CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
ESSAYS:
COLLECTED AND REPUBLISHED
(FIBST TIME, 1839 ; MNAL, 1869),
IN SIX VOLUMES.
YOL. [V.
THOMAS CARLYLE'S
COLLECTED WORKS.
LIBRAEY EDITION:
THIRTY VOLUMES.
7OL. IX.
CEITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS
VCMU-1V.
LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL (LIMITED),
11 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN.
CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
ESSAYS:
COLLECTED AKD EEPUBLISH1D
(FEES! TSM& f 1839 J FINAL, 1869).
THOMAS CARLYLE.
IN SIX VOLUMES.
CHAPMAN AND HALL, ; l^iMirafi,
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON & BUNGAY.
Reprinted from Stereotype Plates,
November, 1890.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME IV
PAGE
BIOGRAPHY . . . *. 8
BQSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON .25
GOETHE'S WORKS 109
CORN-LAW BHYMES . . , . , . ,177
ON HlSTOEY AGAIN . , .215
DIDEROT , ..... 229
COUNT CAGLIOSTRO 311
DEATH OF EDWARD IBVING . . , . . .303
APPENDIX.
No. I. THE TALB ....,>.. 401
2. E~OVELLE .....,,,. 484
BIOGRAPHY.
TOL. IX. (Misc. voL 4)
BIOGRAPHY/
[1832.]
MAN'S sociality of nature evinces itself, in spite of all that
can be said, with abundant evidence by this one fact, were
there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Bio-
graphy. It is written, 'The proper study of mankind is
man ;' to which study, let us candidly admit, he, by true or
by false methods, applies himself, nothing loath. *Man is
t perennially interesting to man ; nay, if we look strictly to
* it, there is nothing else interesting/ How inexpressibly
comfortable to know our fellow-creature; to see into him,
understand his goings-forth, decipher the whole heart of
his mystery : nay, not only to see into him, but even to see
out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it ; so
that we can theoretically construe him, and could almost
practically personate him ; and do now thoroughly discern
both what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing
he has got to work on and live on I
A scientific interest and a poetic one alike inspire us in
this matter. A scientific : because every mortal has a Pro-
blem of Existence set before him, which, were it only, what
for the most it is, the Problem of keeping soul and body
together, must be to a certain extent original, unlike every
1 FBASBB'S MAGAZINE, No. 27 (for April). 2%e.Z#/k of Samuel Johnson,
including a Tour to the Hebrides, By James Boswell, Esq.- A new Edition,
numerous Additions and Notes, by John Wilson Croker, LL,B. t F.B.S. 5 vols,
London, 1831,
MISCELLANIES.
other ; and yet, at the same time, so like every other ; like
our own, therefore ; instructive, moreover, since we also are
indentured to live. A poetic interest still more : for precisely
this same struggle of human Freewill against material Ne-
cessity, which every man's Life, by the mere circumstance
that the man continues alive, will more or less victoriously
exhibit, is that which above all else, or rather inclusive of
all else, calls the Sympathy of mortal hearts into action ;
and whether as acted, or as represented and written of,
not only is Poetry, but is the sole Poetry possible. Borne
onwards by which two all-embracing interests, may the
earnest Lover of Biography expand himself on all sides,
and indefinitely enrich himself. Looking with the eyes of
every new neighbour, he can discern a new world different
for each: feeling with the heart of every neighbour, he
lives with every neighbour's life, even as with his own.
Of these millions of living men, each individual is a mirror
to us ; a mirror both scientific and poetic ; or, if you will,
both natural and magical ; from which one would so gladly
draw aside the gauze veil; and, peering therein, discern
the image of his own natural face, and the supernatural
secrets that prophetically lie under the same !
Observe, accordingly, to what extent, in the actual course
of things, this business of Biography is practised and relished.
Define to thyself, judicious Reader, the real significance of
these phenomena, named Gossip, Egoism, Personal Narrative
(miraculous or not), Scandal, Raillery, Slander, and suchlike;
the sum-total of which (with some fractional addition of a
better ingredient, generally too small to be noticeable) con-
stitutes that other grand phenomenon still called * Conver-
sation.* Do they not mean wholly : Biography and Autobio-
graphy ? Not only in the common Speech of men ; but in
all Art too, which is or should be the concentrated and con-
BIOGRAPHY. 5
served essence of wliat men can speak and snow, Biography
is almost the one thing needful.
Even in the highest works of Art, our interest, as the
critics complain, is too apt to be strongly or even mainly of
a Biographic sort. In the Art we can nowise forget the Ar-
tist : while looking on the Transfiguration, while studying the
Iliad, we ever strive to figure to ourselves what spirit dwelt
in Raphael; what a head was that of Homer, wherein, woven
of Elysian light and Tartarean gloom, that old world fash
ioned itself together, of which these written Greek charac-
ters are but a feeble though perennial copy. The Painter
and the Singer are present to us ; we partially and for the
time become the very Painter and the very Singer, while we
enjoy the Picture and the Song. Perhaps too, let the critic
say what he will, this is the highest enjoyment, the clearest
recognition, we can have of these. Art indeed is Art; yet
Man also is Man. Had the Transfiguration been painted
without human hand ; had it grown merely on the canvas,
say by atmospheric influences, as lichen-pictures do on rocks,
it were a grand Picture doubtless; yet nothing like so
grand as the Picture, which, on opening our eyes, we every-
where in Heaven and in Earth see painted ; and everywhere
pass over with indifference, because the Painter was not
a Man. Think of this; much lies in it. The Vatican is
great ; yet poor to Chimborazo or the Peak of Teneriife :
its dome is but a foolish Big-endian or Little-endian chip of
an egg-shell, compared with that star-fretted Dome where
Arcturus and Orion glance forever; which latter, notwith-
standing, who looks at, save perhaps some necessitous star-
gazer bent to make Almanacs; some thick-quilted watch-
man, to see what weather it will prove? The Biographic
interest is wanting: no Michael Angelo was He who built
that 4 Temple of Immensity ;' therefore do we, pitiful
6 MSCELLANlfiS.
nesses as we are, turn rather to wonder and to worship in
the little toybox of a Temple built by our like.
Still more decisively, still more exclusively does the Bio-
graphic interest manifest itself, as we descend into lower
regions of spiritual communication; through the whole
range of what is called Literature. Of History, for example,
the most honoured, if not honourable species of composition,
is not the whole purport Biographic ? c History,' it has been
said, * is the essence of innumerable Biographies.' Such, at
least, it should be : whether it is, might admit of question.
But, in any case, what hope have we in turning over those
old interminable Chronicles, with their garrulities and insi-
pidities ; or still worse, in patiently examining those modern
Narrations, of the Philosophic kind, where 4 Philosophy,
teaching by Experience/ has to sit like owl on housetop,
seeing nothing, understanding nothing, uttering only, with
such solemnity, her perpetual most wearisome hoo-lioo:
what hope have we, except the for most part fallacious one
of gaining some acquaintance with our fellow -creatures,
though dead and vanished, yet dear to us; how they got
along in those old days, suffering and doing; to what extent,
and under what circumstances, they resisted the Devil and
triumphed over him, or struck their colours to him, and
were trodden under foot by him ; how, in short, the peren-
. nial Battle went, which men name Life, which we also in
these new days, with indifferent fortune, have to fight, and
must bequeath to our sons and grandsons to go on fighting,
till the Enemy one day be quite vanquished and abolished,
or else the great Night sink and part the combatants ; and
thus, either by some Millennium or some new Noah's Deluge,
the Volume of Universal History wind itself up ! Other
hope, in studying such Books, we have none : and that it is
a deceitful hope, who that has tried knows not? A feast
BIOGRAPHY. 7
of widest Biographic insight is spread for us ; we enter full
of hungry anticipations : alas, like so many other feasts,
which Life invites us to, a mere Ossiaii's * feast of shells?
the food and liquor being all emptied out and clean gone,
and only the vacant dishes and deceitful emblems thereof
left ! Your modern Historical Restaurateurs are indeed little
better than high-priests of Famine; that keep choicest china
dinner-sets, only no dinner to serve therein. Yet such is our
Biographic appetite, we run trying from shop to shop,
with ever new hope; and, unless we could eat the wind,
with ever new disappointment.
Again, consider the whole class of Fictitious Narratives;
from the highest category of epic or dramatic Poetry, in
Shakspeare and Homer, down to the lowest of froth Prose
in the Fashionable Novel. What are all these but so many
mimic Biographies ? Attempts, here by an inspired Speaker,
there by an uninspired Babbler, to deliver himself, more or
less ineffectually, of the grand secret wherewith all hearts
labour oppressed: The significance of Man's Life; which
deliverance, even as traced in the unfurnished head, and
printed at the Minerva Press, finds readers. For, observe,
though there is a greatest Fool, as a superlative in every
kind ; and the most Foolish man in the Earth is now indubit-
ably living and breathing, and did this morning or lately
eat breakfast, and is even now digesting the same; and
looks out on the world with his dim horn-eyes, and inwardly
forms some unspeakable theory thereof: yet where shall the
authentically Existing be personally met with ! Can one of
us, otherwise than by guess, know that we have got sight
of him, have orally communed with him 1 To take even the
narrower sphere of this our English Metropolis, can any one
confidently say to himself, that he has converged with, the
identical, individual Stupidest man now extant in London?
8 MISCELLANIES.
No one. Deep as we dive in the Profound, there is ever
a new depth opens : where the ultimate bottom may lie,
through what new scenes of being we must pass before
reaching it (except that we know it does lie somewhere,
and might by human faculty and opportunity be reached),
is altogether a mystery to us. Strange, tantalising pursuit !
We have the fullest assurance, not only that there is a Stu-
pidest of London men actually resident, with bed and board
of some kind, in London; but that several persons have
been or perhaps are now speaking face to face with him :
while for us, chase it as we may, such scientific blessedness
will too probably be forever denied! But the thing we
meant to enforce was this comfortable fact, that no known
Head was so wooden, but there might be other heads to
which it were a genius and Friar Bacon's Oracle. Of no
given Book, not even of a Fashionable Novel, can you predi-
cate with certainty that its vacuity is absolute ; that there
are not other vacuities which shall partially replenish them-
selves therefrom, and esteem it a plenum. How knowest
thou, may the distressed Novelwright exclaim, that I, here
where I sit, am the Foolishest of existing mortals ; that this
my Long-ear of a Fictitious Biography shall not find one
and the other, into whose still longer ears it may be the
means, under Providence, of instilling somewhat ? We ans-
wer, None knows, none can certainly know : therefore, write
on, worthy Brother, even as thou canst, even as it has been
given thee. J
Here, however, in regard to * Fictitious Biographies,' and
much other matter of like sort, which the greener mind in
these days incliteth, we may as well insert some singular
sentences on the importance and significance of Reality, as
they stand written for us in Professor Gottfried Sauerteig's
JEsthetisehe Springwurzeln ; a Work, perhaps, as yet new to
BIOGRAMK". 9
most English readers. The Professor and Doctor is not a
man whom we can praise without reservation ; neither shall
we say that his Springwurzeln (a sort of magical picklocks,
as he affectedly names them) are adequate to ' start' every
bolt that locks-up an esthetic mystery : nevertheless, in his
crabbed, one-sided way, he sometimes hits masses of the
truth. We endeavour to translate faithfully, and trust the
reader will find it worth serious perusal :
4 The significance, even for poetic purposes/ says Sauer-
teig, * that lies in REALITY is too apt to escape us ; is per-
haps only now beginning to be discerned. When we
* named Rousseau's Confessions an elegiaco-didactic Poem, we
6 meant more than an empty figure of speech ; we meant a
6 historical scientific fact.
* Fiction, while the feigner of it knows that he is feign-
' ing, partakes, more than we suspect, of the nature of lying;
6 and has ever an, in some degree, unsatisfactory character.
All Mythologies were once Philosophies ; were believed :
6 the Epic Poems of old time, so long as they continued epic,
< and had any complete impressiveness, were Histories, and
6 understood to be narratives of facts. In so far as Homer
* employed his gods as mere ornamental fringes, and had
6 not himself, or at least did not expect his hearers to have,
* a belief that they were real agents in those antique doings;
c so far did he fail to be genuine; so far was h$ a partially
* hollow and false singer ; and sang to please only a portion
* of man's mind, not the whole thereof.
* Imagination is, after all, but a poor matter when it has
* to part company with Understanding, and even 'front it
' hostilely in flat contradiction. Our mind is divided in
* twain : there is contest ; wherein that which is weaker
* must needs come to the worse. Now of all feelings, states,
* principles, call it what you will, in man's mind, is not Be-
10 MISCELLANIES.
' lief tlie clearest, strongest; against which all others con-
6 tend in vain ! Belief is, indeed, the beginning and first
< condition of all spiritual Force whatsoever : only in so far
* as Imagination, were it but momentarily, is believed, can
' there be any use or meaning in it, any enjoyment of it.
* And what is momentary Belief? The enjoyment of a
* moment. Whereas a perennial Belief were enjoyment
6 perennially, and with the whole united soul.
' It is thus that I judge of the Supernatural in an Epic
* Poem ; and would say, the instant it has ceased to be
* authentically supernatural, and become what you call " Ma-
* chinery :" sweep it out of sight (schaf es mir vom Hake) I
< Of a truth, that same " Machinery," about which the critics
6 make such hubbub, was well named Machinery ; for it is in
( ver y ^ ee( j mec ] lan i ca i j nowise inspired or poetical. Neither
* for us is there the smallest aesthetic enjoyment in it ; save
6 only in this way ; that we believe it to have been believed,
* by the Singer or his Hearers ; into whose case we now
* laboriously straggle to transport 'ourselves; and so, with
* stinted enough result, catch some reflex of the Reality,
4 which for them was wholly real, and visible face to face.
4 Whenever it has come so far that your "Machinery" is
< avowedly mechanical and unbelieved, what is it else, if
* we dare tell ourselves the truth, but a miserable, meaning-
< less Deception, kept-up by old use and wont alone 1 If
* the gods of an Iliad are to us no longer authentic Shapes
* of Terror, heart-stirring, heart-appalling, but only vague-
4 glittering Shadows, what must the dead Pagan gods of
6 an Epigoniad be, the dead-living Pagan-Christian gods of
*a Lusiad, the concrete-abstract, evangelical-metaphysical
< gods of a Paradise Lost ? Superannuated lumber 1 Cast
* raiment, at best ; in which some poor mime, strutting
< and swaggering, may or may not set forth new noble
BIOGKAPHt. 11
* Human Feelings (again a Reality), and so secure, or not
* secure, our pardon of such hoydenish masking ; for which,
* in any case, lie lias a pardon to a$L
< True enough, none but the earliest Epic Poems can
* claim this distinction of entire credibility, of Reality : after
6 an Iliad, a Shaster, a Koran, and other the lite primitive
* performances, the rest seem, by this rule of mine, to be
rf altogether excluded from the list. Accordingly, what are
all the rest, from Virgil's JEneid downwards, in compari-
6 son ? Frosty, artificial, heterogeneous things ; more of
* gumflowers than of roses ; at the best, of the two mixed
* incoherently together : to some of which, indeed, it were
* hard to deny the title of Poems ; yet to no one of which
* can that title belong in any sense even resembling the old
* high one it, in those old days, conveyed, when the epithet
* " divine" or " sacred" as applied to the uttered Word of
* man, was not a vain metaphor, a vain sound, but a real
* name with meaning. Thus, too, the farther we recede
6 from, those early days, when Poetry, as true Poetry is
* always, was still sacred or divine, and inspired (what ours,
6 in great part, only pretends to be), the more impossible
* becomes It to produce any, we say not true Poetry, but
* tolerable semblance of such ; the hollower, in particular,
< grow all manner of Epics ; till at length, as in this genera-
* tion, the very name of Epic sets men a-yawiiing, the an-
* nouncement of a new Epic is received as a public calamity.
6 But what if the impossible being once for all quite dis-
* carded, the probable be well adhered to : how stands it with
* fiction then ? Why, then, I would say, the evil is much
* mended, but nowise completely cured. We have then,
* in place of the wholly dead modern Epic, the partially
* living modern Novel ; to which latter it is much easier ,
* to lend that above mentioned, so essential u momentary
12 MISOMLLANUBS.
c credence" tlian to the former : indeed, infinitely easier ;
* for the former "being flatly incredible, no mortal can for a
< moment credit it, for a moment enjoy it. Thus, here and
* there, a Tom Jones, a Meister, a Crusoe, will yield no little
< solacement to the minds of men ; though still immeasur-
i ably less than a Reality would, were the significance thereof
* as impressively unfolded, were the genius that could so
* unfold it once given us by the kind Heavens. Neither
6 say thou that proper Realities are wanting : for Man's
' Life, now, as of old, is the genuine work of God ; wherever
< there is a Man, a God also is revealed, and all that is God-
* like : a whole epitome of the Infinite, with its meanings,
c lies enfolded in the Life of every Man. Only, alas, that
* the Seer to discern this same Godlike, and with fit utter-
4 ance unfold, it for us, is wanting, and may long be wanting !
' Nay, a question arises on us here, wherein the whole
* German reading-world will eagerly join : Whether man
* can any longer be so interested by the spoken Word, as
* he often was in those primeval days, when rapt away by
* its inscrutable power, he pronounced it, in such dialect as
* he had, to be transcendental (to transcend all measure), to be
* sacred, prophetic and the inspiration of a god? For my-
* self, I (ich meines Ortes), by faith or by insight, do heartily
* understand that the answer to such question will be, Yea !
* For never that I could in searching find out, has Man been,
* by Time which devours so much, deprivated of any faculty
* whatsoever that he in any era was possessed of. To my
* seeming, the babe born yesterday has all the organs of
4 Body, Soul and Spirit, and in exactly the same combina-
* tion and entireness, that the oldest Pelasgic Greek, or Me-
1 sopotamian Patriarch, or Father Adam himself could boast
* of. Ten fingers, one heart with venous and arterial blood
s therein, still belong to man that is born of woman : when
BIOGRAPHY. 13
* did he lose any of his spiritual Endowments either ; above
6 all, his highest spiritual Endowment, that of revealing
' Poetic Beauty, and of adequately receiving the same 1 Not
6 the material, not the susceptibility is wanting ; only the
4 Poet, or long series of Poets, to work on these. True,
6 alas too true, the Poet is still utterly wanting, or all but
{ utterly : nevertheless have we not centuries enough before
'us to produce him in? Him and much else! I, for the
6 present, will but predict that chiefly by working more and
* more on REALITY, and evolving more and more wisely its
4 inexhaustible meanings ; and, in brief, speaking forth in
6 fit utterance whatsoever our whole soul believes, and ceas-
* ing to speak forth what thing soever our whole soul does
* not believe, will this high emprise be accomplished, or
6 approximated to.'
These notable, and not unfounded, though partial and
(fep-seeing rather than ivide-Beemg observations on the great
import of REALITY, considered even as a poetic material, we
have inserted the more willingly, because a transient feel-
ing to the same purpose may often have suggested itself
to many readers; and, on the whole, it is good that every
reader and every writer understand, with all intensity of
conviction, what quite infinite worth lies in Truth ; how all-
pervading, omnipotent, in man's mind, is the thing we name
Belief, For the rest, Herr Sauerteig, though one-sided, on
this matter of Reality, seems heartily persuaded, and is not
perhaps so ignorant as he looks. It cannot be unknown to
him, for example, what noise is made about 'Invention;*
what a supreme rank this faculty is reckoned to hold in the
poetic endowment. Great truly is Invention ; nevertheless,
that is but a poor exercise of it with which Belief is not
concerned. * An Irishman with whisky in his head/ as poor
Byron said, will invent you, in this kind, till there is enough
14 MISCELLANIES.
and to spare. Nay, perhaps, if we consider well, the highest
exercise of Invention has, in very deed, nothing to do with
Fiction ; but is an invention of new Truth, what we can
call a Revelation; which last does undoubtedly transcend
all other poetic efforts, nor can Herr Sauerteig be too loud
in its praises. But, on the other hand, whether such effort
is still possible for man, Herr Sauerteig and the bulk of the
world are probably at issue; and will probably continue
so till that same ' Revelation,' or new i Invention of Reality,'
of the sort he desiderates, shall itself make its appearance.
Meanwhile, quitting these airy regions, let any one be-
think him how impressive the smallest historical fact may
become, as contrasted with the grandest fictitious event; what
an incalculable force lies for us in this consideration : The
Thing which I here hold imaged in my mind did actually
occur ; was, in very truth, an element in the system of the
All. whereof I too form part; had therefore, and has, through
all time, an authentic being; is not a dream, but a reality !
We ourselves can remember reading, in Lord Clarendon*
with feelings perhaps somehow accidentally opened to it,
certainly with a depth of impression strange to us then and
now, that insignificant-looking passage, where Charles,
after the battle of Worcester, glides down, with Squire
Careless, from the Royal Oak, at nightfall, being hungry :
how, ' making a shift to get over hedges and ditches, after
* walking at least eight or nine miles, which were the more
* grievous to the King by the weight of his boots (for he
< could not put them off when he cut off his hair, for want
6 of shoes), before morning they came to a poor cottage, the
6 owner whereof, being a Roman Catholic, was known to Careless. 9
How this poor drudge, being knocked-up from his snoring,
6 carried them into a little barn full of hay, which was a
8 Mistory of tke M$dlion, iii 62$,
BIOGRAPHY. 15
* better lodging than lie had for himself;' and by and by,
not without difficulty, brought his Majesty 'a piece of bread
and a great pot of buttermilk,' saying candidly that "he
himself lived by his daily labour, and that what he had
brought him was the fare he and his wife had :" on which
nourishing diet his Majesty, * staying upon the haymow/
feeds thankfully for two days ; and then departs, under new
guidance, having first changed clothes, down to the very
shirt and c old pair of shoes/ with his landlord ; and so, as
worthy Bunyan has it, 'goes on his way, and sees him no
more/ Singular enough, if we will think of it ! This, then,
was a genuine flesh-and-blood Eustic of the year 1651: he
did actually swallow bread and buttermilk (not having ale
and bacon), and do field-labour: with these hobnailed < shoes'
has sprawled through mud-roads in winter, and, jocund or
not, driven his team a-field in summer : he made bargains ;
had chafferings and Mgglings, now a sore heart, now a glad
one; was born; was a son, was a father; toiled in many
ways, being forced to it, till the strength was all worn out
of him ; and then lay down * to rest his galled back/ and
sleep there till the long-distant morning! How comes it,
that he alone of all the British rustics who tilled and lived
along with him, on whom the blessed sun on that same
* fifth day of September' was shining, should have chanced
to rise on us; that this poor pair of clouted Shoes, out of
the million million hides that have been tanned, and cut,
and worn, should still subsist, and hang visibly together?
We see him but for a moment ; for one moment, the blanket
of the Night is rent asunder, so that we behold and see, and
then closes over him forever.
So too, in some Bo&wellfs Life of Johnson, how indelible
and magically bright does many a little Reality dwell in our
remembrance I There is no need that the personages on
16 MISCELLANIES.
the scene be a King and Clown ; that the scene be the Forest
of the Koyal Oak, * on the borders of Staffordshire :' need
only that the scene lie on this old firm Earth of ours, where
we also have so surprisingly arrived; that the personages
be men, and seen with the eyes of a man. Foolish enough,
how some slight, perhaps mean and even ugly incident, if
real and well presented, will fix itself in a susceptive me-
mory, and lie ennobled there ; silvered over with the pale
cast of thought, with the pathos which belongs only to the
Dead, For the Past is all holy to us; the Dead are all
holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive.
Their baseness and wickedness was not They, was but the
heavy and unmanageable Environment that lay round them,
with which they fought unprevailing : they (the ethereal
god-given Force that dwelt in them, and was their Self)
have now shuffled-off that heavy Environment, and are
free and pure : their life-long Battle, go how it might, is all
ended, with many wounds or with fewer; they have been
recalled from it, and the once harsh-jarring battle-field has
become a silent awe-inspiring Grolgotha, and Gottesachr
(Field of God) ! Boswell relates this in itself smallest and
poorest of occurrences : * As we walked along the Strand
* tonight, arm in arm, a woman of the town accosted us in
* the usual enticing manner. "No, no, my girl/' said John-
* son ; " it won't do. w He, however, did not treat her with
' harshness; and we talked of the wretched life of such
* women,' Strange power of Reality ! Not even this poorest
of occurrences, but now, after seventy years are come and
gone, has a meaning for us. Do but consider that it is true;
that it did in very deed occur! That unhappy Outcast,
with all her sins and woes, her lawless desires, too complex
mischances, her wailings and her riotings, has departed
utterly; alas! her siren finery has got all besmutched*
BIOGBAPEY. 17
ground, generations since, into dust and smoke; of her de
graded body, and whole miserable earthly existence, all is
away : she is no longer here, but far from us, in the bosom of
Eternity, whence we too came, whither we too are bound !
Johnson said, "No, no, my girl; it won't do;" and then
* we talked ;' and herewith the wretched one, seen but for
the twinkling of an eye, passes on into the utter Darkness.
No high Calista, that ever issued from Story-teller's brain,
will impress us more deeply than this meanest of the mean 5
and for a good reason : That she issued from the Maker of
Men.
It is well worth the Artist's while to examine for himself
what it is that gives such pitiful incidents their memorable-
ness ; his aim likewise is, above all things, to be memorable.
Half the effect, we already perceive, depends on the object;
on its being real, on its being really seen. The other half
will depend on the observer ; and the question now is : How
are real objects to be so seen; on what quality of observ-
ing, or of style in describing, does this so intense pictorial
power depend? Often a slight circumstance contributes
curiously to the result : some little, and perhaps to appear-
ance accidental, feature is presented; a light-gleam, which
instantaneously excites the mind, and urges it to complete
the picture, and evolve the meaning thereof for itself, By
critics, such light-gleams and their almost magical influence
have frequently been noted : but the power to produce such,
to select such features as will produce them, is generally
treated as a knack, or trick of the trade, a secret for being
6 graphic ;' whereas these magical feats are, in truth, rather
inspirations; and the gift of performing them, which acts
unconsciously, without forethought, and as if by nature
alone, is properly a genius for description.
One grand, invaluable secret there is, however, which
VOL. IX. (Misc. vol. 4.)
18 MISCELLANIES.
includes all the rest, and, what is comfortable, lies clearly
In every man's power : To have an open loving heart, and what
follows from the possession of such. Truly it has been said,
emphatically in these days ought it to be repeated : A loving
Heart Is the beginning of all Knowledge. This it Is that
opens the whole mind, quickens every faculty of the intellect
to do Its fit work, that of knowing ; and therefrom, by sure
consequence, of vividly uttenng-forth. Other secret for being
'graphic' Is there none, worth having: but this is an all-
sufficient one. See, for example, what a small Boswell can
do ! Hereby, indeed, Is the whole man made a living mirror,
wherein the wonders of this ever-wonderful Universe are,
In their true light (which is ever a magical, miraculous one)
represented, and reflected back on us. It has been said,
< the heart sees farther than the head :' but, indeed, without
the seeing heart, there is no true seeing for the head so
much as possible; all is mere oversight, hallucination and
vain superficial phantasmagoria, which can permanently pro-
fit no one.
Here, too, may we not pause for an instant, and make a
practical reflection ? Considering the multitude of mortals
that handle the Pen in these days, and can mostly spell,
and write without glaring violations of grammar, the ques-
tion naturally arises : How is It, then, thftt no Work proceeds
from them, bearing any stamp of authenticity and perma-
nence; of worth for more than one day? Ship-loads of
Fashionable Novels, Sentimental Ehymes, Tragedies, Farces,
Diaries of Travel, Tales by flood and field, are swallowed
monthly into the bottomless Pool : still does the Press toil ;
imiuraerable Paper-makers, Compositors, Printers' Devils,
Book-binders, and Hawkers grown hoarse with loud pro-
claiming, rest not from their labour; and still, in torrents,
rushes on the great array of Publications, unpausing, to their
BIOGRAPHY, 19
final borne ; and still Oblivion, like the Grave, cries, Give !
Give ! How is it that of all these countless multitudes, no
one can attain to the smallest mark of excellence, or produce
aught that shall endure longer than ' snow-flake on the
river,' or the foam of penny-beer ? We answer : Because
they are foam ; because there is no Reality in them. These
Three Thousand men, women and children, that make up
the army of British Authors, do not, if we will well consider
it, see anything whatever; consequently have nothing that
they can record and utter, only more or fewer things that
they can plausibly pretend to record. The Universe, of Man
and Nature, is still quite shut-up from them; the 'open
secret' still utterly a secret ; because no sympathy with Man
or Nature, no love and free simplicity of heart has yet un-
folded the same. Nothing but a pitiful Image of their own
pitiful Self, with its vanities, and grudgings, and ravenous
hunger of all kinds, hangs forever painted in the retina of
these unfortunate persons; so that the starry ALL, with
whatsoever it embraces, does but appear as some expanded
magic-lantern shadow of that same Image, and naturally
looks pitiful enough.
It is vain for these persons to allege that they are na-
turally without gift, naturally stupid and sightless, and so
can attain to no knowledge of anything; therefore, in writing
of anything, must needs write falsehoods of it, there being
in it no truth for them. Not so, good Friends. The stupid-
est of you has a certain faculty ; were it but that of articulate
speech (say, in the Scottish, the Irish, the Cockney dialect,
or even in ' Governess-English'), and of physically discerning
what lies under your nose. The stupidest of you would
perhaps grudge to be compared in' faculty with James Bos-
well ; yet see what he has produced ! You do not use your
faculty honestly ; your heart is shut up ; full of greediness,
20 MISCELLANIES.
malice, discontent; so your intellectual sense cannot be open.
It is vain also to urge that James Boswell had opportunities ;
saw great men and great things, such as yon can never hope
to look on. What make ye of Parson White in Selboriie?
He had not only no great men to look on, but not even men ;
merely sparrows and cock-chafers : yet has he left us a Bio-
graphy of these ; which., under its title Natural History of Sel-
lorne, fitill remains valuable to us ; which has copied a little
sentence or two faithfully from the Inspired Volume of Na-
ture, and so is itself not without inspiration. Go ye and
do likewise. Sweep away utterly all frothiness and false-
hood from your heart ; struggle unweariedly to acquire, what
is possible for every god-cre"ated Man, a free, open, humble
soul : speak not at all, in any wise, till you have somewhat to
sjwak; care not for the reward of your speaking, but simply
and with undivided mind for the truth of your speaking:
then be placed in what section of Space and of Time soever,
do but open your eyes, and they shall actually see, and bring
you real knowledge, wondrous, worthy of belief; and instead
of one Boswell and one White, the world will rejoice in a
thousand, stationed on their thousand several watch-towers,
to instruct us by indubitable documents, of whatsoever in
our so stupendous World comes to light and is! 0, had
the Editor of this Magazine but a magic rod to turn all that
not inconsiderable Intellect, which now deluges us with
artificial fictitious soap-lather, and mere Lying, into the
faithful study of Eeality, what knowledge of great, ever-
lasting Nature, and of Man's ways and doings therein, would
not every year bring us in ! Can we but change one single
soap-latherer and mountebank Juggler, into a true Thinker
and Doer, who even tries honestly to think and do, great
will be our reward.
But to return; or rather from this point to begin our
BIOG-RAPHY. 21
journey! If now, what with Herr Sauerleig's Springwurzeln,
what with so ranch Incnbration of our own, it have become
apparent how deep, immeasurable is the < worth that lies in
Reality? and farther, how exclusive the interest which man
takes in Histories of Man, may it not seem lamentable, that
so few genuinely good Biographies have yet been accumu-
lated in Literature ; that in the whole world, one cannot find,
going strictly to work, above some dozen, or baker's dozen,
and those chiefly of very ancient date ? Lamentable ; yet,
after what we have just seen, accountable. Another ques-
tion might be asked : How comes it that in England we have
simply one good Biography, this Boswelts Johnson; and of
good, indifferent, or even bad attempts at Biography fewer
than any civilised people ? Consider the French and Ger-
mans, with their Moreris, Bayles, Jordenses, Jochers, their
innumerable Mdmoires, and Schilderungen, and Biographies Uni-
verselles; not to speak of Kousseaus, Goethes, Schubarts,
Jung-Stillings : and then contrast with these our poor
Birches and Kippises and Pecks ; the whole breed of whom,
moreover, is now extinct 1
With this question, as the answer might lead us far, and
come out unflattering to patriotic sentiment, we shall not
intermeddle; but turn rather, with great pleasure, to the
fact, that one excellent Biography is actually English ; and
even now lies, in Five new Volumes, at our hand, soliciting
a new consideration from us; such as, age after age (the
Perennial showing ever new phases as our position alters),
it may long be profitable to bestow on it; to which task
we here, in this position, in this age, gladly address our-
selves.
First, however, let the foolish April-fool Day pass by 3
and our Header, during these twenty-nine days of uncertain
weather that will follow, keep pondering, according to con-
22
venience, the purport of BIOGEAPHY in general: then, with
the blessed dew of May-day, and in unlimited convenience
of space, shall all that we have written on Johnson and Bos-
welt 8 Johnson and Crofars BoswelFs Johnson be faithfully laid
before him.
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON.
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 1
[1832.]
Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been
much laughed at for exclaiming : What a dust I do raise !
Yet which of us, in his way, has not sometimes been guilty
of the like ? Nay, so foolish are men, they often, standing
at ease and as spectators on the highway, will volunteer to
exclaim of the Fly (not being tempted to it, as he was)
exactly to the same purport : What a dust thou dost raise !
Smallest of mortals, when mounted aloft by circumstances,
come to seem great ; smallest of phenomena connected
with them are treated as important, and must be sedulously
scanned, and commented upon with loud emphasis.
That Mr. Croker should undertake to edit BosweWs Life
of Johnson, was a praiseworthy but no miraculous procedure :
neither could the accomplishment of such undertaking be,
in an epoch like ours, anywise regarded as an event in
Universal History ; the right or the wrong accomplishment
thereof was, in very truth, one of the most insignificant of
things. However, it sat in a great environment, on the
axle of a high, fast-rolling, parliamentary chariot ; and all
the world has exclaimed over it, and the author of it : What
a dust thou dost raise ! List to the Keviews, and ' Organs
* FEASBE'S MA&AECHE, No. 28. The Life ofSamwl Johnson, LL,D,;
a Tour to the If&brides. By James BosweE, Esq. A new Edition, with numerous
AdditlonJLand Notes, by John. "Wilson Croker, LL.D. E.B.S. vols. London, 1831*
26 MISCELLANIES.
of Public Opinion/ from the National Omnibus upwards : cri-
ticisms, vituperative and laudatory, stream from their thou-
sand throats of brass and of leather ; here chanting lo-paj-
ans; there grating harsh thunder or vehement shrewmouse
squeaklets ; till the general ear is filled, and nigh deafened.
Boswell's Book had a noiseless birth, compared with this
Edition of Boswell's Book. On the other hand, consider
with what degree of tumult Paradise Lost and the Iliad
were ushered in !
To swell such clamour, or prolong it beyond the time,
seems nowise OUT vocation here. At most, perhaps, we are
bound to inform simple readers, with all possible brevity,
what manner of performance and Edition this is ; especially,
whether, in our poor judgment, it is worth laying out three
pounds sterling upon, yea or not. The whole business be-
longs distinctly to the lower ranks of the trivial class.
Let us admit, then, with great readiness, that as John-
sou once said, and the Editor repeats, 'all works which
* describe manners require notes in sixty or seventy yean&,
f or less;' that, accordingly, a new Edition of Boswell was
desirable; and that Mr. Croker has given one. For this
task he had- various quaKfications : his own voluntary re-
solution to do it; his high place in society, unlocking all
manner of archives to him; not less, perhaps, a certain aneo
dotico-biographic turn of mind, natural or acquired; we
mean, a love for the minuter events of History, and talent
for investigating these. Let us admit too, that he has been
very diligent; seems to have made inquiries perseveringly
far and near; as well as drawn freely from his own ample
stores ; and so tells us, to appearance quite accurately, much
that he has not found lying on the highways, but has had
to seek and dig for. Numerous persons, chiefly of quality,
rise to view in these Notes ; when and also where they came
SOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 27
into tlais world, received office or promotion, died and were
buried (only what they did, except digest, remaining often
too mysterious), is faithfully enough set down. Whereby
all that their various and doubtless widely-scattered Tomb-
stones could have taught us, is here presented, at once, in
a bound Book. Thus is an indubitable conquest, though a
small one, gained over our great enemy, the all-destroyer
Time ; and as such shall have welcome.
Nay, let us say that the spirit of Diligence, exhibited
in this department, seems to attend the Editor honestly
throughout: he keeps everywhere a watchful outlook on
Ms Text; reconciling the distant with the present, or at
least indicating and regretting their irreconcilability ; eluci-
dating, smoothing down ; in all ways exercising, according
to ability, a strict editorial superintendence. Any little
Latin or even Greek phrase is rendered into English, in
general with perfect accuracy ; citations are verified, or else
corrected. On all hands, moreover, there is a certain spirit
of Decency maintained and insisted on : if not good morals,
yet good manners, are rigidly inculcated; if not Eeligion,
and a devout Christian heart, yet Orthodoxy, and a cleanly
Shovel-hatted look, which, as compared with flat Nothing,
is something very considerable. Grant too, as no contemp-
tible triumph of this latter spirit, that though the Editor is
known as a decided Politician and Party-man, he has care-
fully subdued all temptations to transgress in that way:
except by quite involuntary indications, and rather as it
were the pervading temper of the whole, you coijld piot
discover on which side of the Political Warfare ie is en-
listed and fights. This, as we said, is a great triumph of
the Decency-principle : for tbjs, and for these other graces
and performances, let the Editor have all pradge.
Herewith, however^ miust the praise imfol^uiiately ter**
28
mlnate. Diligence, Fidelity, Decency, are good and indis-
pensable: yet, without Faculty, without Light, they will
not do the work. Along with that Tombstone-information,
perhaps even without much of it, we could have liked to
gain some answer, in one way or other, to this wide ques-
tion : What and how was English Life in Johnson's time ;
wherein has ours grown to differ therefrom? In other
words : What things have w r e to forget, what to fancy and
remember, before we, from such distance, can put ourselves
in Johnson's place; and so. in the Ml sense of the term,
understand him, his sayings and his doings 1 This was in-
deed specially the problem which a Commentator and Editor
had to solve: a complete solution of it should have lain in
him, his whole mind should have been filled and prepared
with perfect insight into it; then, whether in the way of
express Dissertation, of incidental Exposition and Indica-
tion, opportunities enough would have occurred of bringing
out the same : what was dark in the figure of the Past had
thereby been enlightened; Boswell had, not in show and
word only, but in very fact, been made new again, readable
to us who are divided from him, even as he was to those
close at hand. Of all which very little has been attempted
here ; accomplished, we should say, next to nothing, or al-
together nothing.
Excuse, no doubt, is in readiness for such omission ; and,
indeed, for innumerable other failings ; as where, for ex-
ample, the Editor will punctually explain what is already
sun-clear; and then anon, not without frankness, declare
frequently enough that *the Editor does not understand/
that 'the Editor cannot guess/ while, for most part, the
Header cannot help both guessing and seeing. Thus, if
Johnson say, in one sentence, that 'English names should
not be used in Latin verses ;' and then, in the next sentence,
BOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON, 29
speak blamingly of < Carteret being used as a dactyl/ will
tlie generality of mortals detect any puzzle there? Or
again, where poor Boswell writes : ' I always remember a
c remark made to me by a Turkish lady, educated in France :
* " Ma foi, monsieur, notre bonheur depend de la fagon que notre
< sang circule;"' though the Turkish lady here speaks Eng-
lish-French> where is the call for a Note like this : 6 Mr.
6 Boswell no doubt fancied these words had some meaning,
* or he would hardly have quoted them : but what that
6 meaning is, the Editor cannot guess' ? The Editor is
clearly no witch at a riddle. For these and all kindred de-
ficiencies the excuse, as we said, is at hand; but the fact
of their existence is not the less certain and regrettable.
Indeed it, from a very early stage of the business, be-
comes afflictively apparent, how much the Editor, so well
furnished with all external appliances and means, is from
within unfurnished with means for forming to himself any
just notion of Johnson, or of Johnson's Life ; and therefore
of speaking on that subject with much hope of edifying.
Too lightly is it from the first taken for granted that Hunger,
the great basis of our life, is also its apex and ultimate per-
fection ; that as * Neediness and Greediness and Vainglory'
are the chief qualities of most men, so no man, not even
a Johnson, acts or can think of acting on any other prin-
ciple. Whatsoever, therefore, cannot be referred to the two
former categories (Need and Greed), is without scruple
ranged under the latter. It is here properly that our Editor
becomes burdensome ; and, to the weaker sort, even a nuis-
ance. " What good is it," will such cry, " when we had
still some faint shadow of belief that man was better than
a selfish Digesting-machine, what good is it to poke in, at
every turn, and explain how this and that which we thought
noble in old Samuel, was vulgar, base; -that for him too
30 MISCELLANIES,
there was no reality but in the Stomach ; and except Pud*
ding, and the finer species of pudding which is named Praise,
life had no pabulum? Why, for instance, when we know
that Johnson loved his good Wife, and says expressly that
their marriage was s a love-match on both sides/ should
two closed lips open to tell us only this : c Is it not possible
* that the obvious advantage of having a woman of experi-
* ence to superintend an establishment of this kind (the
1 Edial School) may have contributed to a match so dispro-
6 portionate in point of age ? ED.' ? Or again when, in the
Text, the honest cynic speaks freely of his former poverty,
and it is known that he once lived on fourpence-halfpenny
a-day, need a Commentator advance, and comment thus :
* When we find Dr. Johnson tell unpleasant truths to, or of,
* other men, let us recollect that he does not appear to have
* spared himself, on occasions in which he might be forgiven
* for doing so' ? Why in short," continues the exasperated
Header, "should Notes of this species stand affronting me,
when there might have been no Note at all?" Gentle
Reader, we answer, Be not wroth. What other could an
honest Commentator do, than give thee the best he had?
Such was the picture and theorem he had fashioned for him-
self of the world and of man's doings therein : take it, and
draw wise inferences from it. If there did exist a Leader
of Public Opinion, and Champion of Orthodoxy in the Church
of Jesus of Nazareth, who reckoned that man's glory con-"
sisted in not being poor; and that a Sage, and Prophet bf
his time, must needs blush because the world had paid him
at that easy rate of fourpence-halfpenny per diem, was not
the fact of such existence worth knowing, worth considering?
Of a much milder hiie, yet to us practically of an all-
defacing, and for the present enterprise quite ruinous cha-
racter, is another grand fundamental failing; the last w
BOSWLI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 31
shall feel ourselves obliged to take the pain of specifying
here. It is, that our Editor has fatally, and almost sur-
prisingly, mistaken the limits of an Editor's function ; and
so, instead of working on the margin with his Pen, to elu-
cidate as best might Tbe, strikes boldly into the body of
the page with his Scissors, and there clips at discretion !
Four Books Mr. 0. had by him, wherefrom to gather light
for the fifth, which was BoswelFs. What does he do but
now, in the placidest manner, slit the whole five into
slips, and sew these together into a septum quid, exactly at
his own convenience; giving Boswell the credit of the
whole ! By what art - magic, our readers ask, has he
united them? By the simplest of all : by Brackets. Never
before was the full virtue of the Bracket made manifest.
You begin a sentence under BoswelPs guidance, thinking
to be carried happily through it by the same : but no ; in
the middle, perhaps after your semicolon, and some conse-
quent * for/ starts up one of these Bracket-ligatures, and
stitches you in from half a page to twenty or thirty pages
of a Hawkins, Tyers, Murphy, Piozzi ; so that often one
must make the old sad reflection, Where we are, we know ;
whither we are going, no man knoweth ! It is truly said
also, There is much between the cup and the lip ; but here
the case is still sadder: for not till after consideration can
you ascertain, now when the cup is at the lip, what liquor
it is you are imbibing; whether BoswelTs French wine
which you began with, or some Piozzfs ginger-beer, or
Hawkins's entire, or perhaps some other great Brewer's
penny-swipes or even alegar, which has been surreptiti-
ously substituted instead thereof. A situation almost ori-
ginal ; not to be tried a second time ! But, in fine, what
ideas Mr. Croker entertains of a literary whole and the
thing called Book and how the Very Printer's Devila did
32 MISCELLANIES*
not rise In mutiny against such, a conglomeration as this,
and refuse to print it, may remain a problem.
And now happily our say is said. All faults, the Moral-
ists tell us, are properly shortcomings; crimes themselves
are nothing other than a not doing enough; a fighting, but
with defective vigour. How much more a mere insuffici-
ency, and this after good efforts, in handicraft practice!
Mr. Crokcr says : The worst that can happen is that all
* the present Editor has contributed may, if the reader so
6 pleases, be rejected as surplusage. 9 It is our pleasant duty
to take with hearty welcome what he has given ; and ren-
der thanks even for what he meant to give. Next and
finally, it is our painful duty to declare, aloud if that be
necessary, that his gift, as weighed against the hard money
which the Booksellers demand for giving it you, is (in our
judgment) very greatly the lighter. No portion, accord-
ingly, of our small floating capital has been embarked in
the business, or shall ever be ; indeed, were we in the
market for such a thing, there is simply no Edition of J3os-
wett to which this last would seem preferable. And now
enough, and more than enough I
We have next a word to say of James Boswell. Bos-
well has already been much commented upon; but rather
in the way of censure and vituperation than of true re-
cognition. He was a man that brought himself much
before the world ; confessed that he eagerly coveted fame,
or if that were not possible, notoriety ; of which latter as
he gained far more than seemed his due, the public were
incited, not only by their natural love of scandal, but by a
special ground of envy, to say whatever ill of him could be
said. Out of the fifteen millions that then lived, and had
bed and board, in the British Islands, this man has pro-
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 33
vided ns a greater pleasure than any other individual, at
whose cost we now enjoy ourselves ; perliaps lias done us
a greater service than, can be specially attributed to more
than two or three : yet, ungrateful that we are, no written
or spoken eulogy of James JBoswell anywhere exists ; his
recompense in solid pudding (so far as copyright went)
was not excessive ; and as for the empty praise, it has alto-
gether been denied him. Men are un wiser than children;
they do not know the hand that feeds them.
Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay
open to the general eye; visible, palpable to the dullest.
His good qualities, again, belonged not to the Time he
lived in; were far from, common then; indeed, in such a
degree, were almost unexampled; not recognisable there-
fore by every one; nay, apt even (so strange had they
grown) to be confounded with the very vices they lay con-
tiguous to, and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-
bibber and gross liver; gluttonously fond of whatever would
yield him a little solacement, were it only of a stomachic
character, is undeniable enough. That he was vain, heed-
less, a babbler; had much of the sycophant, alternating
with the braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an all-per-
vading dash of the coxcomb ; that he gloried much when
the Tailor, by a court-suit, had made a new man of him;
that he appeared at the Shakspeare Jubilee with a riband,
imprinted < CORSICA BOSWELL,' round his hat; and in short,
if you will, lived no day of his life without doing and
saying more than one pretentious ineptitude : all this "un-
happily is evident as the sun at noon. The very look of
Boswell seems to have signified so much. In that cocked
nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-
creatures, partly to snuff-up the smell of coming pleasure,
and scent it from afar; in those bag-cheeks, hanging like
VO&. IX, (Miso. vol. 4.) 3>
34 MISCELLAMES.
half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more; in that
coarsely-protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dewlapped chin;
in all this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous
imbecility enough; much that could not have been orna-
mental in the temper of a great man's overfed great man
(what the Scotch name flunky)^ though it had been more
natural there? The under part of BoswelFs face is of a
low, almost brutish character.
Unfortunately, 011 the other hand, what great and genu-
ine good lay in him was nowise so self-evident That
Boswell was a hunter after spiritual Notabilities, that he
loved such, and longed, and even crept and crawled to be
near them ; that he first (in old Touchwood Atichinleck's
phraseology) " took on with Paoli ;" and then being off with
"the Corsicaii landlouper," took on with a schoolmaster,
" ane that keepecl a schule, and ca'd it an academy :" that
he did all this, and could not help doing it, we account a
very singular merit. The man, once for all, had an * open
sense/ an open loving heart, which so few have : where Ex-
cellence existed, he was compelled to acknowledge it ; was
drawn towards it, and (let the old sulphur-brand of a Laird
say what he liked) could net but walk with it, if not as
superior, if not as equal, then as inferior and lackey, better
so than not at all If we reflect now that this love of Ex-
cellence had not only such an evil nature to triumph over;
but also what an education and social position withstood it
and weighed it down, its innate strength, victorious over
all these things, may astonish us. Consider what an inward
impulse there must have been, how many mountains of im-
pediment hurled aside, before the Scottish Laird could, as
humble servant, embrace the knees (the bosom was not per-
mitted him) of the English Dominie ! Your Scottish Laird,
says an English naturalist of these days, may be defined as
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHHSON. 35
tlie hungriest and vainest of all bipeds yet known. Boswell
too was a Tory; of quite peculiarly feudal, genealogical,
pragmatical temper; Lad been nurtured in an atmosphere
of Heraldry, at the feet of a very Gamaliel in that kind;
within bare walls, adorned only with pedigrees, amid serv-
ing-men in threadbare livery ; all things teaching him, from
birth upwards, to remember that a Laird was a Laird. Per-
haps there was a special vanity in his very blood : old Au-
chinleck had, if not the gay, tail-spreading, peacock vanity
of his son, no little of the slow-stalking, contentious, hissing
vanity of the gander; a still more fatal species. Scottish
Advocates will yet tell you how the ancient man, having
chanced to be the first sheriff appointed (after the abolition
of e hereditary jurisdictions') by royal authority, was wont,
in dull-snuffling pompous tone, to preface many a deliver-
ance from the bench with these words : " I, the first King's
Sheriff in Scotland."
And now behold the worthy Bozzy, so prepossessed and
held back by nature and by art, fly nevertheless like iron to
its magnet, whither his better genius called ! You may sur-
round the iron and the magnet with what enclosures and
encumbrances you please, with wood, with rubbish, with
brass : it matters not, the two feel each other, they struggle
restlessly towards each other, they will be together. The
iron may be a Scottish squirelet, full of gulosity and < gig-
manity ;' 2 the magnet an English plebeian, and moving rag-
and-dust mountain, coarse, proud, irascible, imperious : never-
theless, behold how they embrace, and inseparably cleave to
one another ! It is one of the strangest phenomena of the
past century, that at a time when the old reverent feeling
2 *$. Wfctat do you mean by "respectable"? A. He always kept a gig*'
fell's T'i'ial.) *Thus,' it has been said, *does society naturally divide itself into
four classes : NoWemen, Gentlemen, G%men and Men/
36 MISCELLANIES.
of Diseipleship (such as brought men from far countries, with
rich gifts, and prostrate soul, to the feet of the Prophets)
had passed utterly away from men's practical experience,
and was no longer surmised to exist (as it does), perennial,
indestructible, in man's inmost heart, James Boswell should
have been the individual, of all others, predestined to recall
it, in such singular guise, to the wondering, and, for a long
while, laughing and unrecognising world. It has been com-
monly said, The man's vulgar vanity was all that attached
him to Johnson; he delighted to be seen near him, to be
thought connected with him. Now let it be at once granted
that no consideration springing out of vulgar vanity could
well be absent from the mind of James Boswell, in this his
intercourse with Johnson, or in any considerable transaction
of his life. At the same time, ask yourself: Whether such
vanity, and nothing else, actuated him therein; whether this
was the true essence and moving principle of the pheno-
menon, or not rather its outward vesture, and the accidental
environment (and defacement) in which it came to light?
The man was, by nature and habit, vain ; a sycophant-cox-
comb, be it granted : but had there been nothing more than
vanity in him, was Samuel Johnson the man of men to whom
he must attach himself ? At the date when Johnson was
a poor rusty-coated < scholar,' dwelling in Temple-lane, and
indeed throughout their whole intercourse afterwards, were
there not chancellors and prime ministers enough ; graceful
gentlemen, the glass of fashion ; honour-giving noblemen ;
dinner-giving rich men; renowned fire-eaters, swordsmen,
gownsmen ; Quacks and Eealities of all hues, any one of
whom bulked much larger in the world's eye th^n Johnson
ever did? To any one of whom, by half that submi^sive-
ness and assiduity, our Bozzy might have recommended
liimself 3 and sat there, the envy of surrounding lickspittles ;
BOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 37
pocketing now solid emolument, swallowing now well-cooked
viands and wines of rich vintage ; in each case, also, shone-
on by some glittering reflex of Renown or Notoriety, so as
to be the observed of innumerable observers. To no one of
whom, however, though otherwise a most diligent solicitor
and purveyor, did he so attach himself: such vulgar cour-
tierships were his paid drudgery, or leisure amusement ; the
worship of Johnson was his grand, ideal, voluntary busi-
ness. Does not the frothy-hearted yet enthusiastic man,
doffing his AdvocateVwig, regularly take post, and hurry
up to London, for the sake of his Sage chiefly; as to a
Feast of Tabernacles, the Sabbath of his whole year ? The
plate-lieker and wine-bibber dives into Bolt Court, to sip
muddy coffee with a cynical old man, and a sour-tempered
blind old woman (feeling the cups, whether they are full,
with her finger) ; and patiently endures contradictions with-
out end ; too happy so he may but be allowed to listen and
live. Nay, it does not appear that vulgar vanity could ever
have been much flattered by Boswell's relation to Johnson.
Mr. Croker says, Johnson was, to the last, little regarded
by the great world; from which, for a vulgar vanity, all
honour, as from its fountain, descends. Bozzy, even, among
Johnson's friends and special admirers, seems rather to
have been laughed at than envied: his officious, whisk-
ing, consequential ways, the daily reproofs and rebuffs he
underwent, could gain from the world no golden but only
leaden opinions. His devout Discipleship seemed nothing
more than a mean Spanielship, in the general eye. His
mighty ' constellation,' or sun, round whom he, as satellite,
observantly gyrated, was, for the mass of men, but a huge
ill-snuffed tallow-light, and he a weak night-moth, circling
foolishly, dangerously about it, not knowing what he wanted.
If he enjoyed Highland dinners and toasts, as henchman to
SS MSCELLANiES.
a now sort of chieftain, Henry Erskine, in the domestic
* Outer-House,' could hand him a shilling " for the sight of
his Bear." Doubtless the man was laughed at, and often
heard himself laughed at for his Johnsonism. To be envied
is the grand and sole aim of vulgar vanity; to be filled with
good things is that of sensuality : for Johnson perhaps no
man living envied poor Bozzy; and of good things (except
himself paid for them) there was 110 vestige in that acquaint-
anceship. Had nothing other or better than vanity and
sensuality been there, Johnson and Boswell had never come
together, or had soon and finally separated again.
In fact, the so copious terrestrial dross that welters cha-
otically, as the outer sphere of this man's character, does but
render for us more remarkable, more touching, the celes-
tial spark of goodness, of light, and Keverence for Wisdom,
which dwelt in the interior, and could struggle through such
encumbrances, and in some degree illuminate and beautify
them. There is much lying yet undeveloped in the love
of Boswell for Johnson. A cheering proof, in a time which
else utterly wanted and still wants such, that living Wisdom.
is quite infinitely precious to man, is the symbol of the God-
like to him, which even weak eyes may discern ; that Loy-
alty, Discipleship, all that was ever meant by Hero-worship,
lives perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in
these dead days, only for occasions to unfold it, and inspire
all men with ifc, and again make the world alive ! James
Boswell we can regard as a practical witness, or real martyr,
to this high everlasting truth. A wonderful martyr, if you
will; and in a time which made such martyrdom doubly
wonderful ; yet the time and its martyr perhaps suited each
other. For a decrepit, death-sick Era, when CANT had first
decisively opened her poison-breathing lips to proclaim that .
God-worship and Mammon-worship were one and the same,
feOSWELL*S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 39
that Life was a Lie, and the Earth Beelzebub's, which the
Supreme Quack should inherit ; and so all things were fallen
into the yellow leaf, and fast hastening to noisome corrup-
tion: for such an Era, perhaps no better Prophet than a
parti-coloured Zany-Prophet, concealing, from himself and
others, his prophetic significance in such unexpected ves-
tures, was deserved, or would have been in place. A
precious medicine lay hidden in floods of coarsest, most
composite treacle : the world swallowed the treacle, for it
suited the world's palate; and now, after half a century,
may the medicine also begin to show itself! James Bos-
well belonged, in his corruptible part, to the lowest classes
of mankind; a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an
element of self-conceit : but in his corruptible there dwelt
an incorruptible, all the more impressive and indubitable for
the strange lodging it had taken.
Consider too, with what force, diligence and vivacity he
has rendered back all this which, in Johnson's neighbour-
hood, his ( open sense' had so eagerly and freely taken in.
That loose-flowing, careless-looking Work of his is as a
picture by one of Nature's own Artists; the best possible
resemblance of a Eeality ; like the very image thereof in a
clear mirror. Which indeed it was: let but the mirror be
clear* this is the great point; the picture must and will be
genuine. How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love,
and the recognition and vision which love can lend, epito-
mises nightly the words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects
of Wisdom, and so, by little and little, unconsciously works
together for us a whole Johnsoniad; a more free, perfect,
sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for many centuries
had been drawn by man of man 1 Scarcely since the days
of Homer has the feat been equalled; indeed, in many senses,
this also is a kind of Heroic Poem. The fit Odyssey of OIB?
40 MISCELLANIES.
nnheroic age was to "be written, not sung ; of a Thinker,
not of a Fighter; and (for want of a Homer) by the first
open soul that might offer, looked such even through the
organs of a Boswel! We do the man's intellectual endow-
ment great wrong, if we measure it by its mere logical
outcome ; though here too, there is not wanting a light in-
genuity, a figurativeness and fanciful sport, with glimpses
of insight far deeper than the common. But Boswell's
grand intellectual talent was, as such ever is, an unconscious
one 5 of far higher reach and significance than Logic; and
showed itself in the whole, not in parts. Here again we
have that old saying verified, i The heart sees farther than
the head, 3
Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an ill-assorted,
glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest. What, in-
deed, is man's life generally but a kind of beast-godhood;
the god in us triumphing more and more over the beast;
striving more and more to subdue it under his feet ? Did
not the Ancients, in their wise, perennially-significant way,
figure Nature itself, their sacred ALL, or PAN, as a portentous
commingling of these two discords ; as musical, humane,
oracular in its upper part, yet ending below in the cloven
hairy feet of a goat ? The union of melodious, celestial Free-
will and Eeason with foul Irrationality and Lust ; in which,
nevertheless, dwelt a mysterious unspeakable Fear and half-
mad panic Awe ; as for mortals there well might ! And is
not man a microcosm, or epitomised mirror of that same
Universe ; or rather, is not that Universe even Himself, the
reflex of his own fearful and wonderful being, * the waste
fantasy of his own dream 9 ! No wonder that man, that each
man, and James Boswell like the others, should resemble
it ! The peculiarity in his case was the unusual defect of
amalgamation and subordination: the highest lay side by
BOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 41
side with the lowest; not morally combined with it and
spiritually transfiguring it, but tumbling in half-mechanical
juxtaposition with it, and from time to time, as the mad
alternation chanced, irradiating it, or eclipsed by it.
The world, as we said, has been but unjust to him ; dis-
cerning only the outer terrestrial and often sordid mass;
without eye, as it generally is, for his inner divine secret;
and thus figuring him nowise as a god Pan, but simply of
the bestial species, like the cattle on a thousand hills. Nay,
sometimes a strange enough hypothesis has been started of
him ; as if it were in virtue even of these same bad qualities
that he did his good wort ; as if it were the very fact of his
being among the worst men in this world that had enabled
him, to write one of the best books therein ! Falser hypo-
thesis, we may venture to say, never rose in human soul.
Bad is by its nature negative, and can do nothing ; whatso-
ever enables us to do anything is by its very nature good.
Alas, that there should be teachers in Israel, or even learn-
ers, to whom this world-ancient fact is still problematical,
or even deniable ! Boswell wrote a good Book because he
had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance
to render it forth ; because of his free insight, his lively
talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Open-mindedness.
His sneaking sycophancies, Ms greediness and forwardness,
whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blem-
ishes in his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness;
wholly hindrances, not helps. Towards Johnson, however,
his feeling was not Sycophancy, which is the lowest, but
Reverence, which is the highest of human feelings. None
but a reverent man (which so unspeakably few are) could have
found his way from BoswelTs environment to Johnson's:
if such worship for real God-made superiors showed itself
also as worship for apparent Tailor-made superiors, even as
42 MlSOBLLANIESo
hollow interested month-worship for such, the case, in this
composite human nature of ours, was not miraculous, the
more was the pity! But for ourselves, let every one of us
cling to this last article of Faith, and know it as the begin-
ning of all knowledge worth the name : That neither James
BoswelTs good Book, nor any other good thing, in any time
or in any place, was, is or can Tbe performed by any man in
virtue of Ms badness, but always and solely in spite thereof.
As for the Book itself, questionless the universal favour
entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book we
have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth
century : all Johnson's own Writings, laborious and in their
kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to
it; already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this
generation ; and for some future generation may be valuable
chiefly as Prolegomena and expository Scholia to this John-
soniad of BoswelL Which of us but remembers, as one of
the sunny spots in his existence, the day when he opened
these airy volumes, fascinating him by a true natural magic !
It was as if the curtains of the Past were drawn aside, and
we looked mysteriously into a kindred country, where dwelt
our Fathers ; inexpressibly dear to us, but which had seemed
forever hidden from our eyes. For the dead Night had en-
gulfed it 5 all was gone, vanished as if it had not been.
Nevertheless, wondrously given back to us, there once more
it lay ; all bright, lucid, blooming ; a little island of Creation
amid the circumambient Void. There it still lies; like a
thing stationary, imperishable, over which changeful Time
were now accumulating itself in vain, and could not, any
longer, harm it, or hide it.
If we examine by what charm it is that men are still
held to this Life of Johnson, now when so much else has
been forgotten, the main part of the answer will perhaps be
BOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSOH. 4$
found In that speculation ' on tlie import of Reality? com-
municated to tlie world, last month, in this Magazine. The
Johnsoniad of Boswell turns on objects that in very deed
existed; it is all true. So far other in melodiousness of
tone, it vies with the Odyssey, or surpasses it, in this one
point: to us these read pages, as those chanted hexa-
meters were to the first Greek hearers, are, in the fullest
deepest sense, wholly credible. All the wit and wisdom lying
embalmed in Boswell's Boob, plenteous as these are, could
not have saved it. Far more scientific instruction (mere
excitement and enlightenment of the thinking power) can
be found in twenty other works of that time, which make
but a quite secondary impression on us. The other works
of that time, however, fall under one of two classes : Either
they are professedly Didactic ; and, in that way, mere Ab-
stractions, Philosophic Diagrams, incapable of interesting us
much otherwise than as Euclid's Elements may do : Or else,
with all their vivacity, and pictorial richness of colour, they
are Fictions and not Realities. Deep truly, as Herr Sauerteig
urges, is the force of this consideration : The thing here
stated is a fact ; those figures, that local habitation, are not
shadow but substance. In virtue of such advantages, see
how a very Bos well may become Poetical !
Gritics insist much on the Poet that he should commu-
nicate an < Infinitude* to his delineation; that by intensity
of conception, by that gift of < transcendental Thought,'
which is fitly named genius, and inspiration, he should in-
form the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance ; or
as they sometimes say, ennoble the Actual into Idealness.
They are right in their precept; they mean rightly. But
in cases like this of the Johnsoniad, such is the dark gran-
deur of that * Time-element,' wherein man's soul here below
lives imprisoned, the Poet's task is, as it were, done to hfe
44 MISCELLANIES.
hand: Time itself, -which is the outer veil of Eternity, in-
vests, of its own accord, "with an authentic, felt * infinitude'
whatsoever it has once embraced in its mysterious folds.
Consider all that lies in that one word Past ! What a pa-
thetic, sacred, in every sense poetic, meaning is implied in it ;
a meaning growing ever the clearer, the farther we recede
in Time, the more of that same Past we have to look
through! On which ground indeed must Sauertcig have
built, and not without plausibility, in that strange thesis of
his: 4 Tliat History, after all, is tlie true Poetry; that Ke~
< ality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than Fiction ; nay
' that even in the right interpretation of Reality and His-
< tory does genuine Poetry consist.'
Thus for Boswel?s Life of Johnson has Time done, is Time
still doing, what no ornament of Art or Artifice could have
done for it. Bough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were,
and are not Their Life and whole personal Environment
has melted into air. The Mitre Tavern still stands in
Fleet Street: but where now is its scot-and-lot paying,
beef-and-ale loving, cocked-hatted, pot-bellied Landlord ; its
rosy-faced assiduous Landlady, with all her shining brass-
pans, waxed tables, well-filled larder-shelves; her cooks, and
bootjacks, and errand-boys, and watery-mouthed hangers-
on ? Gone 1 Gone ! The becking Waiter who, with wreathed
smiles, was wont to spread for Samuel and Bozzy their
supper of the gods, has long since pocketed his last six-
pence; and vanished, sixpences and all, like a ghost at cock-
crowing. The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the
Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt ; the very Knives
and Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and
become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscri-
minate clay. All, all has vanished; in every deed and truth,
like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON, 45
Mitre Tavern nothing "but the bare walls remain there ; of
London, of England, of the World, nothing but the bare
walls remain ; and these also decaying (were they of ada-
mant), only slower. The mysterious River of Existence
rushes on : a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes
wildly as ever round the old embankments ; but the former
Billow with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it ? Where !
Now this Book of Boswell's, this is precisely a revocation
of the edict of Destiny ; so that Time shall not utterly, not
so soon by several centuries, have dominion over us. A
little row of Naphtha-lamps, with its line of Naphtha-light,
burns clear and holy through the dead Night of the Past :
they who are gone are still here ; though hidden they are
revealed, though dead they yet speak. There it shines, that
little miraculously lamplit Pathway; shedding its feebler
and feebler twilight into the boundless dark Oblivion, for
all that our Johnson touched has become illuminated for us :
on which miraculous little Pathway we can still travel, and
see wonders.
It is not speaking with exaggeration, but with strict
measured sobriety, to say that this Book of Boswell's will
give us more real insight into the History of England during
those days than twenty other Books, falsely entitled 'His-
tories,' which take to themselves that special aim. What
good is it to me though innumerable Smolletts and Bels-
hams keep dinning in my ears that a man named George
the Third was born and bred xip, and a man named George
the Second died ; that Walpole, and the Pelhams, and Chat-
ham, and Rockingham, and Shelburne, and North, with their
Coalition or their Separation Ministries, all ousted one an-
other ; and vehemently scrambled for * the thing they called
* the Rudder of Government, but which was in reality the
' Spigot of Taxation' ? That debates wer held? and mtfa
46 MISCELLANIES,
liite jarring and jargoning took place ; and road-bills and
enclosure-bills, and game -bills and India -bills, and Laws
which no man can number, which happily few men needed
to trouble their heads with beyond the passing moment,
were enacted, and printed by the King's Stationer? That
he who sat in Chancery, and rayed-out speculation from the
Woolsack, was now a man that squinted, now a man that
did not squint 1 To the hungry and thirsty mind all this
avails next to nothing. These men and these things, we
indeed know, did swim, by strength or by specific levity,
as apples or as horse-dung, on the top of the current : but
is it by painfully noting the courses, eddyings and bobbings
hither and thither of such chift-articles, that you will un-
fold to me the nature of the current itself; of that mighty-
rolling, loud-roaring Life-current, bottomless as the foun-
dations of the Universe, mysterious as its Author? The
thing I want to see is not Redbook Lists, and Court Calen-
dars, and Parliamentary Registers, but the LIFE OF MAN in
England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the
form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its
outward environment, its inward principle how and what it
was ; whence it proceeded, whither it was tending.
Mournful, in truth, is it to behold what the business
called 'History/ in these so enlightened and illuminated
times, still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read
till your eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to
that great question : How men lived and had their being ;
were it but economically, as, what wages they got, and
what they bought with these? Unhappily you cannot.
History will throw no light on any such matter. At the
point where living memory fails, it is all darkness; Mr.
Senior and Mr. Sadler must still debate this simplest of all
elements in the condition of the Past ; Whether men were
BOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 47
better off, la their mere larders and pantries, or were worse
off than now ! History, as it stands all bound up in gilt
volumes, is but a shade more instructive than the wooden
volumes of a Backgammon-board. How my Prime Minister
was appointed is of less moment to me than How my House
Servant was hired. In. these days, ten ordinary Histories
of Kings and Courtiers were well exchanged against the
tenth part of one good History of Booksellers.
For example, I would fain know the History of Scotland:
who can tell it me? " Robertson," say innumerable voices;
" Robertson against the world," I open Robertson ; and
find there, through long ages too confused for narrative,
and fit only to be presented in the way of epitome and
distilled essence, a cunning answer and hypothesis, not to
this question: By whom, and by what means, when and
how, was this fair broad Scotland, with its Arts and Manu-
factures, Temples, Schools, Institutions, Poetry, Spirit, Na-
tional Character, created, and made arable, verdant, pecu-
liar, great, here as I can see some fair section of it lying,
kind and strong (like some Bacchus-tamed Lion), from the
Castle-hill of Edinburgh? but to this other question : How
did the King keep himself alive in those old days; and
restrain so many Butcher-Barons and ravenous Henchmen
from utterly extirpating one another, so that killing went
on in some sort of moderation ? In the one little Letter of
JSneas Sylvius, from old Scotland, there is more of History
than in all this. At length, however, we come to a lumin-
ous age, interesting enough ; to the age of the Reformation.
All Scotland is awakened to a second higher life : the Spirit
of the Highest stirs in every bosom, agitates every bosom ;
Scotland is convulsed, fermenting, struggling to body itself
forth anew. To the herdsman, among Ms cattle in remote
woods ; to the craftsman, in his rude, heath-thatched work*
48 MISCELLANIES.
shop, among Ms rude guild-brethren ; to the great and to
the little, a new light has arisen: in town and hamlet
groups are gathered, with eloquent looks, and governed or
ungovernable tongues ; the great and the little go forth to-
gether to do battle for the Lord against the mighty. We
ask, with breathless eagerness: How was it; how went it
on? Let us understand it, let us see it, and know it ! In
reply, is handed us a really graceful and most dainty little
Scandalous Chronicle (as for some Journal of Fashion) of
two persons : Mary Stuart, a Beauty, but over lightheaded;
and Henry Damley, a Booby who had fine legs. How these
first courted, billed and cooed, according to nature ; then
pouted, fretted, grew utterly enraged, and blew one another
up with gunpowder : this, and not the History of Scotland,
is what we goodnaturedly read. Nay, by other hands,
something like a liorse-load of other Books have been
written to prove that it was the Beauty who blew up the
Booby, and that it was not she. Who or what it was, the
thing once for all being so effectually done, concerns us
little. To know Scotland, at that great epoch, were a valu-
able increase of knowledge : to know poor Darnley, and see
Mm with burning candle, from centre to skin, were no in-
crease of knowledge at all. Thus is History written.
Hence, indeed, comes it that History, which should be
* the essence of innumerable Biographies/ will tell us, ques-
tion it as we like, less than one genuine Biography may do,
pleasantly and of its own accord ! The time is approaching
when History will be attempted on quite other principles ;
when the Court, the Senate and the Battlefield, receding
more and more into the background, the Temple, the Work-
shop and Social Hearth will advance more and more into
the foreground; and History will not content itself with
shaping some answer to that question; How were men
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON, 49
taxed and kept quiet then? but will seek to answer this other
infinitely wider and higher question : How and what were men
then? Not our Government only, or the 'House wherein our
life was led/ but the Life itself we led there, will be inquired
into. Of which latter it may be found that Government, in
any modern sense of the word, is after all but a secondary
condition : in the mere sense of Taxation and Keeping quiet,
a small, almost a pitiful one. Meanwhile let us welcome
such Boswells, each in his degree, as bring us any genuine
contribution, were it never so inadequate, so inconsiderable.
An exception was early taken against this Life of John-
son, and all similar enterprises, which we here recommend ;
and has been transmitted from critic to critic, and repeated
in their several dialects, uninterruptedly, ever since : That
such jottings-down of careless conversation are an infringe-
ment of social privacy ; a crime against our highest Free-
dom, the Freedom of man's intercourse with man. To this
accusation, which we have read and heard oftener than,
enough, might it not be well for once to offer the flattest
contradiction, and plea of Not at all guilty^ Not that con-
versation is noted down, but that conversation should not
deserve noting down, is the evil. Doubtless, if conversation
be falsely recorded, then is it simply a Lie : arid worthy of
being swept, with all despatch, to the Father of Lies. But
if, on the other hand, conversation can be authentically re-
corded, and any one is ready for the task, let him by all
means proceed with it ; let conversation be kept in remem-
brance to the latest date possible. Nay, should the con-
sciousness that a man may be among us i taking notes'
tend, in any measure, to restrict those floods of idle insin-
cere speech, with which the thought of mankind is wellnigh
drowned, were it other than the most indubitable benefit ?
He who speaks honestly cares not, needs not care, thot^gh
VOL. IX. (Misc. vol. 4.) E
50 MISCELLANIES.
Ms words be preserved to remotest time : for Mm who
speaks dishonestly, the fittest of all punishments seems to
be this same, which the nature of the case provides. The
dishonest speaker, not he only who purposely utters false-
hoods, but he who does not purposely, and with sincere
heart, utter Truth, and Truth alone ; who babbles he knows
not what, and has clapped no bridle on his tongue, but lets
it run racket, ejecting chatter and futility, is among the
most indisputable malefactors omitted, or inserted, in the
Criminal Calendar. To him that will well consider it, idle
speaking is precisely the beginning of all Hollowness, Half-
ness, Infidelity (want of Faithfulness); the genial atmosphere
in which rank weeds of every kind attain the mastery over
noble fruits in man's life, and utterly choke them out: one
of the most crying maladies of these days, and to be testi-
fied against, and in all ways to the uttermost withstood.
Wise, of a wisdom far beyond our shallow depth, was that
old precept: Watch thy tongue; out of it are the issues of
Life ! * Man is properly an incarnated word ;' the WOT d that
he speaks is the man himself. Were eyes put into our
head, that we might see ; or only that we might fancy, and
plausibly pretend, we had seen ? Was the tongue suspended
there, that it might tell truly what we had seen, and make
man the souPs-brother of man ; or only that it might utter
vain sounds, jargon, soul-confusing, and so divide man, as
by enchanted walls of Darkness, from union with man!
Thou who wearest that cunning, heaven-made organ, a
Tongue, think well of this. Speak not, I passionately en-
treat thee, till thy thought have silently matured itself, till-
thou have other than mad and mad-making noises to emit :
hold thy tongue (thou hast it a-holding) till some meaning lie
behind, to set it wagging. Consider the significance of
SILENCE: it is boundless, never by meditating to be ex-
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 51
hausted ; unspeakably profitable to tliee ! Cease that chao-
tic hubbub, wherein thy own soul rims to waste, to confused
suicidal dislocation and stupor: out of Silence conies thy
strength. tf Speech is silvern, Silence is golden ; Speech is
human, Silence is divine/ Fool ! thinkest thou that be-
cause no Bos well is there with ass-skin and blacklead to
note thy jargon, it therefore dies and is harmless ? Nothing
dies, nothing can die. No idlest word thou speakest but is
a seed cast into Time, and grows through all Eternity 1 The
Recording Angel, consider it well, is no fable, but the truest
of truths : the paper tablets thou canst burn ; of the * iron
leaf there is no burning. Truly, if we can permit God Al-
mighty to note down our conversation, thinking it good
enough for Him, any poor Boswell need not scruple to
work his will of it.
Leaving now this our English Odyssey, -with its Singer
and Scholiast, let us come to the Ulysses; that great Samuel
Johnson himself, the far-experienced, ' much-enduring man/
whose labours and pilgrimage are here sung. A full-length
image of his Existence has been preserved for us : and he,
perhaps of all living Englishmen, was the one who best
deserved that honour* For if it is true, and now almost
proverbial, that c the Life of the lowest mortal, if faithfully
recorded, would be interesting to the highest;' how much
more when the mortal in question was already distinguished
in fortune and natural quality, so that his thinkings and
doings were not significant of himself only, but of large
masses of mankind ! * There is not a man whom I meet oa
6 the streets,' says one, c but I could like, were it otherwise
* convenient, to know his Biography :' nevertheless, could an
enlightened curiosity be so far gratified, it must be owned
the Biography of most ought to be, in an extreme degree.
52 MISCELLANIES
summary. In this world, there is so wonderfully little salt
subsistence among men ; next to no originality (though
never absolutely none) : one Life is too servilely the copy
of another; and so in whole thousands of them you find
little that is properly new ; nothing but the old song sung
by a new voice, with better or worse execution, here and
there an ornamental quaver, and fake notes enough: but
the fundamental tune is ever the same ; and for the words,
these, all that they meant stands written generally on the
Churchyard-stone : Natus sum ; esurielam, qucerebam ; nunc
repletus requiesco. Mankind sail their Life-voyage in huge-
fleets, following some single whale-fishing or herring-fishing
Commodore: the logbook of each differs not, in essential
purport, from that of any other: nay the most have no
legible logbook (reflection, observation not being among
their talents) ; keep no reckoning, only keep in sight of the
flagship, and fish. Read the Commodore's Papers (know
Ms Life) ; and even your lover of that street Biography will
have learned the most of what he sought after.
Or, the servile imitancy> and yet also a nobler relation-
ship and mysterious union to one another which lies in such
Iinitancy, of Mankind might be illustrated under the different
figure, itself nowise original, of a Flock of Sheep. Sheep go
in flocks for three reasons : First, because they are of a
gregarious temper, and love to be together: Secondly, be-
cause of their cowardice ; they are afraid to be left alone :
Thirdly, because the common run of them are dull of sight,
to a proverb, and can have no choice in roads ; sheep can
in fact see nothing ; in a celestial Luminary, and a scoured
pewter Tankard, would discern only that both dazzled them,
and were of unspeakable glory. How like their fellow-crea-
tures of the human species! Men too, as was from th^ feet
maintained here ? are gregarious; then surely
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 53
enough, trembling to be left by themselves; above all, dull-
sighted, down to the verge of utter blindness. Thus are
we seen ever running in torrents, and mobs, if we run at
all; and after what foolish scoured Tankards, mistaking
them for Suns ! Foolish Turnip-lanterns likewise, to all
appearance supernatural, keep whole nations quaking, their
hair on end. Neither know we, except by blind habit, where
the good pastures lie : solely when the sweet grass is be-
tween our teeth, we know it, and chew it ; also when grass
is bitter and scant, we know it, and bleat and butt : these
last two facts we know of a truth and in very deed. Thus
do Men and Sheep play their parts on this Nether Earth ;
wandering restlessly in large masses, they know not whi-
ther; for most part, each following his neighbour, and his
own nose.
Nevertheless, not always; look better, you shall find
certain that do, in some small degree, know whither. Sheep
have their Bell-wether ; some ram of the folds, endued with
more valour, with clearer vision than other sheep ; he leads
them through the wolds, by height and hollow, to the woods
and water-courses, for covert or for pleasant provender;
courageously marching, and if need be leaping, and with
hoof and horn doing battle, in the van : Mm they courage-
ously and with assured heart follow. Touching it is, as
every herdsman will inform you, with what chivalrous de-
votedness these woolly Hosts adhere to their Wether; and
rush, after him, through good report and through bad report,
were it into safe shelters and green thynry nooks, or into
asphaltic lakes and the jaws of devouring lions. Ever also
must we recall that fact which we owe Jean Paul's quick
eye : * If you hold a stick before the Wether, so that he, by
* necessity, leaps in passing you, and then withdraw your
* stick, the Flock will nevertheless all leap as he did ; and
'54 ^
* the thousandth sheep shall be found impetuously vaulting
* over air, as tlie first did over an otherwise impassable bar-
* rier. 5 Reader, wouldst thou understand Society, ponder
well those ovine proceedings ; thou wilt find them all curi-
ously significant.
Now if sheep always, how much more must men always,
have their Chief, their Guide ! Man too is by nature quite
thoroughly gregarious : nay ever he struggles to be some-
thing more, to be social; not even when Society has become
impossible, does that deep-seated tendency and effort for-
sake him. Man, as if by miraculous magic, imparts his
Thoughts, his Mood of mind to man ; an unspeakable com-
munion binds all past, present and future men into one
Indissoluble whole, almost into one living individual. Of
which high, mysterious Truth, this disposition to imitate, to
lead and be led, this impossibility not to imitate, is the
most constant, and one of the simplest manifestations. To
imitate 1 which of us all can measure the significance that
lies in that one word ? By virtue of which the infant Man,
born at Woolsthorpe, grows up not to be a hairy Savage
and chewer of Acorns, but an Isaac Newton and Discoverer
of Solar Systems ! Thus both in a celestial and terrestrial
sense are we a Flock, such as there is no other ; nay looking
away from the base and ludicrous to the sublime and sacred
side of the matter (since in every matter there are two sides),
have not we also a SHEPHERD, 'if we will but hear his voice'?
Of those stupid multitudes there is no one but has an im-
mortal Soul within him; a reflex and living image of God's
whole Universe: strangely, from its dim environment, the
light of the Highest looks through him ; for which reason,
indeed, it is that we claim a brotherhood with him, and so
love to know his History, and come into clearer and clearer
union with all that he feels, and says, and does.
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON* 55
However, the chief thing to be noted was this : Amid
those dull millions, who, as a dull flock, roll hither and
thither, whithersoever they are led ; and seem all sightless
and slavish, accomplishing, attempting little save what the
animal instinct in its somewhat higher kind might teach,
To keep themselves and their young ones alive, are scat-
tered here and there superior natures, whose eye is not
destitute of free vision, nor then- heart of free volition.
These latter, therefore, examine and determine, not what
others do, but what it is right to do ; towards which, and
which only, will they, with such force as is given them,
resolutely endeavour: for if the Machine, living or inani-
mate, is merely fed, or desires to be fed, and so works; the
Person can will, and so do. These are properly our Men,
our Great Men ; the guides of the dull host, which follows
them as by an irrevocable decree. They are the chosen of
the world : they had this rare faculty not only of < suppos-
ing' and i inclining to think,' but of knowing and believing;
the nature of their being was, that they lived not by Hear-
say, but by clear Vision ; while others hovered and swam
along, in the grand Vanity-fair of the World, blinded by
the mere Shows of things, these saw into the Things them-
selves, and could walk as men having an eternal loadstar,
and with their feet on sure paths. Thus was there a JReality
in their existence ; something of a perennial character ; in
virtue of which indeed it is that the memory of them is
perennial. Whoso belongs only to his own age, and rever-
ences only its gilt Popinjays or soot- smeared Mumbojum-
bos, must needs die with it : though he have been, crowned
seven times in the Capitol, or seventy-and-seven times, and
Kurnour have blown his praises to all the four winds, deafen-
ing every ear therewith, it avails not ; there was nothing
universal, nothing eternal in him; he must f&de away, eV
56 MISCELLANIES.
as the Popinjay-gildings and Scarecrow-apparel, which lie
could not see through. The great man does, in good truth,
belong to his own age; nay more so than any other man 5
being properly the synopsis and epitome of such age with
its interests and influences : but belongs likewise to all ages,
otherwise he is not great. What was transitory in him
passes away ; and an immortal part remains, the signifi-
cance of which is in strict speech inexhaustible, as that of
every real object is. Aloft, conspicuous, on his enduring
basis, he stands there, serene, unaltering ; silently addresses
to every new generation a new lesson and monition. Well is
his Life worth writing, worth interpreting ; and ever, in the
new dialect of new times, of re-writing and re-interpreting.
Of such chosen men was Samuel Johnson : not ranking
among the highest, or even the high, yet distinctly ad-
mitted into that sacred band; whose existence was no idle
Dream, but a Eeality which he transacted awake ; nowise a
Clothes-horse and Patent Digester, but a genuine Man. By
nature he was gifted for the noblest of earthly tasks, that
of Priesthood, and Guidance of mankind; by destiny, more-
over, he was appointed to this task, and did actually, ac-
cording to strength, fulfil the same : so that always the
question, How ; in what spirit ; under what shape ? remains for
us to be asked and answered concerning him. For as the
highest Gospel was a Biography, so is the Life of every
good man still an indubitable Gospel, and preaches to the
eye and heart and whole man, so that Devils even, must
believe and tremble, these gladdest tidings : " Man is hea-
ven-born ; not the thrall of Circumstances, of Necessity, but
the victorious subduer thereof: behold how he can become
the ( Announcer of himself and of his Freedom f and is ever
what the Thinker has named him, 'the Messias of Nature/"
Yes, Reader, all this that thou hast so often heard about
BOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON, 5?
i force of circumstances/ ' the creature of the time,' ' balan-
cing of motives,' and who knows what melancholy stuff to
the like purport, wherein thou, as in a nightmare Dream,
sittest paralysed, and hast no force left, was in very truth,
if Johnson and waking men are to be credited, little other
than a hag-ridden vision of death-sleep ; some 7zaZ/*~fact,
more fatal at times than a whole falsehood. Shake it off;
awake ; up and be doing, even as it is given thee I
The Contradiction which yawns wide enough in every
Life, which it is the meaning and task of Life to reconcile,
was in Johnson's wider than in most. Seldom, for any man,
has the contrast between the ethereal heavenward side of
things, and the dark sordid earthward, been more glaring:
whether we look at Nature's work with him or Fortune's,
from first to last, heterogeneity, as of sunbeams and miry
clay, is on all hands manifest. Whereby indeed, only this
was declared, That much Life had been given him; many
things to triumph over, a great work to do. Happily also
he did it ; better than the most.
Nature had given him a high, keen-visioned, almost
poetic soul ; yet withal imprisoned it in an inert, unsightly
body : he that could never rest had not limbs that would
move with him, but only roll and waddle : the inward eye,
all -penetrating, all-embracing, must look through bodily
windows that were dim, half-blinded ; he so loved men, and
* never once saw the human face divine 5 ! Not less did he
prize the love of men ; he was eminently social ; the appro-
bation of his fellows was dear to Mm, * valuable,' as he
owned, c if from the meanest of human beings :' yet the first
impression he produced on every man was to be one of aver-
sion, almost of disgust. By Nature it was farther ordered
that the imperious Johnson should be born poor : the ruler-
soul, strong in its native royalty, generous, tmcontrollable!,
58 MISCELLANIES.
like the lion of the woods, was to be housed, then, in such
a dwelling-place : of Disfigurement, Disease, and lastly of
a Poverty which itself made him the servant of servants.
Thus was the born king likewise a born slave : the divine
spirit of Music must awake imprisoned arnid dull- croaking
universal Discords; the Ariel finds himself encased in the
coarse hulls of a Caliban. So is it more or less, we know
(and thou, Reader, knowest and feelest even now), with
all men : yet with the fewest men in any such degree as
with Johnson,
Fortune, moreover, which had so managed his first ap-
pearance in the world, lets not her hand He idle, or turn
the other way, but works unweariedly in the same spirit,
while he is journeying through the world. What such a
mind, stamped of Nature's noblest metal, though in so un-
gainly a die, was specially and best of all fitted for, might
still be a question. To none of the world's few Incorpo-
rated Guilds could he have adjusted himself without diffi-
culty, without distortion ; in none been a Guild-Brother well
at ease. Perhaps, if we look to the strictly practical nature
of his faculty, to the strength, decision, method that mani-
fests itself in him, we may say that his calling was rather
towards Active than Speculative life ; that as Statesman (in
the higher, now obsolete sense), Lawgiver, Kuler, in short
as Doer of the Work, he had shone even more than as
Speaker of the Word. His honesty of heart, his courageous
temper, the value he set on things outward and material,
might have made him a King among Kings. Had the
golden age of those new French Prophets, when it shall be
a chacun selon sa eapacit^ a cJiaque capacitS selon $es ceuvres,
but arrived ! Indeed even in our brazen and Birmingham-
lacquer age, he himself regretted that he had not become
a Lawyer, and risen to be Chancellor, which he might well
BOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 5 ( J
Have done. However, it was otherwise appointed. To
no man does Fortune throw open all the kingdoms of
this world, and say : It is thine ; choose where thou wilt
dwell ! To the most she opens hardly the smallest cranny
or doghutch, and says, not without asperity : There, that
is thine while thou canst keep it; nestle thyself there, and
bless Heaven! Alas, men must fit themselves into many
things : some forty years ago, for instance, the noblest and
ablest Man in all the British lands might be seen not sway-
ing the royal sceptre, or the pontiffs censer, on the pinnacle
of the World, but gauging ale-tubs in the little burgh of
Dumfries! Johnson came a little nearer the mark than
Burns : but with him too * Strength was mournfully denied
its arena ;' he too had to fight Fortune at strange odds, all
his life long.
Johnson's disposition for royalty (had the Fates so or-
dered it) is well seen in early boyhood. ' His favourites,*
says Boswell, 'used to receive very liberal assistance from
* him ; and such was the submission and deference with
6 which he was treated, that three of the boys, of whom
6 Mr. Hector was sometimes one, used to come in the mom-
ing as his humble attendants, and carry him to school.
* One in the middle stooped, while he sat upon his back,
* and one on each side supported him ; and thus was he
* borne triumphant.* The purfly, sand-blind lubber and
blubber, with his open mouth, and face of bruised honey-
comb; yet already dominant, imperial, irresistible 1 Not in
the i King's-chair* (of human arms), as we see, do his three
satellites carry him along : rather on the Tj/ranfs-saddle, the
back of his fellow-creature, must he ride prosperous ! The
child is father of the man. He who had seen fifty years
into coming Time, would have felt that little spectacle of
mischievous schoolboys to be a great one. For -us,
60
look back on it, and what followed it, now from afar, there
arise questions enough : How looked these urchins ? What
jackets and galligaskins had they; felt headgear, or of dog-
skin leather? What was old Lichfield doing then ; what
thinking 1 and so on, through the whole series of Corporal
Trim's ' auxiliary verbs.' A picture of it all fashions itself
together ; only unhappily we have no brush and no fingers.
Boyhood is now past; the ferula of Pedagogue waves
harmless, in the distance: Samuel has struggled up to
uncouth bulk and youthhood, wrestling with Disease and
Poverty, all the way; which two continue still his com-
panions. At College we see little of him ; yet thus much,
that things went not well. A rugged wildman of the de-
sert, awakened to the feeling of himself; proud as the
proudest, poor as the poorest; stoically shut up, silently
enduring the incurable : what a world of blackest gloom,
with sun-gleams and pale tearful moon-gleams, and flicker-
ings of a celestial and an infernal splendour, was this that
now opened for him ! But the weather is wintry ; and the
toes of the man are looking through his shoes. His muddy
features grow of a purple and sea-green colour ; a flood of
black indignation mantling beneath. A truculent, raw-boned
iigure ! Meat he has probably little ; hope he has less : his
feet, as we said, have come into brotherhood with the cold
mire.
* Shall I be particular,' inquires Sir John Hawkins, ' and relate
a circumstance of his distress, that cannot "be imputed to Mm as an
effect of Ms own extravagance or irregularity, and consequently re-
flects no disgrace on Ms memory ? He had scarce any change of rai-
ment, and, in a short time after Corbet left Mm, but one pair of shoes,
and those so old that his feet were seen through them : a gentleman
of Ms college, the father of an eminent clergyman now living, directed
a servitor one morning to place a new pair at the door of Johnson's
chamber ; who seeing them upon Ms tot going out, so far forgot Mm-
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSON. 61
self and the spirit which must have actuated his unknown bene-
factor, that, with all the indignation of an insulted man, he threw
them away.'
How exceedingly surprising! The Rev. Dr. Hall re-
marks : tf As far as we can judge from a cursory view of the
6 weekly account in the buttery-books, Johnson appears to
* have lived as well as other commoners and scholars.' Alas!
such. ' cursory view of the buttery-books,' now from the safe
distance of a century, in the safe chair of a College Mas-
tership, is one thing ; the continual view of the empty or
locked buttery itself was quite a different thing. But hear
our Knight, how lie farther discourses. * Johnson/ quoth.
Sir John, could ' not at this early period of Ms life divest
* himself of an idea that poverty was disgraceful ; and was
very severe in his censures of that economy in both our
< Universities, which exacted at meals the attendance of
i poor scholars, under the several denominations of Servi-
* tors in the one, and Sizers in the other : he thought that
* the scholar's, like the Christian life, levelled all distinc-
6 tions of rank and worldly preeminence ; but in this he was
* mistaken : civil polity' &c. &c. Too true ! It is man's lot
to err.
However^ Destiny, in all ways, means to prove the mis-
taken Samuel, and see what stuff is in him. He must leave
these butteries of Oxford, Want like an armed man com-
pelling him ; retreat into his father's mean home ; and there
abandon himself for a season to inaction, disappointment,
shame and nervous melancholy nigh run mad : he is pro-"
bably the wretchedest man in wide England. In all ways he
too must ' become perfect through suffering' High thoughts,
have visited him; his College Exercises have been praised
beyond the walls of College ; Pope himself has seen that
Translation, and approved of it : Samuel had whispered tQ r
64 mSOELLANIES-
' At Edial near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen an
6 boarded, and taught the Latin and Greek languages, ly SAMUEL
JOHNSON.' Had this Edial enterprise prospered, how dif-
ferent might the issue have been! Johnson had lived a
life of unnoticed nobleness, or swoln into some amorphous
Dr. Parr, of no avail to us ; Bozzy would have dwindled
into official insignificance, or risen by some other eleva-
tion; old Anchinleck had never been afflicted with "ane
that keeped a schule," or obliged to violate hospitality by a
" Cromwell do ? God, sir, he gart kings ken that there was a
lith in their neck!" But the Edial enterprise did not prosper;
Destiny had other work appointed for Samuel Johnson; and
young gentlemen got board where they could elsewhere find
it. This man was to become a Teacher of grown gentlemen,
in the most surprising way; a Man of Letters, and Ruler of
the British Nation for some time, not of their bodies merely
but of their minds, not over them but in them.
The career of Literature could not, in Johnson's day, any
more than now, be said to lie along the shores of a Pactolus :
whatever else might be gathered there, gold-dust was nowise
the chief produce. The world, from the times of Socrates,
St. Paul, and far earlier, has always had its Teachers;
and always treated them in a peculiar way. A shrewd
Townclerk (not of Ephesus), once, in founding a Burgh-
Seminary, when the question came, How the Schoolmasters
should be maintained? delivered this brief counsel : "D n
them, keep them poor!" Considerable wisdom may lie in
this aphorism. At all events, we see, the world has acted
on it long, and indeed improved on it, putting many a
Schoolmaster of its great Burgh-Seminary to a death which
even cost it something. The world, it is true, had for some
time been too busy to go out of its way, andpttf any Author
BOSWELL'S LIFE OF JOHNSOK. 65
to death ; however, tlie old sentence pronounced against
them was found to be pretty sufficient. The first Writers,
being Monks, were sworn to a vow of Poverty ; the modern
Authors had no need to swear to it. This was the epoch
when an Otway could still die of hunger; not to speak of
your innumerable Scrogginses, whom l the Muse found
stretched beneath a rug,' with * rusty grate unconscious of
a fire/ stocking -night cap, sanded floor, and all the other
escutcheons of the craft, time out of mind the heirlooms of
Authorship. Scroggins, however, seems to have been but
an idler ; not at all so diligent as worthy Mr. Boyce, whom
we might have seen sitting up in bed, with his wearing-;
apparel of Blanket about him, and a hole slit in the same,
that his hand might be at liberty to work in its vocation.
The worst was, that too frequently a blackguard reckless-
ness of temper ensued, incapable of turning to account what
good the gods even here had provided : your Boyces acted
on some stoico-epicurean principle of carpe diem, as men do
in. bombarded towns, and seasons of raging pestilence;
and so had lost not only their life, and presence of mind,
but their status as persons of respectability. The trade of
Author was at about one of its lowest ebbs when Johnson
embarked on it.
Accordingly we find no mention of Illuminations in the
city of London, when this same Ruler of the British Nation
arrived in it: no cannon-salvos are fired; no flourish of
drums and trumpets greets his appearance on the scene.
He enters quite quietly, with some copper halfpence in his
pocket ; creeps into lodgings in Exeter Street, Strand ; and
has a Coronation Pontiff also, of not less peculiar equip-
ment, whom, with all submissiveness, he must wait upon,
in his Vatican of St. John's Gate, This is the dull oily
Printer alluded to above. : - :
VOL. IX. (Misc. voL 4.) F
66 MISCELLANIES,
4 Cave's temper, 1 says our Knight Hawkins, * was phlegmatic :
though he assumed, as the publisher of the Magazine, the name of
Sylvanus Urban, he had few of those qualities that constitute urbanity.
Judge of Ms want of them by this question, which he once put to an
author : " Mr. , I hear you have just published a pamphlet, and
am told there is a very good paragraph in it upon the subject of music :
did you write that yourself?" His discernment was also slow; and
as he had already at his command some writers of prose and verse,
who, in the language of Booksellers, are called good hands, he was the
backwarder in making advances, or courting an intimacy with John-
son. Upon the first approach of a stranger, his practice was to con-
tinue sitting ; a posture in which he was ever to be found, and for a
few minutes to continue silent : if at any time he was inclined to
begin the discourse, it was generally by putting a leaf of the Maga-
zine, then in the press, into the hand of his visitor, and asking Ms
opinion of it. * * *
< He was so incompetent a judge of Johnson's abilities, that mean-
ing at one time to dazzle Mm with the splendour of some of those
luminaries in Literature, who favoured him with their correspondence,
lie told him that if he would, in the evening, be at a certain alehouse
in the neighbourhood of Clerkenwell, he might have a chance of seeing
Mr. Erowne and another or two of those illustrious contributors : John-
son accepted the invitation; and being introduced by Cave, dress 3d
in a loose horseman's coat, and such a great bushy wig as he con-
stantly wore, to the sight of Mr. Browne, whom he found sitting at
the upper end of a long table, in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, had his
curiosity gratified.' 3
In fact, if we look seriously into the condition of Author-
ship at that period, we shall find that Johnson had under-
taken one of the rnggedest of all possible enterprises ; that
here as elsewhere Fortune had given him unspeakable Con-
tradictions to reconcile. For a man of Johnson's stamp, the
Problem was twofold: First, not only as the humble but
indispensable condition of all else, to keep himself, if so
might be, alive; but secondly, to keep himself alive by speak*
8 Hawkins, pp. 46-50.
BOSWELI/S LIFE OF JOHNSON, 67
ing forth the Truth that was in him, and speaking it truly,
that is, in the clearest and fittest utterance the Heavens had
enabled him to give it, let the Earth say to this what she
liked. Of which twofold Problem if it be hard to solve
either member separately, how incalculably more so to solve
it, when both are conjoined, and work with endless compli-
cation into one another ! He that finds himself already kept
alive can sometimes (unhappily not always) speak a little
truth ; he that finds himself able and willing, to all lengths,
to speak lies, may, by watching how the wind sits, scrape
together a livelihood, sometimes of great splendour: he,
again, who finds himself provided with neither endowment,
has but a ticklish game to play, and shall have praises if he
win it. Let us look a little at both faces of the matter; and
see what front they then offered our Adventurer, what front
he offered them.
At the time of Johnson's appearance on the field, Litera-
ture, in many senses, was in a transitional state ; chiefly in
this sense, as respects the pecuniary subsistence of its cul-
tivators. It was in the very act of passing from the protec-
tion of Patrons into that of the Public ; no longer to supply
its necessities by laudatory Dedications to the Great, but by
judicious Bargains with the Booksellers., This happy change
has been much sung and celebrated ; many a * lord of the
lion heart and eagle eye' looking back with scorn enough
on the bygone system of Dependency : so that now it were
perhaps well to consider, for a moment, what good might
also be in it, what gratitude we owe it. That a good was
in it, admits not of doubt. Whatsoever has existed has had
its value: without some truth and worth lying in it, the
thing could not have hung together, and been the organ
and sustenance, and method of action, for men that reasoned
and were alive, Translate a Falsehood which is wholly
68 MISCELLANIES.
false into Practice, tlie result comes out zero; there is no
fruit or issue to be derived from it. That in an age, when
a Nobleman was still noble, still with his wealth the pro-
tector of worthy and humane things, and still venerated as
such, a poor Man of Genius, his brother in nobleness, should,
with unfeigned reverence, address him and say : " I have
found Wisdom here, and would fain proclaim it abroad ; wilt
thou, of thy abundance, afford me the means T in all this
there was no baseness; it was wholly an honest proposal,
which a free man might make, and a free man listen to. So
might a Tasso, with a Gerusalemme in his hand or in his
head, speak to a Duke of Ferrara; so might a Shakspeare
to his Southampton ; and Continental Artists generally to
their rich Protectors, in some countries, down almost to
these days. It was only when the reverence became feigned,
that baseness entered into the transaction on both sides;
and, indeed, flourished there with rapid luxuriance, till that
became disgraceful for a Dryden, which a Shakspeare could
once practise without offence.
Neither, it is very true, was the new way of Bookseller
Msecenassliip worthless ; which opened itself at this junc-
ture, for the most important of all transport-trades, now
when the old way had become too miry and impassable.
Remark, moreover, how this second sort of Mascenasship,
after carrying us through nearly a century of Literary Time,
appears now to have wellnigh discharged its function also ;
and to be working pretty rapidly towards some third method,
the exact conditions of which are yet nowise visible. Thus
all things have their end; and we should part with them
all, not in anger, but in peace. The Bookseller-System^
during its peculiar century, the whole of the eighteenth, did
carry us handsomely along; and many good Works it has
left us, and many good Men it maintained : if it is now expir-
BOSWELI/S LIFE Oi 1 JOHNSON. 09
ing by PliFFEBY, as the Patronage-System did Tby FLATTERY
(for Lying is ever the forerunner of Death, nay is itself
Death), let us not forget its benefits ; how it nursed Litera-
ture through boyhood and school-years, as Patronage had
wrapped it in soft swaddling-bands ; till now we sec it
about to put on the toga virilis, could it but find any such !
There is tolerable travelling on the beaten road, run how
it may; only on the new road not yet levelled and paved,
and on the old road all broken into ruts and quagmires, is
the travelling bad or impracticable. The difficulty lies al-
ways in the transition from one method to another. In which
state it was that Johnson now found Literature ; and out of
which, let us also say, he manfully carried it. What re-
markable mortal first paid copyright in England we have not
ascertained; perhaps, for almost a century before, some
scarce visible or ponderable pittance of wages had occasion-
ally been yielded by the Seller of Books to the Writer of
them: the original Covenant, stipulating to produce Para-
dise Lost on the one hand, and Five Pounds Sterling on the
other, still lies (we have been told) in black-on-white, for
inspection and purchase by the curious, at a Bookshop in
Chancery Lane. Thus had the matter gone on, in a mixed
confused way, for some threescore years ; -as ever, in such
things, the old system overlaps the new, by some generation
or two, and only dies quite out when the new has got a
complete organisation and weather-worthy surface of its
own. Among the first Authors, the very first of any sig-
nificance, who lived by the day's wages of his craft, and
composedly faced the world on that basis, was Samuel
Johnson.
At the time of Johnson's appearance there were still two
ways, on which an Author might attempt pr 
