and greater vigour of mind, than I think is common at that age'.' But still he complains of sleepless nights and idle days, and forgetfulness, or neglect of resolutions. He thus pathetically expresses himself, 'Surely I shall not spend my whole life with my own total disapprobation 2. Mr. Macbean, whom I have mentioned more than once, as 1 Miss Burney described an evening spent by Johnson at Dr. Burney's some weeks earlier :-'He was in high spirits and good humour, talked all the talk, affronted nobody, and delighted everybody. I never saw him more sweet, nor better attended to by his audience.' In December she wrote: Dr. Johnson is very gay, and sociable, and comfortable, WELL. one Aetat. 71.] Lord Chancellor Thurlow's letter. 441 one of Johnson's humble friends, a deserving but unfortunate man, being now oppressed by age and poverty, Johnson solicited the Lord Chancellor Thurlow, to have him admitted into the Charterhouse. I take the liberty to insert his Lordship's answer', as I am eager to embrace every occasion of augmenting the respectable notion which should ever be entertained of my illustrious friend : 'SIR, 'TO DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON. 'London, October 24, 1780. 'I have this moment received your letter, dated the 19th, and returned from Bath. In the beginning of the summer I placed one in the Chartreux2, without the sanction of a recommendation so distinct and so authoritative as yours of Macbean; and I am afraid, that according to the establishment of the House, the opportunity of making the charity so good amends will not soon recur. But whenever a vacancy shall happen, if you'll favour me with notice of it, I will try to recommend him to the place, even though it should not be my turn to nominate. 'I am, Sir, with great regard, 'DEAR SIR, 'Your most faithful 'And obedient servant, 'TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ. "THURLOW 3.' 'I am sorry to write you a letter that will not please you, and yet it is at last what I resolve to do. interview; the summer has been 'See Boswell's Hebrides, Oct. 27. "The Charterhouse. 3 Macbean was, on Lord Thurlow's nomination, admitted ‘a poor brother of the Charterhouse.' Ante, i. 187. Johnson, on Macbean's death on June 26, 1784, wrote:-'He was one of those who, as Swift says, stood as a screen between me and death. has, I hope, made a good exchange. He was very pious; he was very innocent; he did no ill; and of doing good a continual tenour of distress allowed him few opportunities; he He This year must pass without an foolishly lost, like many other of was very highly esteemed in the house [the Charterhouse].' Piozzi Letters, ii. 373. The quotation from Swift is found in the lines On the Death of Dr. Swift: "The fools, my juniors by a year, Are tortured with suspense and fear, Who wisely thought my age a screen, When death approached, to stand between.' Swift's Works, ed. 1803, xi. 246. my 442 Mr. Thrale loses the election. my summers and winters. I hardly saw a green field, but staid in town to work, without working much. 'Mr. Thrale's loss of health has lost him the election'; he is now going to Brighthelmston, and expects me to go with him; and how long I shall stay, I cannot tell. I do not much like the place, but yet I shall go, and stay while my stay is desired. We must, therefore, content ourselves with knowing what we know as well as man can know the mind of man, that we love one another, and that we wish each other's happiness, and that the lapse of a year cannot lessen our mutual kindness. 'I was pleased to be told that I accused Mrs. Boswell unjustly, in supposing that she bears me ill-will. I love you so much, that I would be glad to love all that love you, and that you love; and I have love very ready for Mrs. Boswell, if she thinks it worthy of acceptance. I hope all the young ladies and gentlemen are well. 'I take a great liking to your brother. He tells me that his father received him kindly, but not fondly; however, you seem to have lived well enough at Auchinleck, while you staid. Make your father as happy as you can. 'You lately told me of your health: I can tell you in return, that my health has been for more than a year past, better than it has been for many years before. Perhaps it may please GOD to give us some time together before we are parted. APPENDIX A. (Page 314.) THE alehouse in the city where Johnson used to go and sit with George Psalmanazar was, no doubt, the club in Old Street, where he met also 'the metaphysical tailor,' the uncle of Hoole the poet (post, under March 30, 1783). Psalmanazar is mentioned a third time by Boswell (post, May 15, 1784) in a passage borrowed from Hawkins's edition of Johnson's Works, xi. 206, where it is stated that 'Johnson said: "He had never seen the close of the life of any one that he wished so much his own to resemble as that of him, for its purity and devotion." He was asked whether he ever contradicted him. "I should as soon," said he, "have thought of contradicting a bishop." When he was asked whether he had ever mentioned Formosa before him, he said, "he was afraid to mention even China." We learn from Hawkins's Life of Johnson, p. 547, that 'Psalmanazar lived in Ironmonger Row, Old Street; in the neighbourhood whereof he was so well known and esteemed, that, as Dr. Hawkesworth once told me, scarce any person, even children, passed him without shewing him the usual signs of respect.' In the list of the writers of the Universal History that Johnson drew up a few days before his death his name is given as the historian of the Jews, Gauls, and Spaniards (post, November, 1784). According to Mrs. Piozzi (Anecdotes, p. 175):-'His pious and patient endurance of a tedious illness, ending in an exemplary death, confirmed the strong impression his merit had made upon the mind of Mr. Johnson. "It is so very difficult," said he always, "for a sick man not to be a scoundrel." Johnson, in Prayers and Meditations, p. 102, mentions him as a man whose life was, I think, uniform.' Smollett, in Humphry Clinker (in Melford's Letter of June 10), describes him as one who, after having drudged half a century in the literary mill, in all the simplicity and abstinence of an Asiatic, subsists upon the charity of a few booksellers, just sufficient to keep him from the parish.' A writer in the Annual Register for 1764 (ii. 71), speaking of the latter part of his life, says :-' He was concerned in compiling and writing works of credit, and lived exemplarily for many years.' He 6 died a few days before that memorable sixteenth day of May 1763, when Boswell first met Johnson. It is a pity that no record has been kept of the club meetings in Ironmonger Row, for then we should have seen Johnson in a new light. Johnson in an alehouse club, with a metaphysical tailor on one side of him, and an aged writer on the other side of him, 'who spoke English with the city accent and coarsely enough',' and whom he would never venture to contradict, is a Johnson that we cannot easily imagine. Of the greater part of Psalmanazar's life we know next to nothinglittle, I believe, beyond the few facts that I have here gathered together. His early years he has described in his Memoirs. That he started sorrow. as one of the most shameless impostors, and that he remained a hypocrite and a cheat till he was fully forty, if not indeed longer, his own narrative shows. That for many years he lived laboriously, frugally, and honestly seems to be no less certain. How far his Memoirs are truthful is somewhat doubtful. In them he certainly confesses the impudent trick which he had played in his youth, when he passed himself off as a Formosan convert. He wished, he writes, 'to undeceive the world by unravelling that whole mystery of iniquity' (p. 5). He lays bare roguery enough, and in a spirit, it seems, of real Nevertheless there are passages which are not free from the leaven of hypocrisy, and there are, I suspect, statements which are at least partly false. Johnson, indeed, looked upon him as little less than a saint; but then, as Sir Joshua Reynolds tells us, though 'Johnson was not easily imposed upon by professions to honesty and candour, he appeared to have little suspicion of hypocrisy in religion".' It was in the year 1704 that Psalmanazar published his Historical and Geographi cal Description of Formosa. So gross is the forgery that it almost passes belief that it was widely accepted as a true narrative. He gave himself out as a native of that island and a convert to Christianity. He lied so foolishly as to maintain that in the Academies of Formosa Greek was studied (p. 290). He asserted also that in an island that is only about half as large as Ireland 18,000 boys were sacrificed every year (p. 176). But his readers were for the most part only too willing to be deceived; for in Protestant England his abuse of the Jesuits covered a multitude of lies. Ere he had been three months in London, he was, he writes (Memoirs, p. 179), 'cried up for a prodigy, and not only the domestic, but even the foreign papers had helped to blaze forth many things in his praise.' He was aided in his fraud by the Rev. Dr. Innes, or Innys, a clergyman of the English Church, who by means of his interesting convert pushed 1 Hawkins's Johnson's Works, xi. 206. It is curious that Psalmanazar, in his Memoirs, p. 101, uses the mongrel word transmogrify. 2 himself |