INTRODUCTION.

THE years of Samuel Johnson's life were momentous years in the history of England. Born in 1709, a few days after the victory of Malplaquet had been won by England's greatest general, the sounds that surrounded his cradle were of political rejoicing. But even now Marlborough's influence was on the wane, and the earliest talk that Johnson could understand at all must have been of the abandonment by the Treaty of Utrecht of England's main purpose in the war-the exclusion of the Bourbons from the throne of Spain. And before his eyes were finally closed in 1784 the Independence of America had been acknowledged. Nor were the changes less in domestic history. His father, he tells us1, would talk with him about Sacheverell's trial, which led to the overthrow of the Whigs under Anne ; whilst Johnson himself lived to see the premiership of the younger Pitt. Such years could not be otherwise than years of vast intensity of national life, and, for good or evil, that intensity has left its mark in a most striking degree upon the products of the time. It was a period when men worked hard, talked hard, swore hard, drank hard, and generally lived hard. At such a time no man must come to the front whose hands cannot keep his head. The intellectual contests were of the roughest, and epithets could be freely bandied about which are no longer to be heard in polite society. It was then correct and natural in the eyes of men to hate a political opponent :-Johnson loved 'a good hater.' A more refined intellect was in some danger of not having strength enough for the time; of being trampled on, as Johnson trampled upon Gray. Such a social atmosphere was clearly suited to the survival only of the intellectually fittest, and Johnson was in this sense eminently fit. Thus whilst great men-some of England's greatest-were at work to make the

time, it is also in a peculiar sense true of that century, that the time was making the men. Throughout Johnson's life gigantic forces were everywhere being stored up, the explosion of which he did not always live to see. He did not live to see the pent-up force of long-endured misery break out in France in the crash of the Revolution, and tear the Bastile stone from stone. But the misery was there, in his day, and some shadow of it even brooded over England. Things were going not right, but wrong, 'dans ce meilleur des mondes possible,' as Voltaire called it in a bitter jest. And Johnson was observer enough to know this well; and had besides enough to remind him of it in his own life-history. The Rasselas of Johnson and the Candide of Voltaire were thus alike in being simply expressions of the age in which the writers lived, of the side of that age which they both saw most clearly, and of a remonstrance against the prevailing optimism which was rendering men far too blind to the wrongness of things around them. The line of demarcation between Faith and Fatalism is ever apt to become vague and shadowy to a feeble intellect or a feeble courage; but Johnson's was a nature, rugged it is true, but essentially strong. Of all bold thinkers he is perhaps the boldest who ventures to attack optimism in a religious age; but Johnson's character was morally and intellectually bold in the extreme. The high courage, which not only gave him his eminence in after years, but which aided him in his daily struggle for bread, against the odds that overwhelmed so many of his contemporaries, enabled him to look life full in the face, and say what he saw there of sorrow and of sin. This peculiar quality of abnormal courage, both physical and intellectual, is very characteristic of times of unusual mental excitement. It nerved the leaders of the Reformation to utterance, totally reckless of their personal safety: it followed their supporters to the stake, and amazed men with the spectacle of heretics triumphant over death in his most awful forms. It gave Burke the power to perform the last feat of oratorical endurance, and pour forth floods of eloquence that shall never die, to the empty benches of an unheeding House. Courage was the key to Johnson's character. Even his fear of death, about which we hear so much, may be to a certain extent misunderstood and exaggerated, unless the student is cautious to make due

allowance for the fact that Johnson had no fear of expressing to the full what fear he felt. When he said that a man who claimed not to fear death must be either an idiot or a liar, he after all only gave utterance to a simple truism in its extreme form. And we are told that when his time came he met the inevitable like a man.' It seems not unreasonable to suppose that the prominence given in his conversation to his love of living as such, was due at least as much to his fearing men less, as to his fearing death more, than falls to the lot of ordinary minds. Allowances of this kind must be made even whilst acknowledging to the full the unhappy influence over Johnson's mind of physical disease and inherited mental derangement.

In this main characteristic Johnson was the man of his time. When he first appeared before the public Pope was still writing satires, and to differ in party politics from Pope was like riding a tilt at Launcelot—apt to be rough work. For rough work then he must be formed who was to succeed in England at a season such as this, and Johnson, in spite of a wonderful depth of hidden tenderness which never left him, had nothing to fear in roughness from any adversary. And in his career too he was at once a type of a class and the noblest exception to the ordinary fate of that class. Johnson's life really begins where we find him a hack writer :—a citizen of the Grub Street republic was to become dictator in the world of literature. Thus as a man, as a politician, as a writer, Johnson stands out as the concrete form of the English eighteenth century; and it is indeed fortunate that we are enabled to study a figure so conspicuous as delineated by the masterly hand of Boswell in the greatest of biographies. For to know Johnson aright, and through him to know the times he lived in, it is not enough to study his writings; we must know him as a talker, and follow him from one place of meeting to another, where he was wont to sit and hold forth to a circle of admiring listeners, whose few observations, intended mostly to draw him out, he condescended to approve or peremptorily censured. Still more we must know those facts of his history which left on him, and on all he did, so deep an impression--an impression which he never wholly shook off, in spite of the iron will he brought to bear on all mere 'circumstances.'

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Johnson's father was a bookseller at Lichfield in Staffordshire; ‘an old bookseller,' Johnson himself calls him in the Life of Dryden'. The simple physical presence of many books in the home of childhood often does much towards inclining a man in after years for scholarly pursuits. Books were the toys of Johnson's infancy, the familiar companions of his earliest youth; he searched amongst folios for suspected treasures of hidden apples; and to a childhood spent amongst the stores of the old bookseller,' or second-hand bookseller, as we should now call him, he undoubtedly owed much of that acquaintance with rare and curious works which so distinguished him in after-life. 'Why, Sir,' said he to his friend Langton, 'who is there in this town who knows anything of Clenardus but you and I?'2 For his father he seems to have retained throughout his life a fond and respectful affection; and it is narrated how Johnson never forgot or forgave himself for what he described as 'this only instance, I believe, of contumacy to my father,' in refusing to take his place at the book-stall at Uttoxeter on market-day. Fifty years after, the Doctor, now rapidly declining in health and strength, endeavoured to atone for this boyish fault by standing bareheaded in the market-place of Uttoxeter, 'exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather.' From his father Johnson doubtless obtained much information which was afterwards put to good account in his writings, and it is noticeable that in his Lives of the Poets his father is one of very few authorities to whom he refers by name. Johnson himself claimed that at eighteen, when the two years since he left school had been spent at home, he knew as much as he did at the age of fifty-three. An unusual memory enabled him to retain most of what he read, and in the pursuit of knowledge he had no choice. Not merely the facts, but what was more momentous for him, the method of acquiring facts, was firmly rooted in him within those two years. Within that space of time he had probably made the acquaintance, in some sort, of most of the books in his father's shop; and the stock must have been small indeed for this not to be a gigantic task. But for work of this kind he had a special aptitude. A fine instinct enabled him to get at the pith of a book with the minimum 2 Boswell, Anno 1780.

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expenditure of time; he is described as 'tearing the hearts out of them,' and for this to be done successfully the mental effort must be the greater the shorter the time occupied. 'To spend too much time in studies is sloth,' wrote Lord Bacon; 'Pray Sir, do you read books through?' said Johnson;-and a comparison of the two sayings is instructive. But he who would travel express along the road to knowledge must pay the express fare; and Johnson paid it in the severe reaction which follows upon periods of the intensest intellectual activity. His memory was an excellent servant to him, and he trusted it even too implicitly, quoting always without referring, and therefore rarely quoting with absolute correctness. What his energy of mind enabled him to remember, he wrote; what he had forgotten, his sluggishness of body made him content to leave unwritten. Hence we value his writings on other grounds than as accurate expositions of intricate matters of fact. adjust the minute events of literary history,' he says, 'is tedious and troublesome1'

To

In 1728 Johnson matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford. At this time learning in England was at its very lowest ebb, and even Oxford had then no name to place beside Johnson's in after celebrity; with, perhaps, the single exception of John Wesley, who was a Fellow of Lincoln at the time when Johnson was an undergraduate at Pembroke. Much ingenuity has been exercised in determining the dates and duration of Johnson's stay in Oxford. It is enough to say here that it was short, and that, though Johnson always retained an affection for his university, it is only too clear that he owed none of his eminence to her. Scholarship and poverty form a bitter compound to live on anywhere, and bitterest of all in Oxford. He insulted all his tutors, whom he doubtless even then surpassed in learning, and hurled out of the window the pair of new boots which some friendly hand had laid at his door. For the only lectures he valued were those of a Mr. Bateman, delivered in Christ Church : these he had attended whilst his shoes held out; but when his toes peeped through he came no more. The poverty which leaves the body unfed Johnson knew well, and could speak of with a ready jest; but the hunger of the spirit prowling outside the gates of Christ Church, where the feast of reason was spread 1 p. 31.

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