And when he showed the men, now dazed You laugh? - My lay is dull, I know;

From The Church Quarterly Review. self guilty of advancing "a false claim." Such letters, although they may lack the charm of Gray's or Cowper's, or, we may add, of Scott's, have all the strength, distinctness, and reality which were inseparable from the majestic personality of the writer.

Dr. Birkbeck Hill, the most recent editor of the "Life," has now enhanced his own strong claim on the gratitude of "Johnsonians" by collecting all those letters of Johnson's which are not included in Boswell's work. "I have not thought it right," he says, "to pass over any on account of their insignificance.' He pleads that those which he now gives to the world-many of which had been already published by Mrs. Piozzi — will secure for Johnson "a far higher rank among letter writers than he has as yet

READERS of that supreme 66 Biography" which Lord Macaulay has ranked as first without a second," will recall the various illustrations which it gives of Johnson's capacities as a letter writer. They may remember, for instance, the "celebrated letter" (as Boswell truly calls it) to Lord Chesterfield; the exquisitely tender condolence with James Elphinston on his mother's death; the "polite and urbane" letter to Charles Burney while as yet undistinguished; the courteous but pointed rebuke to a mother who had importuned him to "solicit a great man to whom he had Lever spoken, for a young person whom he had never seen, upon a supposition which he had no means of knowing to be true;" the noble indignation ex-filled." "Admirable as many of those pressed to his friend William Drum- [letters] are which are published by mond against an attempt to impede the Boswell, nevertheless in the 'Life' translation of the Bible into Gaelic; the they are overshadowed by his superlaSternly defiant acknowledgment of Mac- tive merit as a talker . . . His letters pherson's "foolish and impudent let- may be good, but his talk has no rival;" ter;" the advice to " a young clergyman" but when we no longer have it to in the country," almost verbally anticipating Keble's line, "By blameless guile or gentle force; " 2 the sadly significant announcement to his landlord that it had "pleased God to deprive him of the power of speech;" the irrepressible ery for sympathy, "O my friend, the approach of death is very dreadful," followed almost instantly by two such Sentences as "Let us learn to derive our hope only from God-in the mean time let us be kind to one another; the reply to his little godchild's "pretty letter," with the closing advice "that through your whole life you will carefully say your prayers and read your Bible;" and the dignified gratitude for Thurlow's munificent offer, which he declines only because if he were now to "appropriate so much of a fortune destined to do good," he would hold him

1 Letters of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Collected edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L., Editor

of Boswell's Life of Johnson." Two volumes.

ford: Clarendon Press, 1892.

1 Such honest, I may call them holy artifices,

be practised by every clergyman; for all tans must be tried by which souls may be saved." Life of Johnson, ed. Dr. Hill, iii. 438.)

77 66

"fine

tempt us, we shall not fail to recognize
how admirable he was in his correspond-
ence. This is quite true. The vol-
umes before us do indeed present
and weighty passages in which he treats
of the greatest of all arts, the art of liv-
ing; strong common sense, set forth
in vigorous English, on which his
friends could always draw in their per-
plexities ;" and also "a playfulness and
lightness of touch which will surprise
those who know him only by his formal
writings," and may make up, in some
degree, for the loss involved in Miss
Burney's over-sensitive objection to
supplying Boswell with specimens of
Johnson's correspondence with herself.
We may add that although the letters
now published abound in quotations
from, or references to, famous writers
of all ages-Hesiod, Aristotle, Galen,
Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Cicero, Tacitus,
Martial, Severus, Shakespeare, Sir
Philip Sidney, Milton, Cowley, Dryden,
Pope, Addison, Swift, Rochefoucault
yet the reader feels in every case that
is recalling
this rich and "full mind
the passage because it cannot help doing

so; of pedantry or ostentation there is bon about " supporting

not the shadow of a trace.

" it. This is 66 mere 'padding,' ," and similarly John-⠀⠀ That Dr. Birkbeck Hill has performed son's allusion to the closing of the Bodhis task with indefatigable assiduity leian for one week in the year is made i and true "Johnsonian" enthusiasm, the peg for a long note on the negligoes without saying. At the same time, gence of eighteenth-century custodians, the criticism which was passed on his not only of that library, but of "Dr. annotations to the "Life" is not, we Radcliffe's " as well. Passages in the ta think, wholly inapplicable to similar text of vol. ii., pp. 67, 100, are repeated ta work in the goodly volumes before us. in notes on pp. 212, 209; while here There is, if it be not ungracious to say and there a note seems deficient in so, a little too much of his own individ-point of information. Once or twice Dr. uality in his comments. One does not Birkbeck Hill offends against good taste, particularly care about knowing that he or even good feeling, rather more sericonsiders "Walter Scott disgraced by ously. When Johnson quotes Sulpicius being one of the correspondents of" Severus about St. Martin, Dr. Hill inthat "affected, tiresome, spiteful, and forms us that he was Bishop of Tours mendacious creature, Anna Seward."1 in the fourth century," but apparently He cannot let a reference to Sir Joseph cannot resist the temptation to add a Mawbey pass without not only quoting ponderous sarcasm from Gibbon about from the "Rolliad," about the Speaker the great missionary "imprudently comCornewall as enduring Mawbey's elo- mitting a miracle. 996 Much worse, and quence, but adding-one might say, deserving of grave reprehension, is what dragging in the following personal we find further on. Johnson writes reminiscence: "I thought when I saw to a "dear friend," Joseph Fowke: 7 my friend, Mr. Leonard H. Courtney," Whether we shall ever meet again in sitting as chairman of committee, that this world, who can tell? Let us, howto him, as member for a division of ever, wish well to each other; prayers Cornwall, these lines might be aptly can pass the Line and the Tropics." 8 applied."2 He conjectures that a shoe- And Dr. Hill thinks good to observe in black to whom Johnson's friend Dr. a note, "Prayers apparently would take Taylor, of Ashbourne (of whom more the longer course round the Cape of presently), left his property, with a pro- Good Hope." Respect for the religious viso that he might take any name but belief of many readers, if not for that that of Taylor, 66 was his illegitimate of his hero, whose conviction as to the son. It may have been so, but John-efficacy of intercessory prayer is reson's letter in the text does not, we Letters," 9 think, support this charitable suggestion. ought surely to have restrained the ediJohnson writes to Mrs. Thrale on April tor from setting down in his manuscript, 4, 1776, that Thrale" said that he would or at any rate from retaining in his go to the house; " whereupon we have proof, a sneer so vapid and so ignoble. a note, "The House of Commons, I Dr. Hill, we fear, would hardly echo conjecture. On April 1, if he attended, Carlyle's confession in his book on he heard a debate on expenses " of the "Heroes: ""The church of St. ClemAmerican war; then comes a quotation ent Danes, where Johnson really worfrom Lord North's speech in that de- shipped in the era of Voltaire, is to me bate; after that, a reference to the a venerable place." But we prefer to increase in the national debt on account think of the eminent services which the of that war, with a quotation from Gib-editor has rendered, in this as in previous works, to the study of Johnson's life and character; and we proceed to

1 Letters, i. 10. We by no means take up the cudgels for this sentimental précieuse, whose conceit, fostered by compliments, is pleasantly alluded to by Mrs. Oliphant, (Literary Hist. of England, i. 233.) 8 Ibid., 1. 380.

2 Letters, 1. 333.

markably apparent in the "

take note of the chief features of the | have me; "'5 and again, "Lucy is a correspondence here presented to us in philosopher, and considers me as one of

a form which is, on the whole, so attractive.

66

66

the external and accidental things that are to be taken and left without emotion; " but now under the presence of their common bereavement he writes, Every heart must lean to somebody, and I have nobody but you. .. Pray, my dearest, write to me as often as you can; " he sends her the "little story book" which he has published, and which we know as "Rasselas," begging her to tell him "how she likes it," as if her opinion would be of value; and he adds many tender messages to "poor Kitty Chambers," his mother's old servant. In this period of Johnson's life we find him discussing “ Clarissa" with Richardson, and pleading for an accurate index; pouring himself out to Joseph Weston in sympathy for “ poor,

66

The date of the first letter in the series is October 30, 1731. Johnson was then twenty-two; as Dr. Hill ascertained by a painstaking inquiry,1 he had left Pembroke College (without a degree) nearly two years before; he was living at Lichfield, "not knowing," says Boswell, how he should gain even a decent livelihood. He thanks his relation Mr. Hickman for favor and assistance, but begs to be excused from composing verses on the subject of a recent disappointment. The letter which the editor considers "the gem of his collection," and which he "owes to the liberality of Mr. William R. Smith, barrister-at-law, of the Inner Temple," is one in which "the fond and youthful dear Collins," whose mind had passed husband" of thirty addresses the wife from depression into lunacy; correof over fifty as his "dear girl" and sponding with Miss Hill Boothby in "charming love.” 8 The reader inevi- terms of affection which might seem tably smiles; but there must have been extravagant, if one did not remember more in the "Tetty" whose memory how "Johnson, like all good men, loved was so long and sacredly cherished, than good women; "10 begging her to conGarrick's description of her person and tinue her prayers for him that no good manners would suggest. "She seems,' "resolution may be vain," yet declining writes Mr. Leslie Stephen, "to have to be directed by her in religious matbeen a woman of good sense and some ters; full of anxiety as to her failing literary judgment." 4 She died in | health, and giving her the benefit of his March, 1752, three years after this letter medical studies (which were probably was written; and seven years later, his prejudicial to his own health) by premother's last illness and death called scribing dried orange peel for dyspepforth those indescribably touching let- sia.11 We hear thus early of the blind ters to her and to her step-daughter, Lucy Porter, which Dr. Hill has inserted in " Appendix B" to the first volume of the "Life," and which he incorporates in the text of the "Letters." Miss Porter, in after days, disappointed Johnson by her frivolity and her waywardness; in 1775, for instance, be remarks, "She is very good-humored while I do just as she would

5 See Letters, ii. 335; cf. 359.

66

6 Ibid., i. 180. So, in i. 191, "Miss Porter will be 99 This

satisfied with a very little of my company.'

was in 1772.

Whenever I can do any

7 So in 1768, when Miss Porter's aunt died, "My you have dear, dear love," he writes from Oxford, " had a very great loss. thing for you, remember, my dear darling, that one of my greatest pleasures is to please you." (Ibid.,

i. 139.)

8 Letters, i. 82, 87.

...

Ibid., i. 91, 111, 127. When he hears of his pension, it is natural to him to say, "Be so kind as to tell Kitty," (ibid., i. 93). Later, in 1767, he took a

Dr. Johnson, his Friends and his Critics, p. 329 ff. solemn leave of her, after praying by her bedside 'Life, ed. Dr. Hill, i. 79.

partly in the words of the Visitation Office. This
is that "tender and affectionate scene" which Bos-
well commends to the "candid" consideration of
those "who have been taught to look upon John-
son as a man of a harsh and stern character."
(Life, ii. 44).
10 Leslie Stephen, p. 13.
We cannot agree with Dr.

11 Letters. i. 47-49.

1

66

as

8

a

66 un

lady, Miss Anna Williams, who having | of this burly squire-parson of conspicucome under his roof on a visit to his ously unclerical habits,7 a landowner, wife, became a lifelong and valued, rector, and a canon of Westminster, acthough sometimes querulous inmate, tive as a magistrate and liberal to the claiming, as Boswell found when he poor, but unfortunate in his married had to propitiate her about the famous life, at variance now with his sister and Dilly dinner, a certain control over now with his neighbors - "fierce and her benefactor's engagements, but fell" in the prosecution of "lawsuits," "pleasing " him by her " great merit, and in one case contemplating what both intellectual and moral," by her Johnson thought a pactum iniquum; in- te "comprehensive knowledge and her satiably greedy of more Church prefer-ty "steady fortitude," and "for thirty ment, if he were in want with years," as he expressed it, filling to- twenty children," disappointed (to the wards him the place of "a sister," until reader's satisfaction) in regard to deanher death left him "desolate " about a ery after deanery; giving way to year before his own.2 Mr. Taylor has settlement of mind" and " unnecessary; been already mentioned, and he soon vexation; exhibiting a childish imbecomes a prominent figure in the cor- prudence in domestic affairs of special respondence and illustrates that tena- delicacy, and requiring the terse admocious fidelity of Johnson to old friends nition to "do his own business, and as such, apart from any question of keep his own secrets; "10 a man whose intrinsic congeniality, which appears in talk, as Johnson himself said in the son the letters to Edmund Hector, a medi- of Sirach's words, was "about bulcal man at Birmingham; in the solici- locks," 11 and was also curiously vulgar, tude for his cousin and playmate, the as we gather from a bit of sly mimicry improvident Tom Johnson; in a refer- in one of Johnson's letters to Mrs. ence to Harry Jackson, whom he enter- Thrale.12 Johnson liked well enough tained at dinner on a visit to his native to visit him in his " very pleasant house city in 1776, and whom Boswell found at Ashbourne, where he had a lawn and to be "a low man, dull and untaught; "a lake, and an abundance of live stock" and in the visits paid to "poor Charles for instance, 'thirty deer that ate Congreve," who had drifted through ill bread from the hand”. and where health into habits of "sordid self-indul- Boswell found "everything good, no gence,' and "confessed a bottle a scantiness appearing, and a butler in

day."'

6

John Taylor, who came up to Christ Church, as the editor has ascertained, four months after Johnson entered at Pembroke, was a person of higher type than these, but hardly worthy, except as an old associate, of the great privilege which has perpetuated his name. There is nothing beautiful in the figure

Hill that in these letters Johnson "seems to affect

a style that would have better become a spiritual novel." They exhibit the writer's religious good sense as well as his piety of feeling. "No man can know how little his performance will answer to his promises. . . . Surely no human understanding can pray for anything temporal otherwise than condi tionally."

1 Once, speaking of his ill-assorted household, he says, "We have tolerable concord at home, but no love. Williams hates everybody." (Letters, ii. 77.) 2 Ibid. ii. 336, 348. 3 Letters, i. 198, 302.

4 Ibid., i. 376, ii. 20; Life, ii. 463.

5 Ibid., i. 304, 315.

• Johnson, his Friends and his Critics, p. 343.

66

66

purple clothes with a large white wig." 18 The guest amused himself with the peculiarities of his host, but had a certain, though, as he frankly said,14 a stationary regard for him as representing old times. "Neither of us," he wrote in 1756, can now find € many whom he has known so long as we have known each other." Again, in 1775, "Our friendship has lasted so long, that it is valuable for its antiquity. 15 It seems to have been valuable for little else; yet still it was something to hold by, and at any rate we owe to sojourns at Ashbourne some of the best fun in the correspondence.