THE

LIFE

OF

SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

JOHNSONIANA.

PART I.

ANECDOTES OF DR. JOHNSON,

BY MRS. PIOZZI.

[Published in 1785.]

1. Introductory.

I AM aware that many will say, I have not spoken highly enough of Dr. Johnson; but it will be difficult for those who say so, to speak more highly. If I have described his manners as they were, I have been careful to show his superiority to the common forms of common life. It is surely no dispraise to an oak that it does not bear jessamine; and he who should plant honeysuckle round Trajan's column, would not be thought to adorn, but to disgrace it. When I have said, that he was more a man of genius than of learning, I mean not to take from the one part of his character that

which I willingly give to the other. The erudition of Mr. Johnson proved his genius; for he had not acquired it by long or profound study: nor can I think those characters the greatest which have most learning driven into their heads, any more than I can persuade myself to consider the river Jenisca as superior to the Nile, because the first receives near seventy tributary streams in the course of its unmarked progress to the sea, while the great parent of African plenty, flowing from an almost invisible source, and unenriched by any extraneous waters, except eleven nameless rivers, pours his majestic torrent into the ocean by seven celebrated mouths.

2. Bodily Exercises.

Mr. Johnson was very conversant in the art of attack and defence by boxing, which science he had learned from his uncle Andrew (1), I believe; and I have heard him descant upon the age when people were received, and when rejected, in the schools once held for that brutal amusement, much to the admiration of those who had no expectation of his skill in such matters, from the sight of a figure which precluded all possibility of personal prowess; though, because he saw Mr. Thrale one day leap over a cabriolet stool, to show that he was not tired after a chase of fifty miles or more, he suddenly jumped over it too; but in a way so strange and so unwieldy, that our terror lest he should break his bones took from us even the power of laughing.

3. Showing off Children.

The trick which most parents play with their children, of showing off their newly-acquired accomplishments, disgusted Mr. Johnson beyond expression: he had been treated so himself, he said, till he absolutely loathed his father's caresses, because he knew they were sure

(1) [See antè, Vol. I. p. 312.]

to precede some unpleasing display of his early abilities; and he used, when neighbours came o' visiting, to run up a tree that he might not be found and exhi bited, such, as no doubt he was, a prodigy of early understanding. His epitaph upon the duck he killed by treading on it at five years old, "Here lies poor duck," &c. is a striking example of early expansion of mind, and knowledge of language; yet he always seemed more mortified at the recollection of the bustle his parents made with his wit, than pleased with the thoughts of possessing it. "That," said he to me one day, "is the great misery of late marriages; the unhappy produce of them becomes the plaything of dotage: an old man's child," continued he, "leads much such a life, I think, as a little boy's dog, teased with awkward fondness, and forced, perhaps, to sit up and beg, as we call it, to divert a company, who at last go away complaining of their disagreeable entertainment." sequence of these maxims, and full of indignation against such parents as delight to produce their young ones early into the talking world, I have known Mr. Johnson give a good deal of pain, by refusing to hear the verses the children could recite, or the songs they could sing; particularly one friend who told him that his two sons should repeat Gray's elegy to him alternately, that he might judge who had the happiest cadence. 66 No, pray Sir," said he, " let the dears both speak it at once; more noise will by that means be made, and the noise will be sooner over."

4. Parson Ford.

In con

Mr. Johnson always spoke to me of his cousin, the Rev. Mr. Ford (1), with tenderness, praising his acquaintance with life and manners, and recollecting one piece of advice that no man surely ever followed more

(1) [See antè, Vol. I. p. 45.]