2

difficulty of hearing. On this account he wished to travel all over the world'; for the very act of going forward was delightful to him, and he gave himself no concern about accidents, which he said never happened: nor did the running-away of the horses on the edge of a precipice between Vernon and St. Denys in France convince him to the contrary; 'for nothing came of it (he said), except that Mr. Thrale leaped out of the carriage into a chalk-pit, and then came up again, looking as white!' When the truth was, all their lives were saved by the greatest providence ever exerted in favour of three human creatures; and the part Mr. Thrale took from desperation was the likeliest thing in the world to produce broken limbs and death.

Fear was indeed a sensation to which Mr. Johnson was an utter stranger, excepting when some sudden apprehensions seized him that he was going to die3; and even then he kept all his wits about him, to express the most humble and pathetic petitions to the Almighty: and when the first paralytic stroke took his speech from him, he instantly set about composing a prayer in Latin, at once to deprecate God's mercy, to satisfy himself that his mental powers remained unimpaired, and to keep them in exercise, that they might not perish by permitted stagnation. This was after we parted; but he wrote me an account of it, and I intend to publish that letter 5, with many more.

For his love of travelling see Life, iii. 449.

2

Johnson's Journal for this part of his tour is missing.

3 JOHNSON. "Fear is one of the passions of human nature of which it is impossible to divest it. You remember that the Emperour Charles V, when he read upon the tomb-stone of a Spanish nobleman, ' Here lies one who never knew fear,' wittily said, 'Then he never snuffed a candle with his fingers.'' Life, ii. 81. 'Johnson feared death, but he feared nothing else, not even what might occasion death.' Ib. ii. 298.

'It was the saying of one of the

When one day he had at my house taken tincture of antimony instead of emetic wine, for a vomit, he was himself the person to direct us what to do for him, and managed with as much coolness and deliberation as if he had been prescribing for an indifferent person. Though on another occasion, when he had lamented in the most piercing terms his approaching dissolution, and conjured me solemnly to tell him what I thought, while Sir Richard Jebb1 was perpetually on the road to Streatham, and Mr. Johnson seemed to think himself neglected if the physician left him for an hour only, I made him a steady, but as I thought a very gentle harangue, in which I confirmed all that the Doctor had been saying, how no present danger could be expected; but that his age and continued ill health must naturally accelerate the arrival of that hour which can be escaped by none': 'And this (says Johnson, rising in great anger) is the voice of female friendship I suppose, when the hand of the hangman would be softer.'

Another day, when he was ill, and exceedingly low-spirited, and persuaded that death was not far distant, I appeared before him in a dark-coloured gown, which his bad sight, and worse apprehensions, made him mistake for an iron-grey. 'Why do you delight (said he) thus to thicken the gloom of misery that surrounds me? is not here sufficient accumulation of horror without anticipated mourning?' This is not mourning Sir (said I), drawing the curtain, that the light might fall upon the silk, and shew it was a purple mixed with green. 'Well, well (replied he, changing his voice), you little creatures should never wear those sort of clothes however; they are unsuitable in every way. What! have not all insects gay colours 3!' I relate these

instances chiefly to shew that the fears of death itself could not suppress his wit, his sagacity, or his temptation to sudden

resentment.

Mr. Johnson did not like that his friends should bring their manuscripts for him to read, and he liked still less to read them when they were brought: sometimes however when he could not refuse he would take the play or poem, or whatever it was, and give the people his opinion from some one page that he had peeped into. A gentleman carried him his tragedy, which, because he loved the author', Johnson took, and it lay about our rooms some time. What answer did you give your friend, Sir? said I, after the book had been called for. 'I told him (replied he), that there was too much Tig and Tirry in it.' Seeing me laugh most violently, 'Why what would'st have, child?' (said he.) I looked at nothing but the dramatis [personæ], and there was Tigranes and Tiridates, or Teribazus, or such stuff. A man can tell but what he knows, and I never got any further than the first page. Alas, Madam! (continued he) how few books are there of which one ever can possibly arrive at the last page! Was there ever yet any thing written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe3, and the Pilgrim's Progress *?' After Homer's Iliad,

through several editions, and please as many readers as Dryden and Tillotson.' The Whig Examiner, No. 2.

1720. Swift. I have been better entertained and more informed by a few pages in the Pilgrim's Progress than by a long discourse upon the will and the intellect and simple or complex ideas.' A Letter to a Young Clergyman. Works, ed. 1803, viii. 20.

1741. Gentleman's Magazine, p. 488. Take it all together there never was an Allegory better designed or better supported.'

1758. Mrs. Montagu. 'Bunyan and Quarles, those classics of the artificers Mr.

Mr. Johnson confessed that the work of Cervantes was the greatest in the world, speaking of it I mean as a book of entertainment; and when we consider that every other author's admirers are confined to his countrymen, and perhaps to the literary classes among them, while Don Quixote is a sort of common property, an universal classic, equally tasted by the court and the cottage, equally applauded in France and England as in Spain, quoted by every servant, the amusement of every age from infancy to decrepitude; the first book you see on every shelf, in every shop, where books are sold, through all the states of Italy; who can refuse his consent to an avowal of the

in leather.' Letters of Mrs. Montagu, iv. 78.

1759. Burke. The admirer of Don Bellianis perhaps does not understand the refined language of the Eneid, who, if it was degraded into the style of the Pilgrim's Progress, might feel it in all its energy on the same principle which made him an admirer of Don Bellianis.' On the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. 1759, p. 25.

1765. Gentleman's Magazine, p. 168. 'The Pilgrim's Progress is certainly a work of original and uncommon genius.'

1776. Beattie. Certain it is that fables in which there is neither love nor gallantry may be made highly interesting even to the fancy and affections of a modern reader. This appears not only from the writings of Shakespeare and other great authors, but from the Pilgrim's Progress of Bunyan, and the History of Robinson Crusoe. Essays on Poetry and Music, ed. 1779, p. 191.

1782. Horace Walpole. 'Dante was extravagant, absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist Parson in Bedlam. Ariosto was a more agreeable Amadis de Gaul, and Spenser, John

Bunyan in rhyme.' Walpole's Letters, viii. 235.

1785. Cowper:

'I name thee not, lest so despised a name

Should move a sneer at thy de

served fame,

Yet ev'n in transitory life's late day

That mingles all my brown with sober grey,

Revere the man whose Pilgrim

marks the road

And guides the Progress of the soul to God.'

Tirocinium. Poems, 1786, ii, 298. Macaulay, in 1830, wrote :-' Cowper said forty or fifty years ago that he dared not name John Bunyan in his verse for fear of moving a sneer. To our refined forefathers, we suppose, Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse, and the Duke of Buckinghamshire's Essay on Poetry, appeared to be compositions infinitely superior to the allegory of the preaching tinker. We live in better times,' &c. Essays, ed. 1843, i. 424. Not six years after Macaulay wrote this, the Pilgrim's Progress was described in the Penny Cyclopaedia, vi. 20, as a 'coarse allegory... mean, jejune and wearisome.'

superiority

superiority of Cervantes to all other modern writers? Shakespeare himself has, till lately, been worshipped only at home, though his plays are now the favourite amusements of Vienna; and when I was at Padua some months ago, Romeo and Juliet was acted there under the name of Tragedia Veronese; while engravers and translators live by the Hero of La Mancha in every nation, and the sides of miserable inns all over England and France, and I have heard Germany too, are adorned with the exploits of Don Quixote. May his celebrity procure my pardon for a digression in praise of a writer who, through four volumes of the most exquisite pleasantry and genuine humour, has never been seduced to overstep the limits of propriety, has never called in the wretched auxiliaries of obscenity or profaneness; who trusts to nature and sentiment alone, and never misses of that applause which Voltaire and Sterne labour to produce, while honest merriment bestows her unfading crown upon Cervantes.

Dr. Johnson was a great reader of French literature, and delighted exceedingly in Boileau's works. Moliere I think he had hardly sufficient taste of; and he used to condemn me for preferring La Bruyère to the Duc de Rochefoucault, 'who (he said) was the only gentleman writer who wrote like a professed author.' The asperity of his harsh sentences, each of them a sentence of condemnation, used to disgust me however; though it must be owned, that, among the necessaries of human life, a rasp is reckoned one as well as a razor.

Mr. Johnson did not like any one who said they were happy, or who said any one else was so. 'It is all cant (he would cry), the dog knows he is miserable all the time3. A friend whom

Goldsmith called Sterne 'a bawdy blockhead.' Citizen of the World, Letter 74; Life, ii. 173, n. 2. When he said that he was 'a very dull fellow' Johnson replied, 'Why no Sir.' Ib. ii. 222. Later on however, Johnson said :—'Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.' Ib. ii. 449.

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* 'S'il m'est permis de parler pour moi-même, Boileau est un des hommes qui m'ont le plus occupé depuis que je fais de la critique, et avec qui j'ai le plus vécu en idée.' Sainte-Beuve, Causeries de Lundi, vi. 495.

3 The world in its best state is nothing more than a larger assembly

he