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Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 3

by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay · English · Gutenberg #2169 · 418,234 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 3

Author: Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay


        
Release date: June 26, 2008 [eBook #2169]
                Most recently updated: July 14, 2008

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2169

Credits: Produced by Mike Alder, Sue Asscher, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES — VOLUME 3 ***




Produced by Mike Alder and Sue Asscher





THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

Contributions To The Encyclopaedia Britannica And Miscellaneous Poems,
Inscriptions, Etc.

By Thomas Babington Macaulay


VOLUME III.


CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

AND

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.




CONTENTS.


CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.

Francis Atterbury. (December 1853)

John Bunyan. (May 1854)

Oliver Goldsmith. (February 1856)

Samuel Johnson. (December 1856)

William Pitt. (January 1859)


MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.

Epitaph on Henry Martyn. (1812)

Lines to the Memory of Pitt. (1813)

A Radical War Song. (1820)

The Battle of Moncontour. (1824)

The Battle of Naseby, by Obadiah
Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-with-links-of-iron, Serjeant
in Ireton's Regiment. (1824)

Sermon in a Churchyard. (1825)

Translation of a Poem by Arnault. (1826)

Dies Irae. (1826)

The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad. (1827)

The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge. An Election Ballad. (1827)

Song. (1827)

Political Georgics. (March 1828)

The Deliverance of Vienna. (1828)

The Last Buccaneer. (1839)

Epitaph on a Jacobite. (1845)

Lines Written in August, 1847.

Translation from Plautus. (1850)

Paraphrase of a Passage in the Chronicle of the Monk of St Gall. (1856)

Inscription on the Statue of Lord Wm. Bentinck, at Calcutta. (1835)

Epitaph on Sir Benjamin Heath Malkin, at Calcutta. (1837)

Epitaph on Lord Metcalfe. (1847)




CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.




FRANCIS ATTERBURY. (December 1853.)

Francis Atterbury, a man who holds a conspicuous place in the political,
ecclesiastical, and literary history of England, was born in the year
1662, at Middleton in Buckinghamshire, a parish of which his father was
rector. Francis was educated at Westminster School, and carried thence
to Christchurch a stock of learning which, though really scanty, he
through life exhibited with such judicious ostentation that superficial
observers believed his attainments to be immense. At Oxford, his parts,
his taste, and his bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit, soon
made him conspicuous. Here he published at twenty, his first work,
a translation of the noble poem of Absalom and Achitophel into Latin
verse. Neither the style nor the versification of the young scholar
was that of the Augustan age. In English composition he succeeded much
better. In 1687 he distinguished himself among many able men who wrote
in defence of the Church of England, then persecuted by James II., and
calumniated by apostates who had for lucre quitted her communion. Among
these apostates none was more active or malignant than Obadiah Walker,
who was master of University College, and who had set up there, under
the royal patronage, a press for printing tracts against the established
religion. In one of these tracts, written apparently by Walker himself,
many aspersions were thrown on Martin Luther. Atterbury undertook to
defend the great Saxon Reformer, and performed that task in a manner
singularly characteristic. Whoever examines his reply to Walker will be
struck by the contrast between the feebleness of those parts which are
argumentative and defensive, and the vigour of those parts which are
rhetorical and aggressive. The Papists were so much galled by the
sarcasms and invectives of the young polemic that they raised a cry of
treason, and accused him of having, by implication, called King James a
Judas.

After the Revolution, Atterbury, though bred in the doctrines of
non-resistance and passive obedience, readily swore fealty to the
new government. In no long time he took holy orders. He occasionally
preached in London with an eloquence which raised his reputation, and
soon had the honour of being appointed one of the royal chaplains.
But he ordinarily resided at Oxford, where he took an active part
in academical business, directed the classical studies of the
undergraduates of his college, and was the chief adviser and assistant
of Dean Aldrich, a divine now chiefly remembered by his catches,
but renowned among his contemporaries as a scholar, a Tory, and a
high-churchman. It was the practice, not a very judicious practice, of
Aldrich to employ the most promising youths of his college in editing
Greek and Latin books. Among the studious and well-disposed lads who
were, unfortunately for themselves, induced to become teachers of
philology when they should have been content to be learners, was Charles
Boyle, son of the Earl of Orrery, and nephew of Robert Boyle, the great
experimental philosopher. The task assigned to Charles Boyle was to
prepare a new edition of one of the most worthless books in existence.
It was a fashion, among those Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric
as an art, to compose epistles and harangues in the names of eminent
men. Some of these counterfeits are fabricated with such exquisite taste
and skill that it is the highest achievement of criticism to distinguish
them from originals. Others are so feebly and rudely executed that they
can hardly impose on an intelligent schoolboy. The best specimen which
has come down to us is perhaps the oration for Marcellus, such an
imitation of Tully's eloquence as Tully would himself have read with
wonder and delight. The worst specimen is perhaps a collection of
letters purporting to have been written by that Phalaris who governed
Agrigentum more than 500 years before the Christian era. The evidence,
both internal and external, against the genuineness of these letters is
overwhelming. When, in the fifteenth century, they emerged, in company
with much that was far more valuable, from their obscurity, they were
pronounced spurious by Politian, the greatest scholar of Italy, and
by Erasmus, the greatest scholar on our side of the Alps. In truth,
it would be as easy to persuade an educated Englishman that one of
Johnson's Ramblers was the work of William Wallace as to persuade a
man like Erasmus that a pedantic exercise, composed in the trim and
artificial Attic of the time of Julian, was a despatch written by a
crafty and ferocious Dorian, who roasted people alive many years before
there existed a volume of prose in the Greek language. But, though
Christchurch could boast of many good Latinists, of many good English
writers, and of a greater number of clever and fashionable men of the
world than belonged to any other academic body, there was not then in
the college a single man capable of distinguishing between the infancy
and the dotage of Greek literature. So superficial indeed was the
learning of the rulers of this celebrated society that they were charmed
by an essay which Sir William Temple published in praise of the ancient
writers. It now seems strange that even the eminent public services, the
deserved popularity, and the graceful style of Temple should have saved
so silly a performance from universal contempt. Of the books which he
most vehemently eulogised his eulogies proved that he knew nothing.
In fact, he could not read a line of the language in which they were
written. Among many other foolish things, he said that the letters
of Phalaris were the oldest letters and also the best in the world.
Whatever Temple wrote attracted notice. People who had never heard of
the Epistles of Phalaris began to inquire about them. Aldrich, who knew
very little Greek, took the word of Temple who knew none, and desired
Boyle to prepare a new edition of these admirable compositions which,
having long slept in obscurity, had become on a sudden objects of
general interest.

The edition was prepared with the help of Atterbury, who was Boyle's
tutor, and of some other members of the college. It was an edition such
as might be expected from people who would stoop to edite such a book.
The notes were worthy of the text; the Latin version worthy of the Greek
original. The volume would have been forgotten in a month, had not a
misunderstanding about a manuscript arisen between the young editor and
the greatest scholar that had appeared in Europe since the revival of
letters, Richard Bentley. The manuscript was in Bentley's keeping. Boyle
wished it to be collated. A mischief-making bookseller informed him that
Bentley had refused to lend it, which was false, and also that Bentley
had spoken contemptuously of the letters attributed to Phalaris, and of
the critics who were taken in by such counterfeits, which was perfectly
true. Boyle, much provoked, paid, in his preface, a bitterly ironical
compliment to Bentley's courtesy. Bentley revenged himself by a short
dissertation, in which he proved that the epistles were spurious, and
the new edition of them worthless: but he treated Boyle personally with
civility as a young gentleman of great hopes, whose love of learning was
highly commendable, and who deserved to have had better instructors.

Few things in literary history are more extraordinary than the storm
which this little dissertation raised. Bentley had treated Boyle with
forbearance; but he had treated Christchurch with contempt; and the
Christchurch-men, wherever dispersed, were as much attached to their
college as a Scotchman to his country, or a Jesuit to his order. Their
influence was great. They were dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns
of Court and in the College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and
in the literary and fashionable circles of London. Their unanimous
cry was, that the honour of the college must be vindicated, that the
insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle was unequal to
the task, and disinclined to it. It was, therefore, assigned to his
tutor, Atterbury.

The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, but which was,
in truth, no more the work of Boyle than the letters to which the
controversy related were the work of Phalaris, is now read only by the
curious, and will in all probability never be reprinted again. But it
had its day of noisy popularity. It was to be found, not only in the
studies of men of letters, but on the tables of the most brilliant
drawing-rooms of Soho Square and Covent Garden. Even the beaus and
coquettes of that age, the Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the
Mirabells and the Millaments, congratulated each other on the way in
which the gay young gentleman, whose erudition sate so easily upon him,
and who wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic
dialect and the anapaestic measure, Sicilian talents and Thericlean
cups, had bantered the queer prig of a doctor. Nor was the applause of
the multitude undeserved. The book is, indeed, Atterbury's masterpiece,
and gives a higher notion of his powers than any of those works to
which he put his name. That he was altogether in the wrong on the main
question, and on all the collateral questions springing out of it, that
his knowledge of the language, the literature, and the history of Greece
was not equal to what many freshmen now bring up every year to Cambridge
and Oxford, and that some of his blunders seem rather to deserve a
flogging than a refutation, is true; and therefore it is that his
performance is, in the highest degree, interesting and valuable to a
judicious reader. It is good by reason of its exceeding badness. It is
the most extraordinary instance that exists of the art of making much
show with little substance. There is no difficulty, says the steward
of Moliere's miser, in giving a fine dinner with plenty of money: the
really great cook is he who can set out a banquet with no money at all.
That Bentley should have written excellently on ancient chronology and
geography, on the development of the Greek language, and the origin of
the Greek drama, is not strange. But that Atterbury should, during some
years, have been thought to have treated these subjects much better than
Bentley is strange indeed. It is true that the champion of Christchurch
had all the help which the most celebrated members of that society could
give him. Smalridge contributed some very good wit; Friend and others
some very bad archaeology and philology. But the greater part of the
volume was entirely Atterbury's: what was not his own was revised and
retouched by him: and the whole bears the mark of his mind, a mind
inexhaustibly rich in all the resources of controversy, and familiar
with all the artifices which make falsehood look like truth, and
ignorance like knowledge. He had little gold; but he beat that little
out to the very thinnest leaf, and spread it over so vast a surface that
to those who judged by a glance, and who did not resort to balances and
tests, the glittering heap of worthless matter which he produced seemed
to be an inestimable treasure of massy bullion. Such arguments as he had
he placed in the clearest light. Where he had no arguments, he resorted
to personalities, sometimes serious, generally ludicrous, always clever
and cutting. But, whether he was grave or merry, whether he reasoned or
sneered, his style was always pure, polished, and easy.

Party spirit then ran high; yet, though Bentley ranked among Whigs, and
Christchurch was a stronghold of Toryism, Whigs joined with Tories in
applauding Atterbury's volume. Garth insulted Bentley, and extolled
Boyle in lines which are now never quoted except to be laughed at.
Swift, in his "Battle of the Books," introduced with much pleasantry
Boyle, clad in armour, the gift of all the gods, and directed by Apollo
in the form of a human friend, for whose name a blank is left which may
easily be filled up. The youth, so accoutred, and so assisted, gains
an easy victory over his uncourteous and boastful antagonist. Bentley,
meanwhile, was supported by the consciousness of an immeasurable
superiority, and encouraged by the voices of the few who were really
competent to judge the combat. "No man," he said, justly and nobly, "was
ever written down but by himself." He spent two years in preparing a
reply, which will never cease to be read and prized while the literature
of ancient Greece is studied in any part of the world. This reply
proved, not only that the letters ascribed to Phalaris were spurious,
but that Atterbury, with all his wit, his eloquence, his skill in
controversial fence, was the most audacious pretender that ever wrote
about what he did not understand. But to Atterbury this exposure was
matter of indifference. He was now engaged in a dispute about matters
far more important and exciting than the laws of Zaleucus and the laws
of Charondas. The rage of religious factions was extreme. High church
and Low church divided the nation. The great majority of the clergy were
on the high-church side; the majority of King William's bishops were
inclined to latitudinarianism. A dispute arose between the two parties
touching the extent of the powers of the Lower House of Convocation.
Atterbury thrust himself eagerly into the front rank of the
high-churchmen. Those who take a comprehensive and impartial view of his
whole career will not be disposed to give him credit for religious zeal.
But it was his nature to be vehement and pugnacious in the cause
of every fraternity of which he was a member. He had defended the
genuineness of a spurious book simply because Christchurch had put forth
an edition of that book; he now stood up for the clergy against the
civil power, simply because he was a clergyman, and for the priests
against the episcopal order, simply because he was as yet only a priest.
He asserted the pretensions of the class to which he belonged in several
treatises written with much wit, ingenuity, audacity, and acrimony. In
this, as in his first controversy, he was opposed to antagonists whose
knowledge of the subject in dispute was far superior to his; but in
this, as in his first controversy, he imposed on the multitude by bold
assertion, by sarcasm, by declamation, and, above all, by his peculiar
knack of exhibiting a little erudition in such a manner as to make it
look like a great deal. Having passed himself off on the world as a
greater master of classical learning than Bentley, he now passed himself
off as a greater master of ecclesiastical learning than Wake or Gibson.
By the great body of the clergy he was regarded as the ablest and
most intrepid tribune that had ever defended their rights against the
oligarchy of prelates. The lower House of Convocation voted him thanks
for his services; the University of Oxford created him a doctor of
divinity; and soon after the accession of Anne, while the Tories still
had the chief weight in the government, he was promoted to the deanery
of Carlisle.

Soon after he had obtained this preferment, the Whig party rose to
ascendency in the state. From that party he could expect no favour. Six
years elapsed before a change of fortune took place. At length, in
the year 1710, the prosecution of Sacheverell produced a formidable
explosion of high-church fanaticism. At such a moment Atterbury could
not fail to be conspicuous. His inordinate zeal for the body to which
he belonged, his turbulent and aspiring temper, his rare talents for
agitation and for controversy, were again signally displayed. He bore a
chief part in framing that artful and eloquent speech which the accused
divine pronounced at the bar of the Lords, and which presents a singular
contrast to the absurd and scurrilous sermon which had very unwisely
been honoured with impeachment. During the troubled and anxious months
which followed the trial, Atterbury was among the most active of those
pamphleteers who inflamed the nation against the Whig ministry and the
Whig parliament. When the ministry had been changed and the parliament
dissolved, rewards were showered upon him. The Lower House of
Convocation elected him prolocutor. The Queen appointed him Dean of
Christchurch on the death of his old friend and patron Aldrich. The
college would have preferred a gentler ruler. Nevertheless, the new
head was received with every mark of honour. A congratulatory oration in
Latin was addressed to him in the magnificent vestibule of the hall; and
he in reply professed the warmest attachment to the venerable house in
which he had been educated, and paid many gracious compliments to those
over whom he was to preside. But it was not in his nature to be a mild
or an equitable governor. He had left the chapter of Carlisle distracted
by quarrels. He found Christchurch at peace; but in three months his
despotic and contentious temper did at Christchurch what it had done
at Carlisle. He was succeeded in both his deaneries by the humane and
accomplished Smalridge, who gently complained of the state in which both
had been left. "Atterbury goes before, and sets everything on fire.
I come after him with a bucket of water." It was said by Atterbury's
enemies that he was made a bishop because he was so bad a dean.
Under his administration Christchurch was in confusion, scandalous
altercations took place, opprobrious words were exchanged; and there
was reason to fear that the great Tory college would be ruined by the
tyranny of the great Tory doctor. He was soon removed to the bishopric
of Rochester, which was then always united with the deanery of
Westminster. Still higher dignities seemed to be before him. For, though
there were many able men on the episcopal bench, there was none who
equalled or approached him in parliamentary talents. Had his party
continued in power, it is not improbable that he would have been raised
to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The more splendid his prospects,
the more reason he had to dread the accession of a family which was
well-known to be partial to the Whigs. There is every reason to believe
that he was one of those politicians who hoped that they might be able,
during the life of Anne, to prepare matters in such a way that at her
decease there might be little difficulty in setting aside the Act of
Settlement and placing the Pretender on the throne. Her sudden death
confounded the projects of these conspirators. Atterbury, who wanted no
kind of courage, implored his confederates to proclaim James III., and
offered to accompany the heralds in lawn sleeves. But he found even
the bravest soldiers of his party irresolute, and exclaimed, not, it is
said, without interjections which ill became the mouth of a father of
the church, that the best of all causes and the most precious of all
moments had been pusillanimously thrown away. He acquiesced in what he
could not prevent, took the oaths to the House of Hanover, and at the
coronation officiated with the outward show of zeal, and did his best to
ingratiate himself with the royal family. But his servility was requited
with cold contempt. No creature is so revengeful as a proud man who
has humbled himself in vain. Atterbury became the most factious and
pertinacious of all the opponents of the government. In the House of
Lords his oratory, lucid, pointed, lively, and set off with every grace
of pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the attention and admiration
even of a hostile majority. Some of the most remarkable protests which
appear in the journals of the peers were drawn up by him; and in some of
the bitterest of those pamphlets which called on the English to stand up
for their country against the aliens who had come from beyond the seas
to oppress and plunder her, critics easily detected his style. When the
rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in which the
bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their attachment to the
Protestant succession. He busied himself in electioneering, especially
at Westminster, where, as dean, he possessed great influence; and
was, indeed, strongly suspected of having once set on a riotous mob to
prevent his Whig fellow-citizens from polling.

After having been long in indirect communication with the exiled family,
he, in 1717, began to correspond directly with the Pretender. The first
letter of the correspondence is extant. In that letter Atterbury boasts
of having, during many years past, neglected no opportunity of serving
the Jacobite cause. "My daily prayer," he says, "is that you may have
success. May I live to see that day, and live no longer than I do what
is in my power to forward it." It is to be remembered that he who wrote
thus was a man bound to set to the church of which he was overseer an
example of strict probity; that he had repeatedly sworn allegiance to
the House of Brunswick; that he had assisted in placing the crown on
the head of George I., and that he had abjured James III., "without
equivocation or mental reservation, on the true faith of a Christian."

It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life. His
turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then
required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the
society of the most illustrious of the living and of the dead. Of his
wife little is known: but between him and his daughter there was an
affection singularly close and tender. The gentleness of his manners
when he was in the company of a few friends was such as seemed hardly
credible to those who knew him only by his writings and speeches. The
charm of his "softer hour" has been commemorated by one of those friends
in imperishable verse. Though Atterbury's classical attainments were not
great, his taste in English literature was excellent; and his admiration
of genius was so strong that it overpowered even his political and
religious antipathies. His fondness for Milton, the mortal enemy of the
Stuarts and of the church, was such as to many Tories seemed a crime. On
the sad night on which Addison was laid in the chapel of Henry VII., the
Westminster boys remarked that Atterbury read the funeral service with a
peculiar tenderness and solemnity. The favourite companions, however,
of the great Tory prelate were, as might have been expected, men whose
politics had at least a tinge of Toryism. He lived on friendly terms
with Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. With Prior he had a close intimacy,
which some misunderstanding about public affairs at last dissolved.
Pope found in Atterbury, not only a warm admirer, but a most faithful,
fearless, and judicious adviser. The poet was a frequent guest at the
episcopal palace among the elms of Bromley, and entertained not the
slightest suspicion that his host, now declining in years, confined to
an easy chair by gout, and apparently devoted to literature, was deeply
concerned in criminal and perilous designs against the government.

The spirit of the Jacobites had been cowed by the events of 1715. It
revived in 1721. The failure of the South Sea project, the panic in the
money market, the downfall of great commercial houses, the distress
from which no part of the kingdom was exempt, had produced general
discontent. It seemed not improbable that at such a moment an
insurrection might be successful. An insurrection was planned. The
streets of London were to be barricaded; the Tower and the Bank were
to be surprised; King George, his family, and his chief captains and
councillors, were to be arrested; and King James was to be proclaimed.
The design became known to the Duke of Orleans, regent of France, who
was on terms of friendship with the House of Hanover. He put the English
government on its guard. Some of the chief malecontents were committed
to prison; and among them was Atterbury. No bishop of the Church of
England had been taken into custody since that memorable day when the
applauses and prayers of all London had followed the seven bishops to
the gate of the Tower. The Opposition entertained some hope that it
might be possible to excite among the people an enthusiasm resembling
that of their fathers, who rushed into the waters of the Thames to
implore the blessing of Sancroft. Pictures of the heroic confessor in
his cell were exhibited at the shop windows. Verses in his praise were
sung about the streets. The restraints by which he was prevented from
communicating with his accomplices were represented as cruelties worthy
of the dungeons of the Inquisition. Strong appeals were made to the
priesthood. Would they tamely permit so gross an insult to be offered to
their cloth? Would they suffer the ablest, the most eloquent member of
their profession, the man who had so often stood up for their rights
against the civil power, to be treated like the vilest of mankind?
There was considerable excitement; but it was allayed by a temperate
and artful letter to the clergy, the work, in all probability, of Bishop
Gibson, who stood high in the favour of Walpole, and shortly after
became minister for ecclesiastical affairs.

Atterbury remained in close confinement during some months. He had
carried on his correspondence with the exiled family so cautiously that
the circumstantial proofs of his guilt, though sufficient to produce
entire moral conviction, were not sufficient to justify legal
conviction. He could be reached only by a bill of pains and penalties.
Such a bill the Whig party, then decidedly predominant in both houses,
was quite prepared to support. Many hot-headed members of that party
were eager to follow the precedent which had been set in the case of
Sir John Fenwick, and to pass an act for cutting off the bishop's head.
Cadogan, who commanded the army, a brave soldier, but a headstrong
politician, is said to have exclaimed with great vehemence: "Fling him
to the lions in the Tower." But the wiser and more humane Walpole
was always unwilling to shed blood; and his influence prevailed.
When Parliament met, the evidence against the bishop was laid before
committees of both houses. Those committees reported that his guilt
was proved. In the Commons a resolution, pronouncing him a traitor, was
carried by nearly two to one. A bill was then introduced which provided
that he should be deprived of his spiritual dignities, that he should
be banished for life, and that no British subject should hold any
intercourse with him except by the royal permission.

This bill passed the Commons with little difficulty. For the bishop,
though invited to defend himself, chose to reserve his defence for the
assembly of which he was a member. In the Lords the contest was
sharp. The young Duke of Wharton, distinguished by his parts, his
dissoluteness, and his versatility, spoke for Atterbury with great
effect; and Atterbury's own voice was heard for the last time by that
unfriendly audience which had so often listened to him with mingled
aversion and delight. He produced few witnesses; nor did those witnesses
say much that could be of service to him. Among them was Pope. He was
called to prove that, while he was an inmate of the palace at Bromley,
the bishop's time was completely occupied by literary and domestic
matters, and that no leisure was left for plotting. But Pope, who
was quite unaccustomed to speak in public, lost his head, and, as he
afterwards owned, though he had only ten words to say, made two or three
blunders.

The bill finally passed the Lords by eighty-three votes to forty-three.
The bishops, with a single exception, were in the majority. Their
conduct drew on them a sharp taunt from Lord Bathurst, a warm friend
of Atterbury and a zealous Tory. "The wild Indians," he said, "give
no quarter, because they believe that they shall inherit the skill and
prowess of every adversary whom they destroy. Perhaps the animosity of
the right reverend prelates to their brother may be explained in the
same way."

Atterbury took leave of those whom he loved with a dignity and
tenderness worthy of a better man. Three fine lines of his favourite
poet were often in his mouth:--

     "Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped them soon:
     The world was all before him, where to chuse
     His place of rest, and Providence his guide."

At parting he presented Pope with a Bible, and said, with a
disingenuousness of which no man who had studied the Bible to much
purpose would have been guilty: "If ever you learn that I have any
dealings with the Pretender, I give you leave to say that my punishment
is just." Pope at this time really believed the bishop to be an injured
man. Arbuthnot seems to have been of the same opinion. Swift, a few
months later, ridiculed with great bitterness, in the "Voyage to
Laputa," the evidence which had satisfied the two Houses of Parliament.
Soon, however, the most partial friends of the banished prelate ceased
to assert his innocence, and contented themselves with lamenting and
excusing what they could not defend. After a short stay at Brussels, he
had taken up his abode at Paris, and had become the leading man among
the Jacobite refugees who were assembled there. He was invited to Rome
by the Pretender, who then held his mock court under the immediate
protection of the Pope. But Atterbury felt that a bishop of the Church
of England would be strangely out of place at the Vatican, and declined
the invitation. During some months, however, he might flatter himself
that he stood high in the good graces of James. The correspondence
between the master and the servant was constant. Atterbury's merits were
warmly acknowledged; his advice was respectfully received; and he was,
as Bolingbroke had been before him, the prime minister of a king without
a kingdom. But the new favourite found, as Bolingbroke had found before
him, that it was quite as hard to keep the shadow of power under
a vagrant and mendicant prince as to keep the reality of power at
Westminster. Though James had neither territories nor revenues, neither
army nor navy, there was more faction and more intrigue among his
courtiers than among those of his successful rival. Atterbury soon
perceived that his counsels were disregarded, if not distrusted. His
proud spirit was deeply wounded. He quitted Paris, fixed his residence
at Montpellier, gave up politics, and devoted himself entirely to
letters. In the sixth year of his exile he had so severe an illness that
his daughter, herself in very delicate health, determined to run all
risks that she might see him once more. Having obtained a licence from
the English Government, she went by sea to Bordeaux, but landed there
in such a state that she could travel only by boat or in a litter. Her
father, in spite of his infirmities, set out from Montpellier to meet
her; and she, with the impatience which is often the sign of approaching
death, hastened towards him. Those who were about her in vain implored
her to travel slowly. She said that every hour was precious, that
she only wished to see her papa and to die. She met him at Toulouse,
embraced him, received from his hand the sacred bread and wine, and
thanked God that they had passed one day in each other's society before
they parted forever. She died that night.

It was some time before even the strong mind of Atterbury recovered from
this cruel blow. As soon as he was himself again he became eager
for action and conflict; for grief, which disposes gentle natures to
retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits
more restless. The Pretender, dull and bigoted as he was, had found out
that he had not acted wisely in parting with one who, though a heretic,
was, in abilities and accomplishments, the foremost man of the Jacobite
party. The bishop was courted back, and was without much difficulty
induced to return to Paris and to become once more the phantom minister
of a phantom monarchy. But his long and troubled life was drawing to a
close. To the last, however, his intellect retained all its keenness
and vigour. He learned, in the ninth year of his banishment, that he had
been accused by Oldmixon, as dishonest and malignant a scribbler as any
that has been saved from oblivion by the Dunciad, of having, in
concert with other Christchurchmen, garbled Clarendon's History of the
Rebellion. The charge, as respected Atterbury, had not the slightest
foundation: for he was not one of the editors of the History, and never
saw it till it was printed. He published a short vindication of himself,
which is a model in its kind, luminous, temperate, and dignified. A copy
of this little work he sent to the Pretender, with a letter singularly
eloquent and graceful. It was impossible, the old man said, that he
should write anything on such a subject without being reminded of the
resemblance between his own fate and that of Clarendon. They were the
only two English subjects that had ever been banished from their
country and debarred from all communication with their friends by act of
parliament. But here the resemblance ended. One of the exiles had been
so happy as to bear a chief part in the restoration of the Royal house.
All that the other could now do was to die asserting the rights of that
house to the last. A few weeks after this letter was written Atterbury
died. He had just completed his seventieth year.

His body was brought to England, and laid, with great privacy, under the
nave of Westminster Abbey. Only three mourners followed the coffin. No
inscription marks the grave. That the epitaph with which Pope honoured
the memory of his friend does not appear on the walls of the great
national cemetery is no subject of regret: for nothing worse was ever
written by Colley Cibber.

Those who wish for more complete information about Atterbury may easily
collect it from his sermons and his controversial writings, from the
report of the parliamentary proceedings against him, which will be found
in the State Trials, from the five volumes of his correspondence, edited
by Mr Nichols, and from the first volume of the Stuart papers, edited
by Mr Glover. A very indulgent but a very interesting account of the
bishop's political career will be found in Lord Mahon's valuable History
of England.

*****




JOHN BUNYAN. (May 1854.)


John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in the English language,
was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He
may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed an
hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were
generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the
gipsies, whom in truth they nearly resembled. Bunyan's father was more
respectable than most of the tribe. He had a fixed residence, and was
able to send his son to a village school where reading and writing were
taught.

The years of John's boyhood were those during which the puritan spirit
was in the highest vigour all over England; and nowhere had that spirit
more influence than in Bedfordshire. It is not wonderful, therefore,
that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and
sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted
by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by
fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams
of fiends trying to fly away with him. As he grew older, his mental
conflicts became still more violent. The strong language in which
he described them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr
Southey. It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to
cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of divine grace to
rescue the human soul from the lowest depths of wickedness. He is called
in one book the most notorious of profligates; in another, the brand
plucked from the burning. He is designated in Mr Ivimey's History of the
Baptists as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow. Mr Ryland,
a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into the
following rhapsody:--"No man of common sense and common integrity can
deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible
infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a
soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as
could exist on the face of the earth. Now be astonished, O heavens, to
eternity! and wonder, O earth and hell! while time endures. Behold
this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness,
holiness, truth, and love." But whoever takes the trouble to examine the
evidence will find that the good men who wrote this had been deceived by
a phraseology which, as they had been hearing it and using it all their
lives, they ought to have understood better. There cannot be a greater
mistake than to infer, from the strong expressions in which a devout man
bemoans his exceeding sinfulness, that he has led a worse life than his
neighbours. Many excellent persons, whose moral character from
boyhood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to their
fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries, applied to
themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as could be
applied to Titus Oates or Mrs Brownrigg. It is quite certain that
Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most austerely puritanical
circles, would have been considered as a young man of singular gravity
and innocence. Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like many other
penitents who, in general terms, acknowledged themselves to have been
the worst of mankind, fired up and stood vigorously on his defence,
whenever any particular charge was brought against him by others. He
declares, it is true, that he had let loose the reins on the neck of his
lusts, that he had delighted in all transgressions against the divine
law, and that he had been the ringleader of the youth of Elstow in
all manner of vice. But, when those who wished him ill accused him of
licentious amours, he called on God and the angels to attest his purity.
No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell, could charge him with
having ever made any improper advances to her. Not only had he been
strictly faithful to his wife; but he had even before his marriage, been
perfectly spotless. It does not appear from his own confessions, or from
the railings of his enemies, that he ever was drunk in his life. One
bad habit he contracted, that of using profane language; but he tells
us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he never offended
again. The worst that can be laid to the charge of this poor youth,
whom it has been the fashion to represent as the most desperate of
reprobates, as a village Rochester, is that he had a great liking for
some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the
rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a
great respect. The four chief sins of which he was guilty were dancing,
ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tipcat, and reading
the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton. A rector of the school of Laud
would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model. But
Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in a very different
school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his tastes and
his scruples.

When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was
interrupted by an event which gave a lasting colour to his thoughts.
He enlisted in the parliamentary army, and served during the decisive
campaign of 1645. All that we know of his military career is that, at
the siege of Leicester, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was
killed by a shot from the town. Bunyan ever after considered himself as
having been saved from death by the special interference of Providence.
It may be observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the
glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war. To the last he loved to
draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, from
guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under
its own banner. His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain
Credence, are evidently portraits, of which the originals were among
those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.

In a few months Bunyan returned home and married. His wife had some
pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some pious books.
And now his mind, excitable by nature, very imperfectly disciplined
by education, and exposed, without any protection, to the infectious
virulence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in England, began
to be fearfully disordered. In outward things he soon became a strict
Pharisee. He was constant in attendance at prayers and sermons. His
favourite amusements were one after another relinquished, though not
without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game at tipcat he
paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with his stick in his hand. He
had heard a voice asking him whether he would leave his sins and go
to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he had seen an awful
countenance frowning on him from the sky. The odious vice of bellringing
he renounced; but he still for a time ventured to go to the church tower
and look on while others pulled the ropes. But soon the thought struck
him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple would fall
on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place. To give up
dancing on the village green was still harder; and some months elapsed
before he had the fortitude to part with this darling sin. When this
last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when tried by the maxims of
that austere time, faultless. All Elstow talked of him as an eminently
pious youth. But his own mind was more unquiet than ever. Having nothing
more to do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding in religion
no pleasures to supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he
had relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some special
malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies which
seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam.

At one time he took it into his head that all persons of Israelite blood
would be saved, and tried to make out that he partook of that blood; but
his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father, who seems to have had
no ambition to be regarded as a Jew.

At another time Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma: "If I have
not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, I can work miracles." He was
tempted to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford, "Be ye dry,"
and to stake his eternal hopes on the event.

Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and the
neighbouring villages was past: that all who were to be saved in that
part of England were already converted; and that he had begun to pray
and strive some months too late.

Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in the right,
and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by a maniacal
impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broom-stick, to
the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the
Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated
before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran
through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He
began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin,
and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the
forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and
especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption.
Night and day, in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined,
were repeating close to his ear the words, "Sell him, sell him." He
struck at the hobgoblins; he pushed them from him; but still they were
ever at his side. He cried out in answer to them, hour after hour:
"Never, never; not for thousands of worlds, not for thousands." At
length, worn out by this long agony, he suffered the fatal words to
escape him, "Let him go, if he will." Then his misery became more
fearful than ever. He had done what could not be forgiven. He had
forfeited his part of the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he had sold his
birthright; and there was no longer any place for repentance. "None," he
afterwards wrote, "knows the terrors of those days but myself." He has
described his sufferings with singular energy, simplicity, and pathos.
He envied the brutes; he envied the very stones in the street, and the
tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold its light and warmth
from him. His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and though still in
the highest vigour of youth, trembled whole days together with the fear
of death and judgment. He fancied that this trembling was the sign set
on the worst reprobates, the sign which God had put on Cain. The unhappy
man's emotion destroyed his power of digestion. He had such pains
that he expected to burst asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his
prototype.

Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers whom he consulted,
were likely to do much good in a case like his. His small library had
received a most unseasonable addition, the account of the lamentable
end of Francis Spira. One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom the
sufferer consulted, gave an opinion which might well have produced fatal
consequences. "I am afraid," said Bunyan, "that I have committed the sin
against the Holy Ghost." "Indeed," said the old fanatic, "I am afraid
that you have."

At length the clouds broke; the light became clearer and clearer; and
the enthusiast, who had imagined that he was branded with the mark of
the first murderer, and destined to the end of the arch traitor, enjoyed
peace and a cheerful confidence in the mercy of God. Years elapsed,
however, before his nerves, which had been so perilously overstrained,
recovered their tone. When he had joined a Baptist society at Bedford,
and was for the first time admitted to partake of the Eucharist, it was
with difficulty that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on
his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had
been some time a member of the congregation, he began to preach; and
his sermons produced a powerful effect. He was indeed illiterate; but he
spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had
passed had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of
religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his
vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him,
not only to exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to
extort the half contemptuous admiration of scholars. Yet it was long
before he ceased to be tormented by an impulse which urged him to utter
words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.

Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical diseases.
It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from the internal
sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp persecution from
without. He had been five years a preacher, when the Restoration put
it in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and clergymen all over the
country to oppress the Dissenters; and of all the Dissenters whose
history is known to us, he was perhaps the most hardly treated. In
November 1660, he was flung into Bedford gaol; and there he remained,
with some intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve
years. His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would
abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely set
apart and commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness; and he was
fully determined to obey God rather than man. He was brought before
several tribunals, laughed at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain.
He was facetiously told that he was quite right in thinking that
he ought not to hide his gift; but that his real gift was skill in
repairing old kettles. He was compared to Alexander the coppersmith.
He was told that, if he would give up preaching, he should be instantly
liberated. He was warned that, if he persisted in disobeying the law,
he would be liable to banishment, and that, if he were found in England
after a certain time his neck would be stretched. His answer was, "If
you let me out to-day, I will preach again to-morrow." Year after year
he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with which the worse prison
now to be found in the island is a palace. His fortitude is the more
extraordinary, because his domestic feelings were unusually strong.
Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as somewhat too fond
and indulgent a parent. He had several small children, and among them a
daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with peculiar tenderness. He
could not, he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her; and now she
must suffer cold and hunger; she must beg; she must be beaten; "yet,"
he added, "I must, I must do it." While he lay in prison he could do
nothing in the way of his old trade for the support of his family. He
determined, therefore, to take up a new trade. He learned to make long
tagged thread laces; and many thousands of these articles were furnished
by him to the hawkers. While his hands were thus busied, he had other
employment for his mind and his lips. He gave religious instruction to
his fellow-captives, and formed from among them a little flock, of which
he was himself the pastor. He studied indefatigably the few books which
he possessed. His two chief companions were the Bible and Fox's Book
of Martyrs. His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have been
called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the Book
of Martyrs are still legible the ill spelt lines of doggrel in which
he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable
enmity to the mystical Babylon.

At length he began to write; and though it was some time before he
discovered where his strength lay, his writings were not unsuccessful.
They were coarse, indeed; but they showed a keen mother wit, a great
command of the homely mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the
English Bible, and a vast and dearly-bought spiritual experience. They
therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and
the spelling, were well received by the humbler class of Dissenters.

Much of Bunyan's time was spent in controversy. He wrote sharply against
the Quakers, whom he seems always to have held in utter abhorrence. It
is, however, a remarkable fact that he adopted one of their peculiar
fashions: his practice was to write, not November or December, but
eleventh month and twelfth month.

He wrote against the liturgy of the Church of England. No two things,
according to him, had less affinity than the form of prayer and the
spirit of prayer. Those, he said with much point, who have most of the
spirit of prayer are all to be found in gaol; and those who have most
zeal for the form of prayer are all to be found at the alehouse. The
doctrinal articles, on the other hand, he warmly praised, and
defended against some Arminian clergymen who had signed them. The most
acrimonious of all his works is his answer to Edward Fowler, afterwards
Bishop of Gloucester, an excellent man, but not free from the taint of
Pelagianism.

Bunyan had also a dispute with some of the chiefs of the sect to which
he belonged. He doubtless held with perfect sincerity the distinguishing
tenet of that sect; but he did not consider that tenet as one of high
importance, and willingly joined in communion with quiet Presbyterians
and Independents. The sterner Baptists, therefore, loudly pronounced him
a false brother. A controversy arose which long survived the original
combatants. In our own time the cause which Bunyan had defended with
rude logic and rhetoric against Kiffin and Danvers was pleaded by Robert
Hall with an ingenuity and eloquence such as no polemical writer has
ever surpassed.

During the years which immediately followed the Restoration, Bunyan's
confinement seems to have been strict. But, as the passions of 1660
cooled, as the hatred with which the Puritans had been regarded while
their reign was recent gave place to pity, he was less and less harshly
treated. The distress of his family, and his own patience, courage, and
piety softened the hearts of his persecutors. Like his own Christian in
the cage, he found protectors even among the crowd of Vanity Fair. The
bishop of the Diocese, Dr Barlow, is said to have interceded for him.
At length the prisoner was suffered to pass most of his time beyond the
walls of the gaol, on condition, as it should seem, that he remained
within the town of Bedford.

He owed his complete liberation to one of the worst acts of one of the
worst governments that England has ever seen. In 1671 the Cabal was in
power. Charles II. had concluded the treaty by which he bound himself to
set up the Roman Catholic religion in England. The first step which he
took towards that end was to annul, by an unconstitutional exercise of
his prerogative, all the penal statutes against the Roman Catholics;
and, in order to disguise his real design, he annulled at the same
time the penal statutes against Protestant nonconformists. Bunyan was
consequently set at large. In the first warmth of his gratitude he
published a tract in which he compared Charles to that humane and
generous Persian king who, though not himself blest with the light of
the true religion, favoured the chosen people, and permitted them after
years of captivity, to rebuild their beloved temple. To candid men, who
consider how much Bunyan had suffered, and how little he could guess the
secret designs of the court, the unsuspicious thankfulness with which
he accepted the precious boon of freedom will not appear to require any
apology.

Before he left his prison he had begun the book which has made his name
immortal. The history of that book is remarkable. The author was, as he
tells us, writing a treatise, in which he had occasion to speak of the
stages of the Christian progress. He compared that progress, as many
others had compared it, to a pilgrimage. Soon his quick wit discovered
innumerable points of similarity which had escaped his predecessors.
Images came crowding on his mind faster than he could put them into
words, quagmires and pits, steep hills, dark and horrible glens, soft
vales, sunny pastures, a gloomy castle of which the courtyard was strewn
with the skulls and bones of murdered prisoners, a town all bustle and
splendour, like London on the Lord Mayor's Day, and the narrow path,
straight as a rule could make it, running on up hill and down hill,
through city and through wilderness, to the Black River and the Shining
Gate. He had found out, as most people would have said, by accident, as
he would doubtless have said, by the guidance of Providence, where
his powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a
masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in
English literature; for of English literature he knew nothing. Those who
suppose him to have studied the Fairy Queen might easily be confuted, if
this were the proper place for a detailed examination of the passages in
which the two allegories have been thought to resemble each other. The
only work of fiction, in all probability, with which he could compare
his Pilgrim, was his old favourite, the legend of Sir Bevis of
Southampton. He would have thought it a sin to borrow any time from the
serious business of his life, from his expositions, his controversies,
and his lace tags, for the purpose of amusing himself with what he
considered merely as a trifle. It was only, he assures us, at spare
moments that he returned to the House Beautiful, the Delectable
Mountains, and the Enchanted Ground. He had no assistance. Nobody but
himself saw a line, till the whole was complete. He then consulted his
pious friends. Some were pleased. Others were much scandalised. It was
a vain story, a mere romance, about giants, and lions, and goblins, and
warriors, sometimes fighting with monsters and sometimes regaled by fair
ladies in stately palaces. The loose atheistical wits at Will's might
write such stuff to divert the painted Jezebels of the court: but did it
become a minister of the gospel to copy the evil fashions of the world?
There had been a time when the cant of such fools would have made Bunyan
miserable. But that time was passed; and his mind was now in a firm and
healthy state. He saw that, in employing fiction to make truth clear
and goodness attractive, he was only following the example which every
Christian ought to propose to himself; and he determined to print.

The "Pilgrim's Progress" stole silently into the world. Not a single
copy of the first edition is known to be in existence. The year of
publication has not been ascertained. It is probable that, during
some months, the little volume circulated only among poor and obscure
sectaries. But soon the irresistible charm of a book which gratified
the imagination of the reader with all the action and scenery of a
fairy tale, which exercised his ingenuity by setting him to discover a
multitude of curious analogies, which interested his feelings for human
beings, frail like himself, and struggling with temptations from within
and from without, which every moment drew a smile from him by some
stroke of quaint yet simple pleasantry, and nevertheless left on his
mind a sentiment of reverence for God and of sympathy for man, began to
produce its effect. In puritanical circles, from which plays and novels
were strictly excluded, that effect was such as no work of genius,
though it were superior to the Iliad, to Don Quixote, or to Othello, can
ever produce on a mind accustomed to indulge in literary luxury. In 1678
came forth a second edition with additions; and then the demand became
immense. In the four following years the book was reprinted six times.
The eighth edition, which contains the last improvements made by the
author, was published in 1682, the ninth in 1684, the tenth in 1685. The
help of the engraver had early been called in; and tens of thousands
of children looked with terror and delight on execrable copper plates,
which represented Christian thrusting his sword into Apollyon, or
writhing in the grasp of Giant Despair. In Scotland, and in some of the
colonies, the Pilgrim was even more popular than in his native country.
Bunyan has told us, with very pardonable vanity, that in New England his
dream was the daily subject of the conversation of thousands, and was
thought worthy to appear in the most superb binding. He had numerous
admirers in Holland, and among the Huguenots of France. With the
pleasures, however, he experienced some of the pains of eminence.
Knavish booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name; and
envious scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the poor ignorant
tinker should really be the author of the book which was called his.

He took the best way to confound both those who counterfeited him and
those who slandered him. He continued to work the gold-field which he
had discovered, and to draw from it new treasures, not indeed with quite
such ease and in quite such abundance as when the precious soil was
still virgin, but yet with success which left all competition far
behind. In 1684 appeared the second part of the "Pilgrim's Progress." It
was soon followed by the "Holy War," which, if the "Pilgrim's Progress"
did not exist, would be the best allegory that ever was written.

Bunyan's place in society was now very different from what it had been.
There had been a time when many Dissenting ministers, who could talk
Latin and read Greek, had affected to treat him with scorn. But his
fame and influence now far exceeded theirs. He had so great an authority
among the Baptists that he was popularly called Bishop Bunyan. His
episcopal visitations were annual. From Bedford he rode every year to
London, and preached there to large and attentive congregations. From
London he went his circuit through the country, animating the zeal of
his brethren, collecting and distributing alms, and making up quarrels.
The magistrates seem in general to have given him little trouble. But
there is reason to believe that, in the year 1685, he was in some danger
of again occupying his old quarters in Bedford gaol. In that year the
rash and wicked enterprise of Monmouth gave the Government a pretext for
persecuting the Nonconformists; and scarcely one eminent divine of the
Presbyterian, Independent, or Baptist persuasion remained unmolested.
Baxter was in prison: Howe was driven into exile: Henry was arrested.
Two eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had been engaged in controversy,
were in great peril and distress. Danvers was in danger of being hanged;
and Kiffin's grandsons were actually hanged. The tradition is that,
during those evil days, Bunyan was forced to disguise himself as a
waggoner, and that he preached to his congregation at Bedford in a
smoke-frock, with a cart-whip in his hand. But soon a great change took
place. James the Second was at open war with the Church, and found
it necessary to court the Dissenters. Some of the creatures of the
government tried to secure the aid of Bunyan. They probably knew that
he had written in praise of the indulgence of 1672, and therefore
hoped that he might be equally pleased with the indulgence of 1687. But
fifteen years of thought, observation, and commerce with the world
had made him wiser. Nor were the cases exactly parallel. Charles was
a professed Protestant: James was a professed Papist. The object of
Charles's indulgence was disguised; the object of James's indulgence
was patent. Bunyan was not deceived. He exhorted his hearers to prepare
themselves by fasting and prayer for the danger which menaced their
civil and religious liberties, and refused even to speak to the courtier
who came down to remodel the corporation of Bedford, and who, as was
supposed, had it in charge to offer some municipal dignity to the Bishop
of the Baptists.

Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution. In the summer of 1688 he
undertook to plead the cause of a son with an angry father, and at
length prevailed on the old man not to disinherit the young one. This
good work cost the benevolent intercessor his life. He had to ride
through heavy rain. He came drenched to his lodgings on Snow Hill, was
seized with a violent fever, and died in a few days. He was buried in
Bunhill Fields; and the spot where he lies is still regarded by the
Nonconformists with a feeling which seems scarcely in harmony with the
stern spirit of their theology. Many Puritans, to whom the respect paid
by Roman Catholics to the reliques and tombs of saints seemed childish
or sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that their
coffins might be placed as near as possible to the office of the author
of the "Pilgrim's Progress."

The fame of Bunyan during his life, and during the century which
followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely confined
to religious families of the middle and lower classes. Very seldom
was he during that time mentioned with respect by any writer of great
literary eminence. Young coupled his prose with the poetry of the
wretched D'Urfey. In the Spiritual Quixote, the adventures of Christian
are ranked with those of Jack the Giant-Killer and John Hickathrift.
Cowper ventured to praise the great allegorist, but did not venture to
name him. It is a significant circumstance that, till a recent period,
all the numerous editions of the "Pilgrim's Progress" were evidently
meant for the cottage and the servants' hall. The paper, the printing,
the plates, were all of the meanest description. In general, when the
educated minority and the common people differ about the merit of
a book, the opinion of the educated minority finally prevails. The
"Pilgrim's Progress" is perhaps the only book about which, after the
lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over to the
opinion of the common people.

The attempts which have been made to improve and to imitate this book
are not to be numbered. It has been done into verse: it has been
done into modern English. "The Pilgrimage of Tender Conscience,"
"The Pilgrimage of Good Intent," "The Pilgrimage of Seek Truth," "The
Pilgrimage of Theophilus," "The Infant Pilgrim," "The Hindoo Pilgrim,"
are among the many feeble copies of the great original. But the peculiar
glory of Bunyan is that those who most hated his doctrines have tried to
borrow the help of his genius. A Catholic version of his parable may be
seen with the head of the Virgin in the title-page. On the other hand,
those Antinomians for whom his Calvinism is not strong enough may study
the pilgrimage of Hephzibah, in which nothing will be found which can be
construed into an admission of free agency and universal redemption. But
the most extraordinary of all the acts of Vandalism by which a fine work
of art was ever defaced was committed so late as the year 1853. It was
determined to transform the "Pilgrim's Progress" into a Tractarian book.
The task was not easy: for it was necessary to make the two sacraments
the most prominent objects in the allegory; and of all Christian
theologians, avowed Quakers excepted, Bunyan was the one in whose system
the sacraments held the least prominent place. However, the Wicket Gate
became a type of Baptism, and the House Beautiful of the Eucharist. The
effect of this change is such as assuredly the ingenious person who made
it never contemplated. For, as not a single pilgrim passes through the
Wicket Gate in infancy, and as Faithful hurries past the House Beautiful
without stopping, the lesson which the fable in its altered shape
teaches, is that none but adults ought to be baptised, and that the
Eucharist may safely be neglected. Nobody would have discovered from the
original "Pilgrim's Progress" that the author was not a Paedobaptist.
To turn his book into a book against Paedobaptism was an achievement
reserved for an Anglo-Catholic divine. Such blunders must necessarily
be committed by every man who mutilates parts of a great work, without
taking a comprehensive view of the whole.

*****




OLIVER GOLDSMITH. (February 1856.)

Oliver Goldsmith, one of the most pleasing English writers of the
eighteenth century. He was of a Protestant and Saxon family which had
been long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most other Protestant
and Saxon families, been, in troubled times, harassed and put in fear
by the native population. His father, Charles Goldsmith, studied in the
reign of Queen Anne at the diocesan school of Elphin, became attached to
the daughter of the schoolmaster, married her, took orders, and settled
at a place called Pallas in the county of Longford. There he with
difficulty supported his wife and children on what he could earn, partly
as a curate and partly as a farmer.

At Pallas Oliver Goldsmith was born in November 1728. That spot was
then, for all practical purposes, almost as remote from the busy and
splendid capital in which his later years were passed, as any clearing
in Upper Canada or any sheep-walk in Australasia now is. Even at this
day those enthusiasts who venture to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace
of the poet are forced to perform the latter part of their journey on
foot. The hamlet lies far from any high road, on a dreary plain which,
in wet weather, is often a lake. The lanes would break any jaunting
car to pieces; and there are ruts and sloughs through which the most
strongly built wheels cannot be dragged.

While Oliver was still a child, his father was presented to a living
worth about 200 pounds a year, in the county of Westmeath. The family
accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness for a spacious
house on a frequented road, near the village of Lissoy. Here the boy was
taught his letters by a maid-servant, and was sent in his seventh
year to a village school kept by an old quartermaster on half-pay, who
professed to teach nothing but reading, writing, and arithmetic, but
who had an inexhaustible fund of stories about ghosts, banshees,
and fairies, about the great Rapparee chiefs, Baldearg O'Donnell and
galloping Hogan, and about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope,
the surprise of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega.
This man must have been of the Protestant religion; but he was of the
aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could pour
forth unpremeditated Irish verses. Oliver early became, and through life
continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish music, and especially
of the compositions of Carolan, some of the last notes of whose harp
he heard. It ought to be added that Oliver, though by birth one of the
Englishry, and though connected by numerous ties with the Established
Church, never showed the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy
with which, in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too generally
regarded the subject majority. So far indeed was he from sharing in
the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he belonged, that he
conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, and, even
when George the Third was on the throne, maintained that nothing but the
restoration of the banished dynasty could save the country.

From the humble academy kept by the old soldier Goldsmith was removed
in his ninth year. He went to several grammar schools, and acquired some
knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this time seems to have
been far from happy. He had, as appears from the admirable portrait of
him at Knowle, features harsh even to ugliness. The small-pox had set
its mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small,
and his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to
personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's appearance
was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder
which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and
masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as
a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who
had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early
years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him,
and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter
of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the "Vicar of
Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village."

In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College, Dublin, as a
sizar. The sizars paid nothing for food and tuition, and very little for
lodging; but they had to perform some menial services from which they
have long been relieved. They swept the court: they carried up the
dinner to the fellows' table, and changed the plates and poured out the
ale of the rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quartered, not alone, in
a garret, on the window of which his name, scrawled by himself, is still
read with interest. (The glass on which the name is written has, as we
are informed by a writer in "Notes and Queries" (2d. S. ix. p. 91), been
inclosed in a frame and deposited in the Manuscript Room of the College
Library, where it is still to be seen.) From such garrets many men
of less parts than his have made their way to the woolsack or to the
episcopal bench. But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the humiliations,
threw away all the advantages, of his situation. He neglected the
studies of the place, stood low at the examinations, was turned down to
the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon in the lecture-room,
was severely reprimanded for pumping on a constable, and was caned by a
brutal tutor for giving a ball in the attic story of the college to some
gay youths and damsels from the city.

While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid
distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere
pittance. The youth obtained his bachelor's degree, and left the
university. During some time the humble dwelling to which his widowed
mother had retired was his home. He was now in his twenty-first year; it
was necessary that he should do something; and his education seemed to
have fitted him to do nothing but to dress himself in gaudy colours, of
which he was as fond as a magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish
airs, to play the flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost stories
by the fire in winter. He tried five or six professions in turn without
success. He applied for ordination; but, as he applied in scarlet
clothes, he was speedily turned out of the episcopal palace. He then
became tutor in an opulent family, but soon quitted his situation in
consequence of a dispute about play. Then he determined to emigrate to
America. His relations, with much satisfaction, saw him set out for Cork
on a good horse with thirty pounds in his pocket. But in six weeks he
came back on a miserable hack, without a penny, and informed his mother
that the ship in which he had taken his passage, having got a fair wind
while he was at a party of pleasure, had sailed without him. Then he
resolved to study the law. A generous kinsman advanced fifty pounds.
With this sum Goldsmith went to Dublin, was enticed into a gaming house,
and lost every shilling. He then thought of medicine. A small purse
was made up; and in his twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edinburgh. At
Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal attendance on lectures,
and picked up some superficial information about chemistry and natural
history. Thence he went to Leyden, still pretending to study physic. He
left that celebrated university, the third university at which he had
resided, in his twenty-seventh year, without a degree, with the merest
smattering of medical knowledge, and with no property but his clothes
and his flute. His flute, however, proved a useful friend. He rambled
on foot through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes which
everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which often procured for him a
supper and a bed. He wandered as far as Italy. His musical performances,
indeed, were not to the taste of the Italians; but he contrived to live
on the alms which he obtained at the gates of the convents. It should,
however, be observed that the stories which he told about this part of
his life ought to be received with great caution; for strict veracity
was never one of his virtues; and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in
narration is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when he talks
about his own travels. Goldsmith, indeed, was so regardless of truth
as to assert in print that he was present at a most interesting
conversation between Voltaire and Fontenelle, and that this conversation
took place at Paris. Now it is certain that Voltaire never was within a
hundred leagues of Paris during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on
the Continent.

In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shilling, without a
friend, and without a calling. He had, indeed, if his own unsupported
evidence may be trusted, obtained from the University of Padua a
doctor's degree; but this dignity proved utterly useless to him. In
England his flute was not in request: there were no convents; and he was
forced to have recourse to a series of desperate expedients. He turned
strolling player; but his face and figure were ill suited to the boards
even of the humblest theatre. He pounded drugs and ran about London with
phials for charitable chemists. He joined a swarm of beggars, which made
its nest in Axe Yard. He was for a time usher of a school, and felt the
miseries and humiliations of this situation so keenly that he thought
it a promotion to be permitted to earn his bread as a bookseller's hack;
but he soon found the new yoke more galling than the old one, and was
glad to become an usher again. He obtained a medical appointment in
the service of the East India Company; but the appointment was speedily
revoked. Why it was revoked we are not told. The subject was one on
which he never liked to talk. It is probable that he was incompetent to
perform the duties of the place. Then he presented himself at Surgeon's
Hall for examination, as mate to a naval hospital. Even to so humble
a post he was found unequal. By this time the schoolmaster whom he had
served for a morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no more.
Nothing remained but to return to the lowest drudgery of literature.
Goldsmith took a garret in a miserable court, to which he had to climb
from the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flagstones called
Breakneck Steps. The court and the ascent have long disappeared; but old
Londoners will remember both. (A gentleman, who states that he has known
the neighbourhood for thirty years, corrects this account, and informs
the present publisher that the Breakneck Steps, thirty-two in number,
divided into two flights, are still in existence, and that, according
to tradition, Goldsmith's house was not on the steps, but was the first
house at the head of the court, on the left hand, going from the Old
Bailey. See "Notes and Queries" (2d. S. ix. 280).) Here, at thirty, the
unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave.

In the succeeding six years he sent to the press some things which have
survived and many which have perished. He produced articles for reviews,
magazines, and newspapers; children's books which, bound in gilt paper
and adorned with hideous woodcuts, appeared in the window of the once
far-famed shop at the corner of Saint Paul's Churchyard; "An Inquiry
into the State of Polite Learning in Europe," which, though of little
or no value, is still reprinted among his works; a "Life of Beau Nash,"
which is not reprinted, though it well deserves to be so (Mr Black has
pointed out that this is inaccurate: the life of Nash has been twice
reprinted; once in Mr Prior's edition (vol. iii. p. 249), and once in
Mr Cunningham's edition (vol. iv. p. 35).); a superficial and incorrect,
but very readable, "History of England," in a series of letters
purporting to be addressed by a nobleman to his son; and some very
lively and amusing "Sketches of London Society," in a series of letters
purporting to be addressed by a Chinese traveller to his friends. All
these works were anonymous; but some of them were well-known to be
Goldsmith's; and he gradually rose in the estimation of the booksellers
for whom he drudged. He was, indeed, emphatically a popular writer. For
accurate research or grave disquisition he was not well qualified by
nature or by education. He knew nothing accurately: his reading had been
desultory; nor had he meditated deeply on what he had read. He had seen
much of the world; but he had noticed and retained little more of what
he had seen than some grotesque incidents and characters which had
happened to strike his fancy. But, though his mind was very scantily
stored with materials, he used what materials he had in such a way as
to produce a wonderful effect. There have been many greater writers;
but perhaps no writer was ever more uniformly agreeable. His style was
always pure and easy, and, on proper occasions, pointed and energetic.
His narratives were always amusing, his descriptions always picturesque,
his humour rich and joyous, yet not without an occasional tinge of
amiable sadness. About everything that he wrote, serious or sportive,
there was a certain natural grace and decorum, hardly to be expected
from a man a great part of whose life had been passed among thieves and
beggars, street-walkers and merry andrews, in those squalid dens which
are the reproach of great capitals.

As his name gradually became known, the circle of his acquaintance
widened. He was introduced to Johnson, who was then considered as the
first of living English writers; to Reynolds, the first of English
painters; and to Burke, who had not yet entered parliament, but had
distinguished himself greatly by his writings and by the eloquence of
his conversation. With these eminent men Goldsmith became intimate.
In 1763 he was one of the nine original members of that celebrated
fraternity which has sometimes been called the Literary Club, but which
has always disclaimed that epithet, and still glories in the simple name
of The Club.

By this time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable dwelling at the top of
Breakneck Steps, and had taken chambers in the more civilised region of
the Inns of Court. But he was still often reduced to pitiable shifts.
Towards the close of 1764 his rent was so long in arrear that his
landlady one morning called in the help of a sheriff's officer. The
debtor, in great perplexity, despatched a messenger to Johnson; and
Johnson, always friendly, though often surly, sent back the messenger
with a guinea, and promised to follow speedily. He came, and found that
Goldsmith had changed the guinea, and was railing at the landlady over
a bottle of Madeira. Johnson put the cork into the bottle, and entreated
his friend to consider calmly how money was to be procured. Goldsmith
said that he had a novel ready for the press. Johnson glanced at
the manuscript, saw that there were good things in it, took it to a
bookseller, sold it for 60 pounds, and soon returned with the money.
The rent was paid; and the sheriff's officer withdrew. According to one
story, Goldsmith gave his landlady a sharp reprimand for her treatment
of him; according to another, he insisted on her joining him in a bowl
of punch. Both stories are probably true. The novel which was thus
ushered into the world was the "Vicar of Wakefield."

But, before the "Vicar of Wakefield" appeared in print, came the
great crisis of Goldsmith's literary life. In Christmas week, 1764, he
published a poem, entitled the "Traveller." It was the first work to
which he had put his name; and it at once raised him to the rank of a
legitimate English classic. The opinion of the most skilful critics was,
that nothing finer had appeared in verse since the fourth book of the
"Dunciad." In one respect the "Traveller" differs from all Goldsmith's
other writings. In general his designs were bad, and his execution good.
In the "Traveller," the execution, though deserving of much praise, is
far inferior to the design. No philosophical poem, ancient or modern,
has a plan so noble, and at the same time so simple. An English
wanderer, seated on a crag among the Alps, near the point where three
great countries meet, looks down on the boundless prospect, reviews
his long pilgrimage, recalls the varieties of scenery, of climate, of
government, of religion, of national character, which he has observed,
and comes to the conclusion just or unjust, that our happiness depends
little on political institutions, and much on the temper and regulation
of our own minds.

While the fourth edition of the "Traveller" was on the counters of the
booksellers, the "Vicar of Wakefield" appeared, and rapidly obtained a
popularity which has lasted down to our own time, and which is likely to
last as long as our language. The fable is indeed one of the worst that
ever was constructed. It wants, not merely that probability which ought
to be found in a tale of common English life, but that consistency which
ought to be found even in the wildest fiction about witches, giants,
and fairies. But the earlier chapters have all the sweetness of
pastoral poetry, together with all the vivacity of comedy. Moses and his
spectacles, the vicar and his monogamy, the sharper and his cosmogony,
the squire proving from Aristotle that relatives are related, Olivia
preparing herself for the arduous task of converting a rakish lover by
studying the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great
ladies with their scandal about Sir Tomkyn's amours and Dr Burdock's
verses, and Mr Burchell with his "Fudge," have caused as much harmless
mirth as has ever been caused by matter packed into so small a number of
pages. The latter part of the tale is unworthy of the beginning. As we
approach the catastrophe, the absurdities lie thicker and thicker; and
the gleams of pleasantry become rarer and rarer.

The success which had attended Goldsmith as a novelist emboldened him to
try his fortune as a dramatist. He wrote the "Goodnatured Man," a piece
which had a worse fate than it deserved. Garrick refused to produce it
at Drury Lane. It was acted at Covent Garden in 1768, but was coldly
received. The author, however, cleared by his benefit nights, and by the
sale of the copyright, no less than 500 pounds, five times as much as he
had made by the "Traveller" and the "Vicar of Wakefield" together. The
plot of the "Goodnatured Man" is, like almost all Goldsmith's plots,
very ill constructed. But some passages are exquisitely ludicrous; much
more ludicrous, indeed, than suited the taste of the town at that time.
A canting, mawkish play, entitled "False Delicacy," had just had an
immense run. Sentimentality was all the mode. During some years, more
tears were shed at comedies than at tragedies; and a pleasantry which
moved the audience to anything more than a grave smile was reprobated
as low. It is not strange, therefore, that the very best scene in the
"Goodnatured Man," that in which Miss Richland finds her lover attended
by the bailiff and the bailiff's follower in full court dresses, should
have been mercilessly hissed, and should have been omitted after the
first night.

In 1770 appeared the "Deserted Village." In mere diction and
versification this celebrated poem is fully equal, perhaps superior,
to the "Traveller;" and it is generally preferred to the "Traveller" by
that large class of readers who think, with Bayes in the "Rehearsal,"
that the only use of a plan is to bring in fine things. More discerning
judges, however, while they admire the beauty of the details, are
shocked by one unpardonable fault which pervades the whole. The fault we
mean is not that theory about wealth and luxury which has so often been
censured by political economists. The theory is indeed false: but the
poem, considered merely as a poem, is not necessarily the worse on
that account. The finest poem in the Latin language, indeed the finest
didactic poem in any language, was written in defence of the silliest
and meanest of all systems of natural and moral philosophy. A poet may
easily be pardoned for reasoning ill; but he cannot be pardoned for
describing ill, for observing the world in which he lives so carelessly
that his portraits bear no resemblance to the originals, for exhibiting
as copies from real life monstrous combinations of things which never
were and never could be found together. What would be thought of a
painter who should mix August and January in one landscape, who should
introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene? Would it be a sufficient
defence of such a picture to say that every part was exquisitely
coloured, that the green hedges, the apple-trees loaded with fruit, the
waggons reeling under the yellow sheaves, and the sun-burned reapers
wiping their foreheads, were very fine, and that the ice and the boys
sliding were also very fine? To such a picture the "Deserted Village"
bears a great resemblance. It is made up of incongruous parts. The
village in its happy days is a true English village. The village in its
decay is an Irish village. The felicity and the misery which Goldsmith
has brought close together belong to two different countries; and to two
different stages in the progress of society. He had assuredly never
seen in his native island such a rural paradise, such a seat of plenty,
content, and tranquillity, as his "Auburn." He had assuredly never seen
in England all the inhabitants of such a paradise turned out of their
homes in one day and forced to emigrate in a body to America. The hamlet
he had probably seen in Kent; the ejectment he had probably seen in
Munster: but, by joining the two, he has produced something which never
was and never will be seen in any part of the world.

In 1773 Goldsmith tried his chance at Covent Garden with a second play,
"She Stoops to Conquer." The manager was not without great difficulty
induced to bring this piece out. The sentimental comedy still reigned;
and Goldsmith's comedies were not sentimental. The "Goodnatured Man" had
been too funny to succeed; yet the mirth of the "Goodnatured Man" was
sober when compared with the rich drollery of "She Stoops to Conquer,"
which is, in truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this
occasion, however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, and galleries, were
in a constant roar of laughter. If any bigoted admirer of Kelly and
Cumberland ventured to hiss or groan, he was speedily silenced by a
general cry of "turn him out," or "throw him over." Two generations have
since confirmed the verdict which was pronounced on that night.

While Goldsmith was writing the "Deserted Village," and "She Stoops to
Conquer," he was employed on works of a very different kind, works from
which he derived little reputation but much profit. He compiled for
the use of schools a "History of Rome," by which he made 300 pounds,
a "History of England," by which he made 600 pounds, a "History of
Greece," for which he received 250 pounds, a "Natural History," for
which the booksellers covenanted to pay him 800 guineas. These works he
produced without any elaborate research, by merely selecting, abridging,
and translating into his own clear, pure, and flowing language what he
found in books well-known to the world, but too bulky or too dry for
boys and girls. He committed some strange blunders; for he knew nothing
with accuracy. Thus in his "History of England," he tells us that Naseby
is in Yorkshire; nor did he correct this mistake when the book was
reprinted. He was very nearly hoaxed into putting into the "History
of Greece" an account of the battle between Alexander the Great and
Montezuma. In his "Animated Nature" he relates, with faith and with
perfect gravity, all the most absurd lies which he could find in books
of travels about gigantic Patagonians, monkeys that preach sermons,
nightingales that repeat long conversations. "If he can tell a horse
from a cow," said Johnson, "that is the extent of his knowledge of
zoology." How little Goldsmith was qualified to write about the physical
sciences is sufficiently proved by two anecdotes. He on one occasion
denied that the sun is longer in the northern than in the southern
signs. It was vain to cite the authority of Maupertuis. "Maupertuis!" he
cried, "I understand those matters better than Maupertuis." On another
occasion he, in defiance of the evidence of his own senses, maintained
obstinately, and even angrily, that he chewed his dinner by moving his
upper jaw.

Yet, ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have done more to make the
first steps in the laborious road to knowledge easy and pleasant. His
compilations are widely distinguished from the compilations of ordinary
book-makers. He was a great, perhaps an unequalled, master of the arts
of selection and condensation. In these respects his histories of Rome
and of England, and still more his own abridgements of these histories,
well deserve to be studied. In general nothing is less attractive than
an epitome: but the epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most concise, are
always amusing; and to read them is considered by intelligent children,
not as a task, but as a pleasure.

Goldsmith might now be considered as a prosperous man. He had the means
of living in comfort, and even in what to one who had so often slept
in barns and on bulks must have been luxury. His fame was great and
was constantly rising. He lived in what was intellectually far the
best society of the kingdom, in a society in which no talent or
accomplishment was wanting, and in which the art of conversation was
cultivated with splendid success. There probably were never four talkers
more admirable in four different ways than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk,
and Garrick; and Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy with all the four.
He aspired to share in their colloquial renown; but never was ambition
more unfortunate. It may seem strange that a man who wrote with so much
perspicuity, vivacity, and grace, should have been, whenever he took a
part in conversation, an empty, noisy, blundering rattle. But on this
point the evidence is overwhelming. So extraordinary was the contrast
between Goldsmith's published works and the silly things which he said,
that Horace Walpole described him as an inspired idiot. "Noll," said
Garrick, "wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." Chamier
declared that it was a hard exercise of faith to believe that so foolish
a chatterer could have really written the "Traveller." Even Boswell
could say, with contemptuous compassion, that he liked very well to hear
honest Goldsmith run on. "Yes, sir," said Johnson, "but he should
not like to hear himself." Minds differ as rivers differ. There are
transparent and sparkling rivers from which it is delightful to drink as
they flow; to such rivers the minds of such men as Burke and Johnson may
be compared. But there are rivers of which the water when first drawn
is turbid and noisome, but becomes pellucid as crystal, and delicious to
the taste, if it be suffered to stand till it has deposited a sediment;
and such a river is a type of the mind of Goldsmith. His first thoughts
on every subject were confused even to absurdity; but they required
only a little time to work themselves clear. When he wrote they had that
time; and therefore his readers pronounced him a man of genius: but when
he talked he talked nonsense, and made himself the laughing-stock of his
hearers. He was painfully sensible of his inferiority in conversation;
he felt every failure keenly; yet he had not sufficient judgment and
self-command to hold his tongue. His animal spirits and vanity were
always impelling him to try to do the one thing which he could not do.
After every attempt he felt that he had exposed himself, and writhed
with shame and vexation; yet the next moment he began again.

His associates seem to have regarded him with kindness, which, in spite
of their admiration of his writings, was not unmixed with contempt.
In truth, there was in his character much to love, but very little to
respect. His heart was soft even to weakness: he was so generous that he
quite forgot to be just: he forgave injuries so readily that he might be
said to invite them; and was so liberal to beggars that he had nothing
left for his tailor and his butcher. He was vain, sensual, frivolous,
profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him,
envy. But there is not the least reason to believe that this bad
passion, though it sometimes made him wince and utter fretful
exclamations, ever impelled him to injure by wicked arts the reputation
of any of his rivals. The truth probably is, that he was not more
envious, but merely less prudent, than his neighbours. His heart was on
his lips. All those small jealousies, which are but too common among men
of letters, but which a man of letters who is also a man of the world
does his best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a
child. When he was envious, instead of affecting indifference, instead
of damning with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slily and in the
dark, he told everybody that he was envious. "Do not, pray, do not talk
of Johnson in such terms," he said to Boswell; "you harrow up my very
soul." George Steevens and Cumberland were men far too cunning to say
such a thing. They would have echoed the praises of the man whom they
envied, and then have sent to the newspapers anonymous libels upon him.
Both what was good and what was bad in Goldsmith's character was to his
associates a perfect security that he would never commit such villany.
He was neither ill natured enough, nor long headed enough, to be guilty
of any malicious act which required contrivance and disguise.

Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of genius, cruelly
treated by the world, and doomed to struggle with difficulties which at
last broke his heart. But no representation can be more remote from the
truth. He did, indeed, go through much sharp misery before he had done
anything considerable in literature. But, after his name had appeared on
the title-page of the "Traveller," he had none but himself to blame for
his distresses. His average income, during the last seven years of
his life, certainly exceeded 400 pounds a year; and 400 pounds a year
ranked, among the incomes of that day, at least as high as 800 pounds a
year would rank at present. A single man living in the Temple with 400
pounds a year might then be called opulent. Not one in ten of the young
gentlemen of good families who were studying the law there had so much.
But all the wealth which Lord Clive had brought from Bengal, and Sir
Lawrence Dundas from Germany, joined together, would not have sufficed
for Goldsmith. He spent twice as much as he had. He wore fine clothes,
gave dinners of several courses, paid court to venal beauties. He had
also, it should be remembered, to the honour of his heart, though not of
his head, a guinea, or five or ten, according to the state of his purse,
ready for any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not in dress
or feasting, in promiscuous amours or promiscuous charities, that his
chief expense lay. He had been from boyhood a gambler, and at once the
most sanguine and the most unskilful of gamblers. For a time he put off
the day of inevitable ruin by temporary expedients. He obtained advances
from booksellers, by promising to execute works which he never began.
But at length this source of supply failed. He owed more than 2000
pounds; and he saw no hope of extrication from his embarrassments. His
spirits and health gave way. He was attacked by a nervous fever, which
he thought himself competent to treat. It would have been happy for him
if his medical skill had been appreciated as justly by himself as by
others. Notwithstanding the degree which he pretended to have received
at Padua, he could procure no patients. "I do not practise," he once
said; "I make it a rule to prescribe only for my friends." "Pray, dear
Doctor," said Beauclerk, "alter your rule; and prescribe only for your
enemies." Goldsmith now, in spite of this excellent advice, prescribed
for himself. The remedy aggravated the malady. The sick man was induced
to call in real physicians; and they at one time imagined that they had
cured the disease. Still his weakness and restlessness continued. He
could get no sleep. He could take no food. "You are worse," said one
of his medical attendants, "than you should be from the degree of fever
which you have. Is your mind at ease?" "No, it is not," were the last
recorded words of Oliver Goldsmith. He died on the third of April 1774,
in his forty-sixth year. He was laid in the churchyard of the Temple;
but the spot was not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten.
The coffin was followed by Burke and Reynolds. Both these great men were
sincere mourners. Burke, when he heard of Goldsmith's death, had burst
into a flood of tears. Reynolds had been so much moved by the news that
he had flung aside his brush and palette for the day.

A short time after Goldsmith's death, a little poem appeared, which
will, as long as our language lasts, associate the names of his two
illustrious friends with his own. It has already been mentioned that he
sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild blundering talk brought
upon him. He was, not long before his last illness, provoked into
retaliating. He wisely betook himself to his pen; and at that weapon he
proved himself a match for all his assailants together. Within a
small compass he drew with a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the
characters of nine or ten of his intimate associates. Though this little
work did not receive his last touches, it must always be regarded as a
masterpiece. It is impossible, however, not to wish that four or five
likenesses which have no interest for posterity were wanting to that
noble gallery; and that their places were supplied by sketches of
Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and
Garrick.

Some of Goldsmith's friends and admirers honoured him with a cenotaph
in Westminster Abbey. Nollekens was the sculptor; and Johnson wrote the
inscription. It is much to be lamented that Johnson did not leave to
posterity a more durable and a more valuable memorial of his friend. A
life of Goldsmith would have been an inestimable addition to the Lives
of the Poets. No man appreciated Goldsmith's writings more justly than
Johnson; no man was better acquainted with Goldsmith's character and
habits; and no man was more competent to delineate with truth and spirit
the peculiarities of a mind in which great powers were found in company
with great weaknesses. But the lists of poets to whose works Johnson was
requested by the booksellers to furnish prefaces ended with Lyttleton,
who died in 1773. The line seems to have been drawn expressly for the
purpose of excluding the person whose portrait would have most fitly
closed the series. Goldsmith, however, has been fortunate in his
biographers. Within a few years his life has been written by Mr Prior,
by Mr Washington Irving, and by Mr Forster. The diligence of Mr Prior
deserves great praise; the style of Mr Washington Irving is always
pleasing; but the highest place must, in justice, be assigned to the
eminently interesting work of Mr Forster.

*****




SAMUEL JOHNSON. (December 1856.)

Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English writers of the
eighteenth century, was the son of Michael Johnson, who was, at the
beginning of that century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and a bookseller
of great note in the midland counties. Michael's abilities and
attainments seem to have been considerable. He was so well acquainted
with the contents of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the
country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought him an
oracle on points of learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed,
there was a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous
churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for municipal office
by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a
Jacobite in heart. At his house, a house which is still pointed out to
every traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 18th of
September 1709. In the child, the physical, intellectual, and moral
peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were plainly
discernible; great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and
many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to
sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy
and irritable temper. He had inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous
taint, which it was beyond the power of medicine to remove. His parents
were weak enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific for this
malady. In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by the
court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and stroked and
presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of his earliest
recollections was that of a stately lady in a diamond stomacher and a
long black hood. Her hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which
were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his malady.
His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye;
and he saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the force of
his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he was, he acquired
knowledge with such ease and rapidity that at every school to which
he was sent he was soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he
resided at home, and was left to his own devices. He learned much at
this time, though his studies were without guidance and without plan. He
ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, read
what was interesting, and passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad
would have acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way: but
much that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. He read
little Greek: for his proficiency in that language was not such that he
could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence.
But he had left school a good Latinist; and he soon acquired, in the
large and miscellaneous library of which he now had the command, an
extensive knowledge of Latin literature. That Augustan delicacy of
taste which is the boast of the great public schools of England he never
possessed. But he was early familiar with some classical writers who
were quite unknown to the best scholars in the sixth form at Eton.
He was peculiarly attracted by the works of the great restorers of
learning. Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio
volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited his curiosity; and
he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the diction and
versification of his own Latin compositions show that he had paid at
least as much attention to modern copies from the antique as to the
original models.

While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was sinking
into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was much better qualified
to pore upon books, and to talk about them, than to trade in them. His
business declined; his debts increased; it was with difficulty that the
daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It was out of his power
to support his son at either university; but a wealthy neighbour offered
assistance; and, in reliance on promises which proved to be of very
little value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the
young scholar presented himself to the rulers of that society, they were
amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners than by
the quantity of extensive and curious information which he had picked up
during many months of desultory but not unprofitable study. On the first
day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and
one of the most learned among them declared that he had never known a
freshman of equal attainments.

At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. He was poor, even
to raggedness; and his appearance excited a mirth and a pity which
were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He was driven from the
quadrangle of Christ Church by the sneering looks which the members
of that aristocratical society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some
charitable person placed a new pair at his door; but he spurned them
away in a fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and
ungovernable. No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for one-and-twenty,
could have treated the academical authorities with more gross
disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate
of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle of
lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit
and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendency. In every mutiny against
the discipline of the college he was the ringleader. Much was
pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities and
acquirements. He had early made himself known by turning Pope's Messiah
into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly
Virgilian; but the translation found many admirers, and was read with
pleasure by Pope himself.

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course of
things, have become a Bachelor of Arts: but he was at the end of his
resources. Those promises of support on which he had relied had not been
kept. His family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen
were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731,
he was under the necessity of quitting the university without a
degree. In the following winter his father died. The old man left but a
pittance; and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the
support of his widow. The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to
no more than twenty pounds.

His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard struggle
with poverty. The misery of that struggle needed no aggravation, but
was aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound mind.
Before the young man left the university, his hereditary malady had
broken forth in a singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable
hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been mad all his life, or
at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange
than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving
felons, and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures, his
mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who did
not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop
down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by
suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive
an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great
circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on
touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any
chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the
omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly
torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would
stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At
another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off,
calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A deep melancholy
took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human
nature and of human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven
many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no
temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life; but he was afraid of
death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of
the inevitable hour. In religion he found but little comfort during his
long and frequent fits of dejection; for his religion partook of his
own character. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a
direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays had to struggle
through a disturbing medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and
discoloured by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul; and,
though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to
cheer him.

With such infirmities of body and mind, this celebrated man was left, at
two-and-twenty, to fight his way through the world. He remained during
about five years in the midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace
and his early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired others.
He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family,
who happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of
the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts,
learning, and knowledge of the world, did himself honour by patronising
the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners, and
squalid garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the neighbourhood to
laughter or to disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no
way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school in
Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a
country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his
haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few
guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a translation,
little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about
Abyssinia. He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription
the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin
verse: but subscriptions did not come in; and the volume never appeared.

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in love. The
object of his passion was Mrs Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children
as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a
short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy
colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were
not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however,
whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish
ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the same
room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he called her, was
the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his
admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted; for she was as poor as
himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honour,
the addresses of a suitor who might have been her son. The marriage,
however, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved happier than might
have been expected. The lover continued to be under the illusions of the
wedding-day till the lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument
he placed an inscription extolling the charms of her person and of her
manners; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to mention
her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic,
"Pretty creature!"

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more strenuously
than he had hitherto done. He took a house in the neighbourhood of his
native town, and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away;
and only three pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his appearance was
so strange, and his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must have
resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted grandmother whom
he called his Titty well qualified to make provision for the comfort of
young gentlemen. David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used, many
years later, to throw the best company of London into convulsions of
laughter by mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary pair.

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, determined to
seek his fortune in the capital as a literary adventurer. He set out
with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy of Irene in manuscript,
and two or three letters of introduction from his friend Walmesley.

Never, since literature became a calling in England, had it been a less
gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his residence in
London. In the preceding generation a writer of eminent merit was sure
to be munificently rewarded by the government. The least that he could
expect was a pension or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude
for politics, he might hope to be a member of parliament, a lord of the
treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the
other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth century of
whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from the
booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary
part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity.
Literature had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the great, and
had not begun to flourish under the patronage of the public. One man of
letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then considered
as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles
and ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an
author whose reputation was established, and whose works were popular,
such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every library, such an
author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater run than any drama
since The Beggar's Opera, was sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his
best coat, the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground,
where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a
Newfoundland dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations
and privations must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a
name. One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for employment
measured with a scornful eye that athletic though uncouth frame, and
exclaimed, "You had better get a porter's knot, and carry trunks." Nor
was the advice bad; for a porter was likely to be as plentifully fed,
and as comfortably lodged, as a poet.

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was able to form any
literary connection from which he could expect more than bread for the
day which was passing over him. He never forgot the generosity with
which Hervey, who was now residing in London, relieved his wants during
this time of trial. "Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher many years
later, "was a vicious man; but he was very kind to me. If you call a dog
Hervey I shall love him." At Hervey's table Johnson sometimes enjoyed
feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. But in general he
dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpenny worth of meat, and a
pennyworth of bread, at an alehouse near Drury Lane.

The effect of the privations and sufferings which he endured at this
time was discernible to the last in his temper and his deportment. His
manners had never been courtly. They now became almost savage. Being
frequently under the necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts,
he became a confirmed sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down
to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness.
Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the
sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey.
His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and alamode
beefshops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to
have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made
with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins
swelled, and the moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts which
his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would
have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to
ferocity. Unhappily the insolence which, while it was defensive,
was pardonable, and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into
societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness. He was
repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken liberties with
him. All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to abstain from
talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the most rapacious and
brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he had been
knocked down by the huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian
Library.

About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in London, he was
fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from Cave, an enterprising
and intelligent bookseller, who was proprietor and editor of the
"Gentleman's Magazine." That journal, just entering on the ninth year
of its long existence, was the only periodical work in the kingdom which
then had what would now be called a large circulation. It was, indeed,
the chief source of parliamentary intelligence. It was not then safe,
even during a recess, to publish an account of the proceedings of either
House without some disguise. Cave, however, ventured to entertain his
readers with what he called "Reports of the Debates of the Senate of
Lilliput." France was Blefuscu; London was Mildendo: pounds were sprugs:
the Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac secretary of State: Lord Hardwicke
was the Hurgo Hickrad: and William Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub. To write
the speeches was, during several years, the business of Johnson. He was
generally furnished with notes, meagre indeed, and inaccurate, of what
had been said; but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence both
for the ministry and for the opposition. He was himself a Tory, not
from rational conviction--for his serious opinion was that one form of
government was just as good or as bad as another--but from mere passion,
such as inflamed the Capulets against the Montagues, or the Blues of
the Roman circus against the Greens. In his infancy he had heard so much
talk about the villanies of the Whigs, and the dangers of the Church,
that he had become a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak.
Before he was three he had insisted on being taken to hear Sacheverell
preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had listened to the sermon with
as much respect, and probably with as much intelligence, as any
Staffordshire squire in the congregation. The work which had been
begun in the nursery had been completed by the university. Oxford, when
Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical place in England;
and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobital colleges in Oxford. The
prejudices which he brought up to London were scarcely less absurd than
those of his own Tom Tempest. Charles II. and James II. were two of the
best kings that ever reigned. Laud, a poor creature who never did, said,
or wrote anything indicating more than the ordinary capacity of an
old woman, was a prodigy of parts and learning over whose tomb Art and
Genius still continued to weep. Hampden deserved no more honourable name
than that of "the zealot of rebellion." Even the ship money, condemned
not less decidedly by Falkland and Clarendon than by the bitterest
Roundheads, Johnson would not pronounce to have been an unconstitutional
impost. Under a government, the mildest that had ever been known in the
world--under a government, which allowed to the people an unprecedented
liberty of speech and action--he fancied that he was a slave; he
assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted itself, and regretted
the lost freedom and happiness of those golden days in which a writer
who had taken but one-tenth part of the license allowed to him would
have been pilloried, mangled with the shears, whipped at the cart's
tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters
and stockjobbers, the excise and the army, septennial parliaments,
and continental connections. He long had an aversion to the Scotch, an
aversion of which he could not remember the commencement, but which, he
owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the
nation during the Great Rebellion. It is easy to guess in what manner
debates on great party questions were likely to be reported by a
man whose judgment was so much disordered by party spirit. A show of
fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the Magazine. But
Johnson long afterwards owned that, though he had saved appearances, he
had taken care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it; and,
in fact, every passage which has lived, every passage which bears the
marks of his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member of
the opposition.

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure labours, he
published a work which at once placed him high among the writers of his
age. It is probable that what he had suffered during his first year in
London had often reminded him of some parts of that noble poem in which
Juvenal had described the misery and degradation of a needy man of
letters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tottering garrets which
overhung the streets of Rome. Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's
Satires and Epistles had recently appeared, were in every hand, and were
by many readers thought superior to the originals. What Pope had done
for Horace, Johnson aspired to do for Juvenal. The enterprise was bold
and yet judicious. For between Johnson and Juvenal there was much in
common, much more certainly than between Pope and Horace.

Johnson's London appeared without his name in May 1738. He received only
ten guineas for this stately and vigorous poem; but the sale was rapid,
and the success complete. A second edition was required within a
week. Those small critics who are always desirous to lower established
reputations ran about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was
superior to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department of literature. It
ought to be remembered, to the honour of Pope, that he joined heartily
in the applause with which the appearance of a rival genius was
welcomed. He made inquiries about the author of London. Such a man, he
said, could not long be concealed. The name was soon discovered; and
Pope with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an academical degree
and the mastership of a grammar school for the poor young poet. The
attempt failed; and Johnson remained a bookseller's hack.

It does not appear that these two men, the most eminent writer of the
generation which was going out, and the most eminent writer of the
generation which was coming in, ever saw each other. They lived in
very different circles, one surrounded by dukes and earls, the other by
starving pamphleteers and index makers. Among Johnson's associates at
this time may be mentioned Boyse, who, when his shirts were pledged,
scrawled Latin verses sitting up in bed with his arms through two holes
in his blanket; who composed very respectable sacred poetry when he
was sober; and who was at last run over by a hackney coach when he
was drunk: Hoole, surnamed the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of
attending to his measures, used to trace geometrical diagrams on the
board where he sate cross-legged; and the penitent impostor, George
Psalmanazar, who, after poring all day, in a humble lodging, on the
folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers, indulged himself at night
with literary and theological conversation at an alehouse in the city.
But the most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time Johnson
consorted was Richard Savage, an earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice,
who had seen life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue ribands
in Saint James's Square, and had lain with fifty-pounds' weight of iron
on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. This man had, after many
vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless poverty.
His pen had failed him. His patrons had been taken away by death,
or estranged by the riotous profusion with which he squandered their
bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he rejected their
advice. He now lived by begging. He dined on venison and champagne
whenever he had been so fortunate as to borrow a guinea. If his questing
had been unsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hunger with some scraps
of broken meat, and lay down to rest under the Piazza of Covent Garden
in warm weather, and, in cold weather, as near as he could get to the
furnace of a glass house. Yet, in his misery, he was still an agreeable
companion. He had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that gay and
brilliant world from which he was now an outcast. He had observed the
great men of both parties in hours of careless relaxation, had seen the
leaders of opposition without the mask of patriotism, and had heard
the prime minister roar with laughter and tell stories not over decent.
During some months Savage lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson;
and then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson remained in
London to drudge for Cave. Savage went to the West of England, lived
there as he had lived everywhere, and in 1743, died, penniless and
heart-broken, in Bristol gaol.

Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly excited
about his extraordinary character, and his not less extraordinary
adventures, a life of him appeared widely different from the catchpenny
lives of eminent men which were then a staple article of manufacture in
Grub Street. The style was indeed deficient in ease and variety; and the
writer was evidently too partial to the Latin element of our language.
But the little work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece. No finer
specimen of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead;
and a discerning critic might have confidently predicted that the author
was destined to be the founder of a new school of English eloquence.

The life of Savage was anonymous; but it was well known in literary
circles that Johnson was the writer. During the three years which
followed, he produced no important work, but he was not, and indeed
could not be, idle. The fame of his abilities and learning continued to
grow. Warburton pronounced him a man of parts and genius; and the praise
of Warburton was then no light thing. Such was Johnson's reputation
that, in 1747, several eminent booksellers combined to employ him in the
arduous work of preparing a Dictionary of the English language, in two
folio volumes. The sum which they agreed to pay him was only fifteen
hundred guineas; and out of this sum he had to pay several poor men of
letters who assisted him in the humbler parts of his task.

The prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to the Earl of
Chesterfield. Chesterfield had long been celebrated for the politeness
of his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, and the delicacy of his
taste. He was acknowledged to be the finest speaker in the House of
Lords. He had recently governed Ireland, at a momentous conjuncture,
with eminent firmness, wisdom, and humanity; and he had since become
Secretary of State. He received Johnson's homage with the most winning
affability, and requited it with a few guineas, bestowed doubtless in
a very graceful manner, but was by no means desirous to see all his
carpets blackened with the London mud, and his soups and wines thrown to
right and left over the gowns of fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine
gentlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who gave strange starts and
uttered strange growls, who dressed like a scarecrow, and ate like a
cormorant. During some time Johnson continued to call on his patron, but
after being repeatedly told by the porter that his lordship was not at
home, took the hint, and ceased to present himself at the inhospitable
door.

Johnson had flattered himself that he should have completed his
Dictionary by the end of 1750; but it was not till 1755 that he at
length gave his huge volumes to the world. During the seven years which
he passed in the drudgery of penning definitions and making quotations
for transcription, he sought for relaxation in literary labour of a
more agreeable kind. In 1749 he published the Vanity of Human Wishes, an
excellent imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal. It is in truth not
easy to say whether the palm belongs to the ancient or to the modern
poet. The couplets in which the fall of Wolsey is described, though
lofty and sonorous, are feeble when compared with the wonderful lines
which bring before us all Rome in tumult on the day of the fall of
Sejanus, the laurels on the doorposts, the white bull stalking towards
the Capitol, the statues rolling down from their pedestals, the
flatterers of the disgraced minister running to see him dragged with a
hook through the streets, and to have a kick at his carcase before it
is hurled into the Tiber. It must be owned too that in the concluding
passage the Christian moralist has not made the most of his advantages,
and has fallen decidedly short of the sublimity of his Pagan model. On
the other hand, Juvenal's Hannibal must yield to Johnson's Charles;
and Johnson's vigorous and pathetic enumeration of the miseries of a
literary life must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's lamentation
over the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero.

For the copyright of the Vanity of Human Wishes Johnson received only
fifteen guineas.

A few days after the publication of this poem, his tragedy, begun many
years before, was brought on the stage. His pupil, David Garrick, had,
in 1741, made his appearance on a humble stage in Goodman's Fields,
had at once risen to the first place among actors, and was now, after
several years of almost uninterrupted success, manager of Drury Lane
Theatre. The relation between him and his old preceptor was of a very
singular kind. They repelled each other strongly, and yet attracted
each other strongly. Nature had made them of very different clay; and
circumstances had fully brought out the natural peculiarities of both.
Sudden prosperity had turned Garrick's head. Continued adversity had
soured Johnson's temper. Johnson saw with more envy than became so great
a man the villa, the plate, the china, the Brussels carpet, which the
little mimic had got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticulations,
what wiser men had written; and the exquisitely sensitive vanity of
Garrick was galled by the thought that, while all the rest of the world
was applauding him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose opinion
it was impossible to despise, scarcely any compliment not acidulated
with scorn. Yet the two Lichfield men had so many early recollections in
common, and sympathised with each other on so many points on which they
sympathised with nobody else in the vast population of the capital,
that, though the master was often provoked by the monkey-like
impertinence of the pupil, and the pupil by the bearish rudeness of the
master, they remained friends till they were parted by death. Garrick
now brought Irene out, with alterations sufficient to displease the
author, yet not sufficient to make the piece pleasing to the audience.
The public, however, listened with little emotion, but with much
civility, to five acts of monotonous declamation. After nine
representations the play was withdrawn. It is, indeed, altogether
unsuited to the stage, and, even when perused in the closet, will be
found hardly worthy of the author. He had not the slightest notion of
what blank verse should be. A change in the last syllable of every other
line would make the versification of the Vanity of Human Wishes closely
resemble the versification of Irene. The poet, however, cleared, by his
benefit nights, and by the sale of the copyright of his tragedy, about
three hundred pounds, then a great sum in his estimation.

About a year after the representation of Irene, he began to publish a
series of short essays on morals, manners, and literature. This species
of composition had been brought into fashion by the success of the
Tatler, and by the still more brilliant success of the Spectator. A
crowd of small writers had vainly attempted to rival Addison. The Lay
Monastery, the Censor, the Freethinker, the Plain Dealer, the Champion,
and other works of the same kind, had had their short day. None of them
had obtained a permanent place in our literature; and they are now to be
found only in the libraries of the curious. At length Johnson undertook
the adventure in which so many aspirants had failed. In the thirty-sixth
year after the appearance of the last number of the Spectator appeared
the first number of the Rambler. From March 1750 to March 1752 this
paper continued to come out every Tuesday and Saturday.

From the first the Rambler was enthusiastically admired by a few eminent
men. Richardson, when only five numbers had appeared, pronounced it
equal, if not superior, to the Spectator. Young and Hartley expressed
their approbation not less warmly. Bubb Doddington, among whose many
faults indifference to the claims of genius and learning cannot be
reckoned, solicited the acquaintance of the writer. In consequence
probably of the good offices of Doddington, who was then the
confidential adviser of Prince Frederic, two of his Royal Highness's
gentlemen carried a gracious message to the printing office, and ordered
seven copies for Leicester House. But these overtures seem to have been
very coldly received. Johnson had had enough of the patronage of the
great to last him all his life, and was not disposed to haunt any other
door as he had haunted the door of Chesterfield.

By the public the Rambler was at first very coldly received. Though the
price of a number was only twopence, the sale did not amount to five
hundred. The profits were therefore very small. But as soon as the
flying leaves were collected and reprinted they became popular. The
author lived to see thirteen thousand copies spread over England alone.
Separate editions were published for the Scotch and Irish markets. A
large party pronounced the style perfect, so absolutely perfect that
in some essays it would be impossible for the writer himself to alter a
single word for the better. Another party, not less numerous, vehemently
accused him of having corrupted the purity of the English tongue. The
best critics admitted that his diction was too monotonous, too obviously
artificial, and now and then turgid even to absurdity. But they did
justice to the acuteness of his observations on morals and manners, to
the constant precision and frequent brilliancy of his language, to the
weighty and magnificent eloquence of many serious passages, and to
the solemn yet pleasing humour of some of the lighter papers. On the
question of precedence between Addison and Johnson, a question which,
seventy years ago, was much disputed, posterity has pronounced a
decision from which there is no appeal. Sir Roger, his chaplain and his
butler, Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, the Vision of Mirza, the Journal
of the Retired Citizen, the Everlasting Club, the Dunmow Flitch, the
Loves of Hilpah and Shalum, the Visit to the Exchange, and the Visit
to the Abbey, are known to everybody. But many men and women, even of
highly cultivated minds, are unacquainted with Squire Bluster and Mrs
Busy, Quisquilius and Venustulus, the Allegory of Wit and Learning, the
Chronicle of the Revolutions of a Garret, and the sad fate of Aningait
and Ajut.

The last Rambler was written in a sad and gloomy hour. Mrs Johnson had
been given over by the physicians. Three days later she died. She left
her husband almost broken-hearted. Many people had been surprised to see
a man of his genius and learning stooping to every drudgery, and denying
himself almost every comfort, for the purpose of supplying a silly,
affected old woman with superfluities, which she accepted with but
little gratitude. But all his affection had been concentrated on her. He
had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. To him she was
beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady Mary. Her opinion of his
writings was more important to him than the voice of the pit of Drury
Lane Theatre or the judgment of the Monthly Review. The chief support
which had sustained him through the most arduous labour of his life
was the hope that she would enjoy the fame and the profit which
he anticipated from his Dictionary. She was gone; and in that vast
labyrinth of streets, peopled by eight hundred thousand human beings, he
was alone. Yet it was necessary for him to set himself, as he expressed
it, doggedly to work. After three more laborious years, the Dictionary
was at length complete.

It had been generally supposed that this great work would be dedicated
to the eloquent and accomplished nobleman to whom the prospectus
had been addressed. He well knew the value of such a compliment; and
therefore, when the day of publication drew near, he exerted himself
to soothe, by a show of zealous and at the same time of delicate and
judicious kindness, the pride which he had so cruelly wounded. Since
the Ramblers had ceased to appear, the town had been entertained by a
journal called the World, to which many men of high rank and fashion
contributed. In two successive numbers of the World the Dictionary was,
to use the modern phrase, puffed with wonderful skill. The writings of
Johnson were warmly praised. It was proposed that he should be invested
with the authority of a Dictator, nay, of a Pope, over our language, and
that his decisions about the meaning and the spelling of words should
be received as final. His two folios, it was said, would of course be
bought by everybody who could afford to buy them. It was soon known that
these papers were written by Chesterfield. But the just resentment of
Johnson was not to be so appeased. In a letter written with singular
energy and dignity of thought and language, he repelled the tardy
advances of his patron. The Dictionary came forth without a dedication.
In the preface the author truly declared that he owed nothing to the
great, and described the difficulties with which he had been left
to struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest and most
malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, Horne Tooke, never could read
that passage without tears.

The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full justice, and something
more than justice. The best lexicographer may well be content if his
productions are received by the world with cold esteem. But Johnson's
Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm such as no similar work has
ever excited. It was indeed the first dictionary which could be read
with pleasure. The definitions show so much acuteness of thought and
command of language, and the passages quoted from poets, divines, and
philosophers are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always
be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. The faults of the
book resolve themselves, for the most part, into one great fault.
Johnson was a wretched etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any
Teutonic language except English, which indeed, as he wrote it, was
scarcely a Teutonic language; and thus he was absolutely at the mercy of
Junius and Skinner.

The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, added nothing to his
pecuniary means. The fifteen hundred guineas which the booksellers had
agreed to pay him had been advanced and spent before the last sheets
issued from the press. It is painful to relate that, twice in the course
of the year which followed the publication of this great work, he was
arrested and carried to spunging-houses, and that he was twice indebted
for his liberty to his excellent friend Richardson. It was still
necessary for the man who had been formally saluted by the highest
authority as Dictator of the English language to supply his wants by
constant toil. He abridged his Dictionary. He proposed to bring out
an edition of Shakspeare by subscription; and many subscribers sent in
their names and laid down their money; but he soon found the task so
little to his taste that he turned to more attractive employments. He
contributed many papers to a new monthly journal, which was called the
Literary Magazine. Few of these papers have much interest; but among
them was the very best thing that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of
reasoning and of satirical pleasantry, the review of Jenyn's Inquiry
into the Nature and Origin of Evil.

In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first of a series of essays,
entitled the Idler. During two years these essays continued to
appear weekly. They were eagerly read, widely circulated, and indeed,
impudently pirated, while they were still in the original form, and had
a large sale when collected into volumes. The Idler may be described as
a second part of the Rambler, somewhat livelier and somewhat weaker than
the first part.

While Johnson was busied with his Idlers, his mother, who had
accomplished her ninetieth year, died at Lichfield. It was long since
he had seen her; but he had not failed to contribute largely, out of
his small means, to her comfort. In order to defray the charges of her
funeral, and to pay some debts which she had left, he wrote a little
book in a single week, and sent off the sheets to the press without
reading them over. A hundred pounds were paid him for the copyright; and
the purchasers had great cause to be pleased with their bargain; for the
book was Rasselas.

The success of Rasselas was great, though such ladies as Miss Lydia
Languish must have been grievously disappointed when they found that
the new volume from the circulating library was little more than a
dissertation on the author's favourite theme, the Vanity of Human
Wishes; that the Prince of Abyssinia was without a mistress, and the
princess without a lover; and that the story set the hero and the
heroine down exactly where it had taken them up. The style was the
subject of much eager controversy. The Monthly Review and the Critical
Review took different sides. Many readers pronounced the writer a
pompous pedant, who would never use a word of two syllables where it was
possible to use a word of six, and who could not make a waiting woman
relate her adventures without balancing every noun with another noun,
and every epithet with another epithet. Another party, not less zealous,
cited with delight numerous passages in which weighty meaning was
expressed with accuracy and illustrated with splendour. And both the
censure and the praise were merited.

About the plan of Rasselas little was said by the critics; and yet the
faults of the plan might seem to invite severe criticism. Johnson has
frequently blamed Shakspeare for neglecting the proprieties of time and
place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the manners and opinions
of another. Yet Shakspeare has not sinned in this way more grievously
than Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently
meant to be Abyssinians of the eighteenth century: for the Europe which
Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and the inmates
of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of gravitation which
Newton discovered, and which was not fully received even at Cambridge
till the eighteenth century. What a real company of Abyssinians would
have been may be learned from Bruce's Travels. But Johnson, not content
with turning filthy savages, ignorant of their letters, and gorged
with raw steaks cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and
enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly
accomplished as Mrs Lennox or Mrs Sheridan, transferred the whole
domestic system of England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of
polygamy, a land where women are married without ever being seen, he
introduced the flirtations and jealousies of our ball-rooms. In a land
where there is boundless liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the
indissoluble compact. "A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought
together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home,
and dream of each other. Such," says Rasselas, "is the common process
of marriage." Such it may have been, and may still be, in London, but
assuredly not at Cairo. A writer who was guilty of such improprieties
had little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, and
represented Julio Romano as flourishing in the days of the oracle of
Delphi.

By such exertions as have been described, Johnson supported himself till
the year 1762. In that year a great change in his circumstances took
place. He had from a child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. His
Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited with little disguise both in
his works and in his conversation. Even in his massy and elaborate
Dictionary, he had, with a strange want of taste and judgment, inserted
bitter and contumelious reflections on the Whig party. The excise, which
was a favourite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as
a hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise in
language so coarse that they had seriously thought of prosecuting him.
He had with difficulty been prevented from holding up the Lord Privy
Seal by name as an example of the meaning of the word "renegade." A
pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray his
country; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a
master. It seemed unlikely that the author of these definitions would
himself be pensioned. But that was a time of wonders. George the
Third had ascended the throne; and had, in the course of a few months,
disgusted many of the old friends and conciliated many of the old
enemies of his house. The city was becoming mutinous. Oxford was
becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. Somersets and
Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. The head of the treasury was
now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no objection to Johnson's
Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron of men of letters; and
Johnson was one of the most eminent and one of the most needy men of
letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred a year was graciously
offered, and with very little hesitation accepted.

This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of life. For the
first time since his boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad urging him
to the daily toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety and
drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till
two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning,
without fearing either the printer's devil or the sheriff's officer.

One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to perform. He had
received large subscriptions for his promised edition of Shakspeare;
he had lived on those subscriptions during some years: and he could not
without disgrace omit to perform his part of the contract. His friends
repeatedly exhorted him to make an effort; and he repeatedly resolved
to do so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolutions,
month followed month, year followed year, and nothing was done. He
prayed fervently against his idleness; he determined, as often as he
received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze away and trifle
away his time; but the spell under which he lay resisted prayer
and sacrament. His private notes at this time are made up of
self-reproaches. "My indolence," he wrote on Easter Eve in 1764,
"has sunk into grosser sluggishness. A kind of strange oblivion has
overspread me, so that I know not what has become of the last year."
Easter 1765 came, and found him still in the same state. "My time," he
wrote, "has been unprofitably spent, and seems as a dream that has left
nothing behind. My memory grows confused, and I know not how the days
pass over me." Happily for his honour, the charm which held him captive
was at length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He had been weak
enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost which haunted
a house in Cock Lane, and had actually gone himself with some of his
friends, at one in the morning, to St John's Church, Clerkenwell, in
the hope of receiving a communication from the perturbed spirit. But the
spirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained obstinately silent;
and it soon appeared that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing
herself by making fools of so many philosophers. Churchill, who,
confidant in his powers, drunk with popularity, and burning with party
spirit, was looking for some man of established fame and Tory politics
to insult, celebrated the Cock Lane Ghost in three cantos, nicknamed
Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was which had been so long
promised and so liberally paid for, and directly accused the great
moralist of cheating. This terrible word proved effectual; and in
October 1765 appeared, after a delay of nine years, the new edition of
Shakspeare.

This publication saved Johnson's character for honesty, but added
nothing to the fame of his abilities and learning. The preface, though
it contains some good passages, is not in his best manner. The most
valuable notes are those in which he had an opportunity of showing
how attentively he had during many years observed human life and human
nature. The best specimen is the note on the character of Polonius.
Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm Meister's admirable
examination of Hamlet. But here praise must end. It would be difficult
to name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great classic.
The reader may turn over play after play without finding one happy
conjectural emendation, or one ingenious and satisfactory explanation of
a passage which had baffled preceding commentators. Johnson had, in his
prospectus, told the world that he was peculiarly fitted for the task
which he had undertaken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been under
the necessity of taking a wider view of the English language than any of
his predecessors. That his knowledge of our literature was extensive is
indisputable. But, unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very
part of our literature with which it is especially desirable that an
editor of Shakspeare should be conversant. It is dangerous to assert a
negative. Yet little will be risked by the assertion, that in the two
folio volumes of the English Dictionary there is not a single passage
quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan age, except Shakspeare and
Ben. Even from Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might easily, in a
few months, have made himself well acquainted with every old play that
was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this was
a necessary preparation for the work which he had undertaken. He would
doubtless have admitted that it would be the height of absurdity in a
man who was not familiar with the works of Aeschylus and Euripides to
publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition
of Shakspeare, without having ever in his life, as far as can be
discovered, read a single scene of Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster,
Marlow, Beaumont, or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and scurrilous.
Those who most loved and honoured him had little to say in praise of
the manner in which he had discharged the duty of a commentator. He
had, however, acquitted himself of a debt which had long lain on his
conscience; and he sank back into the repose from which the sting of
satire had roused him. He long continued to live upon the fame which
he had already won. He was honoured by the University of Oxford with a
Doctor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by the
King with an interview, in which his Majesty most graciously expressed
a hope that so excellent a writer would not cease to write. In the
interval, however, between 1765 and 1775 Johnson published only two or
three political tracks, the longest of which he could have produced in
forty-eight hours, if he had worked as he worked on the life of Savage
and on Rasselas.

But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was active. The influence
exercised by his conversation, directly upon those with whom he lived,
and indirectly on the whole literary world, was altogether without a
parallel. His colloquial talents were indeed of the highest order. He
had strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humour, immense knowledge of
literature and of life, and an infinite store of curious anecdotes. As
respected style, he spoke far better than he wrote. Every sentence which
dropped from his lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely
balanced period of the Rambler. But in his talk there was no pompous
triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in "osity" and
"ation". All was simplicity, ease, and vigour. He uttered his short,
weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice, and a justness
and energy of emphasis, of which the effect was rather increased than
diminished by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic
gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally
ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit down to his
desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. To
discuss questions of taste, of learning, casuistry, in language so exact
and so forcible that it might have been printed without the alteration
of a word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he
said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the
overflowings of his full mind on anybody who would start a subject, on a
fellow-passenger in a stage coach, or on the person who sate at the same
table with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so
brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few friends, whose
abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to
send him back every ball that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed
themselves into a club, which gradually became a formidable power in the
commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new
books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell
off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service
of the trunk-maker and the pastry-cook. Nor shall we think this strange
when we consider what great and various talents and acquirements met in
the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the representative of poetry and
light literature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political eloquence and
political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian,
and Jones, the greatest linguist, of the age. Garrick brought to the
meetings his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his
consummate knowledge of stage effect. Among the most constant attendants
were two high-born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound together
by friendship, but of widely different characters and habits; Bennet
Langton, distinguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the
orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life; and Topham
Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his knowledge of the gay world,
his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over such a
society was not easy. Yet even over such a society Johnson predominated.
Burke might indeed have disputed the supremacy to which others were
under the necessity of submitting. But Burke, though not generally a
very patient listener, was content to take the second part when Johnson
was present; and the club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is
to this day popularly designated as Johnson's Club.

Among the members of this celebrated body was one to whom it has owed
the greater part of its celebrity, yet who was regarded with little
respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a seat
among them. This was James Boswell, a young Scotch lawyer, heir to an
honourable name and a fair estate. That he was a coxcomb and a bore,
weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who were
acquainted with him. That he could not reason, that he had no wit,
no humour, no eloquence, is apparent from his writings. And yet his
writings are read beyond the Mississippi, and under the Southern Cross,
and are likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as
a living or as a dead language. Nature had made him a slave and an
idolater. His mind resembles those creepers which the botanists call
parasites, and which can subsist only by clinging round the stems and
imbibing the juices of stronger plants. He must have fastened himself on
somebody. He might have fastened himself on Wilkes, and have become the
fiercest patriot in the Bill of Rights Society. He might have fastened
himself on Whitfield, and have become the loudest field preacher among
the Calvinistic Methodists. In a happy hour he fastened himself on
Johnson. The pair might seem ill matched. For Johnson had early been
prejudiced against Boswell's country. To a man of Johnson's strong
understanding and irritable temper, the silly egotism and adulation of
Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant buzz of a fly. Johnson
hated to be questioned; and Boswell was eternally catechising him on
all kinds of subjects, and sometimes propounded such questions as
"What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a baby?"
Johnson was a water drinker; and Boswell was a wine-bibber, and indeed
little better than a habitual sot. It was impossible that there should
be perfect harmony between two such companions. Indeed, the great man
was sometimes provoked into fits of passion in which he said things
which the small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. Every
quarrel, however, was soon made up. During twenty years the disciple
continued to worship the master: the master continued to scold the
disciple, to sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends ordinarily
resided at a great distance from each other. Boswell practised in the
Parliament House of Edinburgh, and could pay only occasional visits to
London. During those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson,
to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to subjects
about which Johnson was likely to say something remarkable, and to fill
quarto note books with minutes of what Johnson had said. In this way
were gathered the materials out of which was afterwards constructed the
most interesting biographical work in the world.

Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connection less
important indeed to his fame, but much more important to his happiness,
than his connection with Boswell. Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent
brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound and cultivated understanding,
rigid principles, and liberal spirit, was married to one of those
clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women, who are
perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly right, but who, do or
say what they may, are always agreeable. In 1765 the Thrales became
acquainted with Johnson; and the acquaintance ripened fast into
friendship. They were astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of
his conversation. They were flattered by finding that a man so widely
celebrated, preferred their house to any other in London. Even the
peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for civilised society, his
gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings, the strange
way in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous eagerness with which
he devoured his dinner, his fits of melancholy, his fits of anger, his
frequent rudeness, his occasional ferocity, increased the interest which
his new associates took in him. For these things were the cruel marks
left behind by a life which had been one long conflict with disease and
with adversity. In a vulgar hack writer such oddities would have excited
only disgust. But in a man of genius, learning, and virtue their effect
was to add pity to admiration and esteem. Johnson soon had an apartment
at the brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment at the
villa of his friends on Streatham Common. A large part of every year he
passed in those abodes, abodes which must have seemed magnificent and
luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in which he had generally
been lodged. But his chief pleasures were derived from what the
astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called "the endearing elegance of
female friendship." Mrs Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him,
and, if she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends
by listening to his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he
was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses.
No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly
ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise, was wanting
to his sick-room. He requited her kindness by an affection pure as the
affection of a father, yet delicately tinged with a gallantry, which,
though awkward, must have been more flattering than the attentions of a
crowd of the fools who gloried in the names, now obsolete, of Buck and
Maccaroni. It should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during
about sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales. He
accompanied the family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to Brighton,
once to Wales, and once to Paris. But he had at the same time a house in
one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the north of Fleet Street. In the
garrets was his library, a large and miscellaneous collection of books,
falling to pieces and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor he sometimes,
but very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner, a veal pie, or
a leg of lamb and spinage, and a rice pudding. Nor was the dwelling
uninhabited during his long absences. It was the home of the most
extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought together.
At the head of the establishment Johnson had placed an old lady named
Williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and her
poverty. But, in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum
to another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs Desmoulins, whose family
he had known many years before in Staffordshire. Room was found for the
daughter of Mrs Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was
generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom her generous host
called Polly. An old quack doctor named Levett, who bled and dosed
coal-heavers and hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts of
bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little copper,
completed this strange menagerie. All these poor creatures were at
constant war with each other, and with Johnson's negro servant Frank.
Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their hostilities from the servant
to the master, complained that a better table was not kept for them, and
railed or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make his escape
to Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern. And yet he, who was generally
the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt to
resent anything which looked like a slight on the part of a purse-proud
bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron, bore patiently from
mendicants, who, but for his bounty, must have gone to the workhouse,
insults more provoking than those for which he had knocked down Osborne
and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs Desmoulins,
Polly, and Levett, continued to torment him and to live upon him.

The course of life which has been described was interrupted in Johnson's
sixty-fourth year by an important event. He had early read an account of
the Hebrides, and had been much interested by learning that there was so
near him a land peopled by a race which was still as rude and simple as
in the middle ages. A wish to become intimately acquainted with a
state of society so utterly unlike all that he had ever seen frequently
crossed his mind. But it is not probable that his curiosity would have
overcome his habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke, the mud,
and the cries of London, had not Boswell importuned him to attempt the
adventure, and offered to be his squire. At length, in August 1773,
Johnson crossed the Highland line, and plunged courageously into what
was then considered, by most Englishmen, as a dreary and perilous
wilderness. After wandering about two months through the Celtic region,
sometimes in rude boats which did not protect him from the rain, and
sometimes on small shaggy ponies which could hardly bear his weight,
he returned to his old haunts with a mind full of new images and new
theories. During the following year he employed himself in recording his
adventures. About the beginning of 1775, his Journey to the Hebrides was
published, and was, during some weeks, the chief subject of conversation
in all circles in which any attention was paid to literature. The
book is still read with pleasure. The narrative is entertaining; the
speculations, whether sound or unsound, are always ingenious; and
the style, though too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier and more
graceful than that of his early writings. His prejudice against the
Scotch had at length become little more than matter of jest; and
whatever remained of the old feeling had been effectually removed by the
kind and respectful hospitality with which he had been received in every
part of Scotland. It was, of course, not to be expected that an Oxonian
Tory should praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or that an eye
accustomed to the hedgerows and parks of England should not be struck
by the bareness of Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even in censure
Johnson's tone is not unfriendly. The most enlightened Scotchmen, with
Lord Mansfield at their head, were well pleased. But some foolish and
ignorant Scotchmen were moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth
which was mingled with much eulogy, and assailed him whom they chose
to consider as the enemy of their country with libels much more
dishonourable to their country than anything that he had ever said or
written. They published paragraphs in the newspapers, articles in the
magazines, sixpenny pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused
Johnson for being blear-eyed; another for being a pensioner; a third
informed the world that one of the Doctor's uncles had been convicted
of felony in Scotland, and had found that there was in that country
one tree capable of supporting the weight of an Englishman. Macpherson,
whose Fingal had been proved in the Journey to be an impudent forgery,
threatened to take vengeance with a cane. The only effect of this
threat was that Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery in the most
contemptuous terms, and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel,
which, if the impostor had not been too wise to encounter it, would
assuredly have descended upon him, to borrow the sublime language of his
own epic poem, "like a hammer on the red son of the furnace."

Of other assailants Johnson took no notice whatever. He had early
resolved never to be drawn into controversy; and he adhered to his
resolution with a steadfastness which is the more extraordinary,
because he was, both intellectually and morally, of the stuff of which
controversialists are made. In conversation, he was a singularly eager,
acute, and pertinacious disputant. When at a loss for good reasons,
he had recourse to sophistry; and, when heated by altercation, he made
unsparing use of sarcasm and invective. But, when he took his pen in his
hand, his whole character seemed to be changed. A hundred bad writers
misrepresented him and reviled him; but not one of the hundred could
boast of having been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or even of
a retort. The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, and Hendersons, did their
best to annoy him, in the hope that he would give them importance by
answering them. But the reader will in vain search his works for
any allusion to Kenrick or Campbell, to MacNicol or Henderson. One
Scotchman, bent on vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him
to the combat in a detestable Latin hexameter.

     "Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum."

But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He had learned, both from
his own observation and from literary history, in which he was deeply
read, that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by
what is written about them, but by what is written in them; and that
an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops
to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die. He always
maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by
being beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall
if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth
than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down
but by himself.

Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the Journey to the
Hebrides, Johnson did what none of his envious assailants could have
done, and to a certain extent succeeded in writing himself down. The
disputes between England and her American colonies had reached a point
at which no amicable adjustment was possible. Civil war was evidently
impending; and the ministers seem to have thought that the eloquence of
Johnson might with advantage be employed to inflame the nation against
the opposition here, and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic. He
had already written two or three tracts in defence of the foreign and
domestic policy of the government; and those tracts, though hardly
worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of pamphlets which lay on
the counters of Almon and Stockdale. But his Taxation No Tyranny was a
pitiable failure. The very title was a silly phrase, which can have been
recommended to his choice by nothing but a jingling alliteration which
he ought to have despised. The arguments were such as boys use in
debating societies. The pleasantry was as awkward as the gambols of a
hippopotamus. Even Boswell was forced to own that, in this unfortunate
piece, he could detect no trace of his master's powers. The general
opinion was that the strong faculties which had produced the Dictionary
and the Rambler were beginning to feel the effect of time and of
disease, and that the old man would best consult his credit by writing
no more.

But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not because his mind
was less vigorous than when he wrote Rasselas in the evenings of a week,
but because he had foolishly chosen, or suffered others to choose for
him, a subject such as he would at no time have been competent to treat.
He was in no sense a statesman. He never willingly read or thought or
talked about affairs of state. He loved biography, literary history, the
history of manners; but political history was positively distasteful to
him. The question at issue between the colonies and the mother country
was a question about which he had really nothing to say. He failed,
therefore, as the greatest men must fail when they attempt to do that
for which they are unfit; as Burke would have failed if Burke had tried
to write comedies like those of Sheridan; as Reynolds would have failed
if Reynolds had tried to paint landscapes like those of Wilson. Happily,
Johnson soon had an opportunity of proving most signally that his
failure was not to be ascribed to intellectual decay.

On Easter Eve 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting which consisted
of forty of the first booksellers in London, called upon him. Though he
had some scruples about doing business at that season, he received his
visitors with much civility. They came to inform him that a new edition
of the English poets, from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and
to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook
the task, a task for which he was pre-eminently qualified. His knowledge
of the literary history of England since the Restoration was unrivalled.
That knowledge he had derived partly from books, and partly from sources
which had long been closed; from old Grub Street traditions; from the
talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers who had long been lying in
parish vaults; from the recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley,
who had conversed with the wits of Button; Cibber, who had mutilated the
plays of two generations of dramatists; Orrery, who had been admitted to
the society of Swift; and Savage, who had rendered services of no very
honourable kind to Pope. The biographer therefore sate down to his task
with a mind full of matter. He had at first intended to give only
a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or five pages to the
greatest name. But the flood of anecdote and criticism overflowed the
narrow channel. The work, which was originally meant to consist only of
a few sheets, swelled into ten volumes, small volumes, it is true, and
not closely printed. The first four appeared in 1779, the remaining six
in 1781.

The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson's works.
The narratives are as entertaining as any novel. The remarks on life and
on human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are
often excellent, and, even when grossly and provokingly unjust, well
deserve to be studied. For, however erroneous they may be, they are
never silly. They are the judgments of a mind trammelled by prejudice
and deficient in sensibility, but vigorous and acute. They therefore
generally contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be
separated from the alloy; and, at the very worst, they mean something,
a praise to which much of what is called criticism in our time has no
pretensions.

Savage's Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had appeared in 1744.
Whoever, after reading that life, will turn to the other lives will be
struck by the difference of style. Since Johnson had been at ease in
his circumstances he had written little and had talked much. When,
therefore, he, after the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism
which he had contracted while he was in the constant habit of elaborate
composition was less perceptible than formerly; and his diction
frequently had a colloquial ease which it had formerly wanted. The
improvement may be discerned by a skilful critic in the Journey to the
Hebrides, and in the Lives of the Poets is so obvious that it cannot
escape the notice of the most careless reader.

Among the lives the best are perhaps those of Cowley, Dryden, and Pope.
The very worst is, beyond all doubt, that of Gray.

This great work at once became popular. There was, indeed, much just
and much unjust censure: but even those who were loudest in blame were
attracted by the book in spite of themselves. Malone computed the gains
of the publishers at five or six thousand pounds. But the writer
was very poorly remunerated. Intending at first to write very
short prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred guineas. The
booksellers, when they saw how far his performance had surpassed his
promise, added only another hundred. Indeed, Johnson, though he did not
despise, or affect to despise, money, and though his strong sense
and long experience ought to have qualified him to protect his own
interests, seems to have been singularly unskilful and unlucky in his
literary bargains. He was generally reputed the first English writer of
his time. Yet several writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums
such as he never ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Robertson
received four thousand five hundred pounds for the History of Charles
V.; and it is no disrespect to the memory of Robertson to say that the
History of Charles V. is both a less valuable and a less amusing book
than the Lives of the Poets.

Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirmities of age were
coming fast upon him. That inevitable event of which he never thought
without horror was brought near to him; and his whole life was
darkened by the shadow of death. He had often to pay the cruel price of
longevity. Every year he lost what could never be replaced. The strange
dependents to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in spite of their
faults, he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off one by one;
and, in the silence of his home, he regretted even the noise of their
scolding matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no more; and it would
have been well if his wife had been laid beside him. But she survived to
be the laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and to draw from the
eyes of the old man who had loved her beyond anything in the world
tears far more bitter than he would have shed over her grave. With
some estimable and many agreeable qualities, she was not made to be
independent. The control of a mind more steadfast than her own was
necessary to her respectability. While she was restrained by her
husband, a man of sense and firmness, indulgent to her taste in trifles,
but always the undisputed master of his house, her worst offences had
been impertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettishness ending
in sunny good humour. But he was gone; and she was left an opulent widow
of forty, with strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment.
She soon fell in love with a music-master from Brescia, in whom nobody
but herself could discover anything to admire. Her pride, and perhaps
some better feelings, struggled hard against this degrading passion.
But the struggle irritated her nerves, soured her temper, and at length
endangered her health. Conscious that her choice was one which Johnson
could not approve, she became desirous to escape from his inspection.
Her manner towards him changed. She was sometimes cold and sometimes
petulant. She did not conceal her joy when he left Streatham; she never
pressed him to return; and, if he came unbidden, she received him in
a manner which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome guest. He
took the very intelligible hints which she gave. He read, for the last
time, a chapter of the Greek testament in the library which had been
formed by himself. In a solemn and tender prayer he commended the house
and its inmates to the Divine protection, and, with emotions which
choked his voice and convulsed his powerful frame, left for ever that
beloved home for the gloomy and desolate house behind Fleet Street,
where the few and evil days which still remained to him were to run out.
Here, in June 1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which, however,
he recovered, and which does not appear to have at all impaired his
intellectual faculties. But other maladies came thick upon him. His
asthma tormented him day and night. Dropsical symptoms made their
appearance. While sinking under a complication of diseases, he heard
that the woman whose friendship had been the chief happiness of sixteen
years of his life had married an Italian fiddler; that all London was
crying shame upon her; and that the newspapers and magazines were filled
with allusions to the Ephesian matron, and the two pictures in Hamlet.
He vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence. He never
uttered her name. Every memorial of her which met his eye he flung
into the fire. She meanwhile fled from the laughter and hisses of her
countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was unknown, hastened
across Mount Cenis, and learned, while passing a merry Christmas of
concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that the great man with whose
name hers is inseparably associated had ceased to exist.

He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily affliction, clung
vehemently to life. The feeling described in that fine but gloomy paper
which closes the series of his Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as
his last hour drew near. He fancied that he should be able to draw his
breath more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have set
out for Rome and Naples, but for his fear of the expense of the journey.
That expense, indeed, he had the means of defraying; for he had laid
up about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labours which had made the
fortune of several publishers. But he was unwilling to break in upon
this hoard; and he seems to have wished even to keep its existence a
secret. Some of his friends hoped that the government might be induced
to increase his pension to six hundred pounds a year: but this hope was
disappointed; and he resolved to stand one English winter more. That
winter was his last. His legs grew weaker; his breath grew shorter; the
fatal water gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, courageous
against pain, but timid against death, urged his surgeons to make deeper
and deeper. Though the tender care which had mitigated his sufferings
during months of sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, he was not left
desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, and refused
to accept fees from him. Burke parted from him with deep emotion.
Windham sate much in the sick room, arranged the pillows, and sent his
own servant to watch a night by the bed. Frances Burney, whom the old
man had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at the door;
while Langton, whose piety eminently qualified him to be an adviser and
comforter at such a time, received the last pressure of his friend's
hand within. When at length the moment, dreaded through so many years,
came close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson's mind. His temper
became unusually patient and gentle; he ceased to think with terror of
death, and of that which lies beyond death; and he spoke much of the
mercy of God, and of the propitiation of Christ. In this serene frame of
mind he died on the 13th of December 1784. He was laid, a week later,
in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had been the
historian,--Cowley and Denham, Dryden and Congreve, Gay, Prior, and
Addison.

Since his death the popularity of his works--the Lives of the Poets,
and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human Wishes, excepted--has greatly
diminished. His Dictionary has been altered by editors till it can
scarcely be called his. An allusion to his Rambler or his Idler is not
readily apprehended in literary circles. The fame even of Rasselas has
grown somewhat dim. But, though the celebrity of the writings may have
declined, the celebrity of the writer, strange to say, is as great as
ever. Boswell's book has done for him more than the best of his own
books could do. The memory of other authors is kept alive by their
works. But the memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive. The old
philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal buttons
and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking, puffing, rolling
his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger,
and swallowing his tea in oceans. No human being who has been more than
seventy years in the grave is so well known to us. And it is but just
to say that our intimate acquaintance with what he would himself have
called the anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves
only to strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good
man.

*****




WILLIAM PITT. (January 1859.)

William Pitt, the second son of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and of
Lady Hester Granville, daughter of Hester Countess Temple, was born on
the 28th of May 1759. The child inherited a name which, at the time
of his birth, was the most illustrious in the civilised world, and was
pronounced by every Englishman with pride, and by every enemy of England
with mingled admiration and terror. During the first year of his life,
every month had its illuminations and bonfires, and every wind brought
some messenger charged with joyful tidings and hostile standards. In
Westphalia the English infantry won a great battle which arrested the
armies of Louis the Fifteenth in the midst of a career of conquest;
Boscawen defeated one French fleet on the coast of Portugal; Hawke put
to flight another in the Bay of Biscay; Johnson took Niagara; Amherst
took Ticonderoga; Wolfe died by the most enviable of deaths under the
walls of Quebec; Clive destroyed a Dutch armament in the Hooghly, and
established the English supremacy in Bengal; Coote routed Lally at
Wandewash, and established the English supremacy in the Carnatic. The
nation, while loudly applauding the successful warriors, considered them
all, on sea and on land, in Europe, in America, and in Asia, merely as
instruments which received their direction from one superior mind.
It was the great William Pitt, the great commoner, who had vanquished
French marshals in Germany, and French admirals on the Atlantic; who
had conquered for his country one great empire on the frozen shores
of Ontario, and another under the tropical sun near the mouths of the
Ganges. It was not in the nature of things that popularity such as he
at this time enjoyed should be permanent. That popularity had lost
its gloss before his children were old enough to understand that their
father was a great man. He was at length placed in situations in which
neither his talents for administration nor his talents for debate
appeared to the best advantage. The energy and decision which had
eminently fitted him for the direction of war were not needed in time
of peace. The lofty and spirit-stirring eloquence which had made him
supreme in the House of Commons often fell dead on the House of Lords. A
cruel malady racked his joints, and left his joints only to fall on his
nerves and on his brain. During the closing years of his life, he was
odious to the court, and yet was not on cordial terms with the great
body of the opposition. Chatham was only the ruin of Pitt, but an
awful and majestic ruin, not to be contemplated by any man of sense
and feeling without emotions resembling those which are excited by the
remains of the Parthenon and of the Coliseum. In one respect the old
statesman was eminently happy. Whatever might be the vicissitudes of his
public life, he never failed to find peace and love by his own hearth.
He loved all his children, and was loved by them; and, of all his
children, the one of whom he was fondest and proudest was his second
son.

The child's genius and ambition displayed themselves with a rare and
almost unnatural precocity. At seven, the interest which he took in
grave subjects, the ardour with which he pursued his studies, and the
sense and vivacity of his remarks on books and on events, amazed his
parents and instructors. One of his sayings of this date was reported to
his mother by his tutor. In August 1766, when the world was agitated
by the news that Mr Pitt had become Earl of Chatham, little William
exclaimed, "I am glad that I am not the eldest son. I want to speak
in the House of Commons like papa." A letter is extant in which Lady
Chatham, a woman of considerable abilities, remarked to her lord, that
their younger son at twelve had left far behind him his elder brother,
who was fifteen. "The fineness," she wrote, "of William's mind makes him
enjoy with the greatest pleasure what would be above the reach of any
other creature of his small age." At fourteen the lad was in intellect a
man. Hayley, who met him at Lyme in the summer of 1773, was astonished,
delighted, and somewhat overawed, by hearing wit and wisdom from so
young a mouth. The poet, indeed, was afterwards sorry that his shyness
had prevented him from submitting the plan of an extensive literary
work, which he was then meditating, to the judgment of this
extraordinary boy. The boy, indeed, had already written a tragedy, bad
of course, but not worse than the tragedies of his friend. This piece
is still preserved at Chevening, and is in some respects highly curious.
There is no love. The whole plot is political; and it is remarkable that
the interest, such as it is, turns on a contest about a regency. On one
side is a faithful servant of the Crown, on the other an ambitious and
unprincipled conspirator. At length the King, who had been missing,
reappears, resumes his power, and rewards the faithful defender of his
rights. A reader who should judge only by internal evidence would have
no hesitation in pronouncing that the play was written by some Pittite
poetaster at the time of the rejoicings for the recovery of George the
Third in 1789.

The pleasure with which William's parents observed the rapid development
of his intellectual powers was alloyed by apprehensions about his
health. He shot up alarmingly fast; he was often ill, and always weak;
and it was feared that it would be impossible to rear a stripling so
tall, so slender, and so feeble. Port wine was prescribed by his medical
advisers: and it is said that he was, at fourteen, accustomed to take
this agreeable physic in quantities which would, in our abstemious
age, be thought much more than sufficient for any full-grown man. This
regimen, though it would probably have killed ninety-nine boys out of
a hundred, seems to have been well suited to the peculiarities of
William's constitution; for at fifteen he ceased to be molested by
disease, and, though never a strong man, continued, during many years of
labour and anxiety, of nights passed in debate and of summers passed in
London, to be a tolerably healthy one. It was probably on account of the
delicacy of his frame that he was not educated like other boys of the
same rank. Almost all the eminent English statesmen and orators to whom
he was afterwards opposed or allied, North, Fox, Shelburne, Windham,
Grey, Wellesley, Grenville, Sheridan, Canning, went through the training
of great public schools. Lord Chatham had himself been a distinguished
Etonian: and it is seldom that a distinguished Etonian forgets his
obligations to Eton. But William's infirmities required a vigilance and
tenderness such as could be found only at home. He was therefore bred
under the paternal roof. His studies were superintended by a clergyman
named Wilson; and those studies, though often interrupted by illness,
were prosecuted with extraordinary success. Before the lad had completed
his fifteenth year, his knowledge both of the ancient languages and
of mathematics was such as very few men of eighteen then carried up to
college. He was therefore sent, towards the close of the year 1773,
to Pembroke Hall, in the university of Cambridge. So young a student
required much more than the ordinary care which a college tutor bestows
on undergraduates. The governor, to whom the direction of William's
academical life was confided, was a bachelor of arts named Pretyman, who
had been senior wrangler in the preceding year, and who, though not a
man of prepossessing appearance or brilliant parts, was eminently
acute and laborious, a sound scholar, and an excellent geometrician.
At Cambridge, Pretyman was, during more than two years, the inseparable
companion, and indeed almost the only companion of his pupil. A close
and lasting friendship sprang up between the pair. The disciple was
able, before he completed his twenty-eighth year, to make his preceptor
Bishop of Lincoln and Dean of St Paul's; and the preceptor showed
his gratitude by writing a life of the disciple, which enjoys the
distinction of being the worst biographical work of its size in the
world.

Pitt, till he graduated, had scarcely one acquaintance, attended chapel
regularly morning and evening, dined every day in hall, and never went
to a single evening party. At seventeen, he was admitted, after the bad
fashion of those times, by right of birth, without any examination, to
the degree of the Master of Arts. But he continued during some years
to reside at college, and to apply himself vigorously, under Pretyman's
direction, to the studies of the place, while mixing freely in the best
academic society.

The stock of learning which Pitt laid in during this part of his life
was certainly very extraordinary. In fact, it was all that he ever
possessed; for he very early became too busy to have any spare time
for books. The work in which he took the greatest delight was Newton's
Principia. His liking for mathematics, indeed, amounted to a passion,
which, in the opinion of his instructors, themselves distinguished
mathematicians, required to be checked rather than encouraged. The
acuteness and readiness with which he solved problems was pronounced by
one of the ablest of the moderators, who in those days presided over
the disputations in the schools, and conducted the examinations of the
Senate House, to be unrivalled in the university. Nor was the youth's
proficiency in classical learning less remarkable. In one respect,
indeed, he appeared to disadvantage when compared with even second-rate
and third-rate men from public schools. He had never, while under
Wilson's care, been in the habit of composing in the ancient languages:
and he therefore never acquired that knack of versification which is
sometimes possessed by clever boys whose knowledge of the language and
literature of Greece and Rome is very superficial. It would have been
utterly out of his power to produce such charming elegiac lines as those
in which Wellesley bade farewell to Eton, or such Virgilian hexameters
as those in which Canning described the pilgrimage to Mecca. But it may
be doubted whether any scholar has ever, at twenty, had a more solid and
profound knowledge of the two great tongues of the old civilised world.
The facility with which he penetrated the meaning of the most intricate
sentences in the Attic writers astonished veteran critics. He had set
his heart on being intimately acquainted with all the extant poetry
of Greece, and was not satisfied till he had mastered Lycophron's
Cassandra, the most obscure work in the whole range of ancient
literature. This strange rhapsody, the difficulties of which have
perplexed and repelled many excellent scholars, "he read," says his
preceptor, "with an ease at first sight, which, if I had not witnessed
it, I should have thought beyond the compass of human intellect."

To modern literature Pitt paid comparatively little attention. He knew
no living language except French; and French he knew very imperfectly.
With a few of the best English writers he was intimate, particularly
with Shakspeare and Milton. The debate in Pandemonium was, as it well
deserved to be, one of his favourite passages; and his early friends
used to talk, long after his death, of the just emphasis and the
melodious cadence with which they had heard him recite the incomparable
speech of Belial. He had indeed been carefully trained from infancy in
the art of managing his voice, a voice naturally clear and deep-toned.
His father, whose oratory owed no small part of its effect to that art,
had been a most skilful and judicious instructor. At a later period,
the wits of Brookes's, irritated by observing, night after night, how
powerfully Pitt's sonorous elocution fascinated the rows of country
gentlemen, reproached him with having been "taught by his dad on a
stool."

His education, indeed, was well adapted to form a great parliamentary
speaker. One argument often urged against those classical studies which
occupy so large apart of the early life of every gentleman bred in the
south of our island is, that they prevent him from acquiring a command
of his mother tongue, and that it is not unusual to meet with a youth
of excellent parts, w

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