and

morning when all the world agrees to shut out interruption.' These are the moments of which poor Sober trembles at the anticipation. That he might avoid both these periods of solitude, he was neither willing to go to bed, nor willing to get up again. He did not rise till twelve or one, by which hour his friends began to arrive. He sat a long while declaiming over his breakfast, went out about four to dine at a tavern, and seldom returned before two in the morning. He boasted on one occasion to Miss Williams that he was home for once before everybody was in bed, for that he had knocked against some bricklayers in the court. "You forget, my dear Sir,' she replied, that they are just up, are now beginning their morning's work.' To escape from moody meditation and the anguish of his own corroding thoughts, he often amused himself with practical chemistry. He has a small furnace,' he says of Sober, which he employs in distillation, and which has long been the solace of his life. With this he draws oils and waters which he knows to be of no use.' They were of use, because the employment was medicine to his malady. For the same reason he loved to be driven fast in a post-chaise. 'A man,' he remarked, when accounting for the fascination of hunting, "feels his vacuity less in action than in rest.' He consequently delighted in the mere motion of travelling, and exclaimed to Boswell as the carriage rolled rapidly along the road, 'Life has not many things better than this.' The animation of the movement diverted his mind from preying on itself, and he found positive pleasure in a respite from pain.

6

As conversation was his main refuge from uneasy thoughts, no amount of it could make him weary. He would keep it up with unflagging spirit as long as any one would sit with him-his ideas never failing, his knowledge never exhausted, his wit never running dry. He maintained that a companion who talked for fame could not be agreeable, and that the real pleasure was in a quiet interchange of sentiments without rivalry or effort. Yet Burke asserted that he argued only for victory, and that when he had neither a paradox to defend nor an antagonist to crush, he would even preface his assent with 'Why, no, Sir.' He would commence a sentence with,' Why, Sir, as to the good or evil of card-playing!' "Now,' said Garrick, 'he is thinking which side he shall take.' He disliked hyperboles, and whoever praised anything extravagantly, or asserted anything confidently, was sure to be contradicted by him. His friend Dr. Taylor expatiated on the merits of a bull-dog, which he boasted was perfectly well-shaped. Johnson would not suffer even a point like this to pass. He examined the animal attentively, and having prepared himself for the contest, called out, 'No, Sir, he is not well-shaped, for there is not

the

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the quick transition from the thickness of the fore-part to the slim part behind which a bull-dog ought to have.' In all the countless discussions he provoked he was rarely worsted, for if argument failed him, he won the victory by his wit. He once dreamt that he was engaged in a conflict of repartee, and was much depressed because his antagonist got the better of him. This he adduced to show that the judgment is weakened by sleep, or he would have known that the rejoinder which vexed him was as much his own as the observation it eclipsed; but the incident is equally an example of the mortification he always felt at defeat, though the annoyance and the ebullition of temper it produced were only momentary. Wit, in the estimation of his friends, was his most shining quality. Rabelais and all the rest,' said Garrick, 'are nothing compared to him. You may be diverted by them, but Johnson gives you a forcible hug, and shakes laughter out of you whether you will or not.' No man that we know of ever had a quiver so full of arrows. His repartee seldom lay upon the surface; it was as original and unexpected as it was sharp and telling. He had a vast abundance, in addition, of that species of illustration which equally serves to cover sophistry and to set off truth, and an acuteness of discrimination which enabled him instantly to detect the fallacies of an opponent. He envied Beauclerk the ease with which he uttered his sallies, and the freedom from the look which announced that a good thing was coming, and from the look which betrayed a consciousness that it had come. But though his own elaborate manner did not please him so well, all his biographers testify that his deliberate enunciation and emphasis of tone added greatly to the force of his sayings. His delivery was as much more imposing than that of his antagonist, as his matter was more powerful; and nothing could resist the combined brilliancy of the flash, and the roar of the thunder.

Johnson, like Milton, thought,

'That which before us lies in daily life
Is the prime wisdom."

Of this 'prime wisdom' there is a greater store in Boswell's work than any other book we can remember.* What Johnson might not unlikely have spread out in his 'Rambler' into a flat dissertation he condensed in his talk into a lively and idiomatic

* Mr. Croker's notes, which combine the gleanings from the numerous other memorials of Johnson, are often quite as valuable as the text. If his edition were published in parts it might find its way to a class who are, as yet, ignorant of the most entertaining and instructive book in the language.

aphorism.

aphorism. Sketches of character, rules of conduct, literary criticism, and questions of morals and religion, were his favourite topics. The conversation which had no bearing upon man of the passing generation he considered lost to both pleasure and instruction. He expressed a hope that he might never hear of the Punic war while he lived, and when Mr. Vesey began to talk to him about Catiline's conspiracy, 'I withdrew,' he said, 'my attention, and thought of Tom Thumb.' There was one quality for which he was noted, whatever the subject on which he spokethe minutest regard to truth. His own scrupulosity had made him particularly sensible of the general laxity. Nothing but experience,' he said, 'could enable any one to conceive that so many groundless reports should be propagated as every man of eminence might hear of himself.' He imputed the deviations from accuracy rather to carelessness than to falsehood, and he might have added, to the disposition to supply the want of knowledge by conjecture, and from a little that is known to infer a great deal that is not. He had thus grown to be extremely incredulous, and if the narration partook at all of the marvellous he would break in with a significant look and decisive tone, and exclaim, 'It is not so; do not tell this again.' Hogarth once remarked of him, that, not contented with believing the Bible, he believed nothing but the Bible, and said, like the Psalmist, 'in his haste, that all men were liars.' He was especially mistrustful of the tales of travellers. When a friend repeated to him some extraordinary facts related by the companions of Captain Cook, Johnson replied, 'I never knew before how much I was respected by these gentlemen; they told me none of these things. He dined in company with Bruce, and Boswell found, on questioning him the same evening, that he gave no credence to the traveller's testimony. In this he was not peculiar. Horace Walpole was present when Bruce was asked what description of musical instruments were used in Abyssinia? I think,' he answered, 'I saw one lyre there.' 'Yes,' said Selwyn, in a whisper, ' and there is one less since he left the country.' The rudeness of which Johnson was sometimes guilty to the narrators of wonders solely arose from the excess of his incredulity. He firmly believed that he was rebuking falsehood, and serving the cause of good morals.

In the same way he would violate the common forms of society to mark his horror of sceptics. The Abbé Raynal was introduced to him and offered his hand. Johnson drew back and refused to take it: I will not,' he said to a friend who expostulated with him, 'shake hands with an infidel.' He would more easily pardon bad practice than bad principles. He had a strong feeling

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feeling against schismatics, and never grew more hot than when the discussion turned upon the points at issue between them and the Church. As he walked at Oxford in New Inn Hall Garden, Sir Robert Chambers picked up snails and threw them over the wall into the adjoining premises. Johnson roughly rebuked him for so unneighbourly an act. 'My neighbour,' pleaded Sir Robert, 'is a dissenter.' 'If so,' rejoined Johnson, 'toss away, toss away as hard as you can.' This was more than half a jest, for it was a common habit with him to indulge in humorous exaggeration, but a slight incident recorded by him in one of the pious entries in his diary is a serious and significant indication of his sentiments. Seeing a poor girl at the sacrament in a bedgown I gave her privately a crown though I saw Hart's Hymns in her hand.' Hart was a Presbyterian, and notwithstanding that the girl was attending the Communion in the Church of England, it is plain from Johnson's though' that he thought the mere fact of her reading Presbyterian hymns, which she probably valued for their piety, without the least knowledge of the ecclesiastical principles of their author, was a reason against the extension of his bounty to her. All distinctions were forgotten by him at the spectacle of distress, and that her possession of this book should have passed through his mind as a motive for checking his benevolence is a curious evidence of the strength of his convictions. His distaste, however, for their opinions did not prevent his partiality for individuals. He had friends among men of all parties, both political and religious.

He was as stout and energetic in his creed respecting the State as in matters which affected the Church. He was a Tory opposed to constitutional changes, and the licence of the mob. But those who have represented him as a bigot to abuses have not read his works. In many respects he was in advance of his age, or at least must be ranked among the foremost men in it. Years before Wilberforce had opened his lips against the slave-trade or slavery, Johnson in a company of 'potent, grave, and reverend signiors' at Oxford gave for a toast To the next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies.' Boswell, who shared the common opinions of the time, boldly avers that he showed more zeal than knowledge' on the subject, and that to adopt his notions would be robbery of the planters,' 'cruelty to the African savages,' and in a word would be

'To shut the gates of mercy on mankind.'

As early, again, as 1751 Johnson published a paper in the Rambler,' in which he urged with unanswerable arguments a mitigation

mitigation of our bloody criminal code, and showed that humanity and policy alike demanded the change. A little later, in the 'Idler,' he demonstrated the cruelty of allowing creditors blinded by interest and inflamed by resentment to imprison at their private pleasure debtors guiltless of fraud, and whose only crime was misfortune. His own poverty and the arrests to which he had been subjected, together with the inhumanity he must have seen practised towards his obscure associates, had put him in a position to know and feel the injustice of the system. But in no shape did oppression find a friend in him, and he was not more zealous for order and authority than he was hostile to the ills which laws had caused and laws could cure.

The history of Johnson teaches a lesson of resignation to those who are straitened in their circumstances when a man so good and gifted languished for considerably more than half his life in abject penury; a lesson of perseverance to those who are desponding, when a toilsome and desolate road, which it took more than thirty years to traverse and which seemed to have no other goal than the grave, led him at last to competence and ease; a lesson of contentment to those who do not possess his mental preeminence, when Providence had coupled with it a disorder which saddened his days, and conjoined with the brightness of the flame the smart of the burn; a lesson of intellectual humility to those who are his inferiors in mind and knowledge, when he always spoke of his own attainments as slight, and a lesson of moral humility to those who are not possessed of his worth, when, in spite of his exemplary conduct and marvellous benevolence, he was almost enraged if anybody spoke of him as good; a lesson of the supreme importance of religion to those whose piety is less fervent than his when his repentance was so bitter at the close, and present fame and future renown were quite forgotten in the contemplation of eternity; a lesson to all of what can be effected in situations which appear to afford no scope for the exertion of abilities or the practice of virtues, when we see the learning he amassed in his youth with scanty aid from books or instructors, the works he wrote without ease or encouragement, the charities he exercised without gold or silver when he was living himself upon fourpence halfpenny a day, and the honesty and independence he maintained when not to lower his opinions or sully his conscience was to condemn himself to fare as coarse as that which was allotted for the punishment of crime. Whether we desire an example to stimulate us to the acquisition of knowledge under difficulties or the retention of uprightness under temptation, there is no more memorable in

stance