INTRODUCTION. No man has ever held the same place as Johnson. Dryden was gazed at with distant veneration by Pope; Pope's hand was touched with reverence by Reynolds'. Each of these poets was in his own time the acknowledged head of the world of letters. But Johnson was more than this. He was the unrivalled talker, the master of the art of life, the oracle whom all men could consult, the dread of the fool and the affected, the founder of a great school of truthfulness and accuracy, the profound teacher of morality. Death laid his hand on him in vain; for though Johnson was gone the land became more and more Johnsonised. Great though his fame was in his life-time, it is greater still in his death. It is his singular fortune among authors that his reputation is founded not on his own writings but on those of his disciples and friends. As Edmund Burke justly maintained, 'Boswell's Life is a greater monument to Johnson's fame than all his writings put together3.' His written wisdom was indeed great, but it is in his spoken wisdom that he lives. A few of his writings still hold their ground and are likely to hold them, for it is not easy to believe that the day will ever come when the world will be wholly indifferent to London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, or will suffer the Lives of the Poets to sink into neglect. Rasselas has been translated into at least ten languages, and can be 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, Clarendon Press ed. i. 377 n. I. 2 Ib. i. 13. 3 Ib. i. Io n. I. * Italian, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Modern Greek, Hungarian, Russian, Polish, and Bengalee. Ib. ii. 208; vi. lxiv. read read not only on the banks of the Volga1 but also on the banks of the Ganges. Nevertheless it is true that when we talk of Johnson it is not of Johnson's Johnson, but of Boswell's Johnson, that we are thinking. The extraordinary interest which the skill of the biographer has raised in his hero has led us no doubt to study his character in all the lights that are cast upon it. In the pages of Hawkins, Murphy, Mrs. Piozzi, Mme. D'Arblay, and a host of others, we see qualities and peculiarities which Boswell either altogether passed over or traced with far too light a touch. In Johnson's own writings, if we care to study them, we come upon many a passage in which the author, while describing the character of another, is at the same time describing his own. Tradition too, before it was too late, came in with her delightful aid. From the memories of men who had visited at Bolt-court and at Streatham, or had enjoyed the manly conversation and the society of the brown table' of the Literary Club2, was gathered many an interesting anecdote of the grand old sage. The result of all these varied labours has not been in vain, for we now know Johnson as no other man is known to us. It is with the characters of fiction alone that we have the same kind of friendly and close intimacy. Our acquaintance with him is not as with Dryden or Pope or Gibbon, but as with Falstaff and Don Quixote, with Sir Roger de Coverley and my Uncle Toby. If it is by the wonderful skill of the biographer that his life 1 6 'Johnson. "O! Gentlemen, I must tell you a very great thing. The Empress of Russia has ordered the Rambler to be translated into the Russian language; so I shall be read on the banks of the Wolga. Horace boasts that his fame would extend as far as the banks of the Rhone; now the Wolga is farther from me than the Rhone was from Horace."' Boswell's Life of Johnson, iv. 276. The report that the Rambler was translated into Russian was not well founded. 2 Ib. iii. 128 n. 4. still lives and glows, yet that skill would have been of no avail had it not had for its subject a man whose character was noble in itself, and was marked in the deepest and strongest lines. Striking and even wonderful though this character was, yet it seems to be understood only by the English-speaking races. Of Boswell's Life of Johnson no translation, so far as I know, has ever yet been made. No foreigners come to worship at the shrine of the rugged idol whom we have set up. His wit, his humour, his strong common sense, his truthfulness, his roughness, his tenderness, are known to us and us alone. Boswell was indeed right when he so often spoke of him as 'a true-born Englishman'. Of all Englishmen he was the most English-in his bad qualities as well as in his good, in his prejudices as well as in his wisdom. The interest of the portrait that Boswell draws of him is heightened by the biographer's freedom from all insular narrowness. The young Scotchman was as far removed as possible from being 'A Scot if ever Scot there were "' 'I can With perfect justice he boasted that he was 'a very universal man He was as easy with Rousseau as he was with Johnson, with Paoli as he was with Jack Wilkes. drink,' he boasted, 'I can laugh, I can converse in perfect humour with Whigs, with Republicans, with Dissenters, with Independents, with Quakers, with Moravians, with Jews".' He would have been the last man to agree with 'Old Meynell' when he exclaimed:-'For anything I see foreigners are fools". In his Tour to the Hebrides, while he describes Johnson as 'at bottom much of a John Bull, much of a blunt true-born Englishman, writing of himself he says:—' I am, I flatter myself, completely a citizen of the world. In my 2 Ib. ii. 306. 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, v. 20. 3 Ib. iii. 375 n. 2. 5 Ib. iv. 15. • Ib. v. 20. travels travels through Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home1.' He often boasted of his descent from Robert Bruce. But this universality, which was one of his greatest merits, may have come to him from his 'great-grandmother, Veronica, Countess of Kincardine, a Dutch lady of the noble house of Sommelsdyck";' certainly it is not often found north of the Tweed. In whatever way it came, he had it in a large degree. By means of it he saw the striking contrasts in his hero's character, but he saw them not with anger or contempt, or even with mere toleration. So far from being shocked by them, he had his interest all the more aroused. : As Johnson is marked off from all other men as the typical Englishman, so is he distinguished from all other Englishmen, by the prominence of 'the contradictory qualities "' that were found in him. Horace Walpole describes him as 'the representative in epitome of all the contradictions in human nature 1.' With all his contradictions, however, he never exhibited those unhappy variations which trouble us in some of the greatest of men. One of his friends praising the originality of his talk said :—' In general you may tell what the man to whom you are speaking will say next. This you can never do of Johnson. Though you could never tell what Johnson would say, yet in all the greater questions of right or wrong every one could know what Johnson would do. Here there were no wanderings, no strayings to one side or to the other. There was the strait gate, and here was the narrow path leading to it. The gate he kept ever in view, and along the narrow path he doggedly plodded his way. Who has 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, v. 20. 2 Ib. v. 25 n. 2. not |