less provoking. My own favorite "Life" is that of Sir Richard Blackmore. The poorer the poet the kindlier is the treatment he receives. Johnson kept all his rough words for Shakspeare, Milton, and Gray. In this trait, surely an amiable one, he was much resembled by that eminent man the late Sir George Jessel, whose civility to a barrister was always in inverse ratio to the barrister's practice; and whose friendly zeal in helping young and nervous practitioners over the stiles of legal difficulty was only equaled by the fiery enthusiasm with which he thrust back the Attorney and Solicitor-General and people of that sort. As a political thinker Johnson has not had justice. He has been lightly dismissed as the last of the old-world Tories. He was nothing of the sort. His cast of political thought is shared by thousands to this day. He represents that vast army of electors whom neither canvasser nor caucus has ever yet cajoled or bullied into a polling booth. Newspapers may scold, platforms may shake; whatever circulars can do may be done, all that placards can tell may be told; but the fact remains that one third of every constituency in the realm shares Dr. Johnson's "narcotic indifference," and stays away. It is, of course, impossible to reconcile all Johnson's recorded utterances with any one view of anything. When crossed in conversation or goaded by folly he was, like the prophet Habakkuk (according to Voltaire), capable du tout. But his dominant tone about politics was something of this sort. Provided a man lived in a state which guaranteed him private liberty and secured him public order, he was very much of a knave or altogether a fool if he troubled himself further. To go to bed when you wish, to get up when you like, to eat and drink and read what you choose, to say across your port or your tea whatever occurs to you at the moment, and to earn your living as best you may-this is what Dr. Johnson meant by private liberty. Fleet Street open day and night - this is what he meant by public order. Give a sensible man these, and take all the rest the world goes round. Tyranny was a bugbear. Either the tyranny was bearable, or it was not. If it was bearable, it did not matter; and as soon as it became unbearable the mob cut off the tyrant's head, and wise men went home to their dinner. To views of this sort he gave emphatic utterance on the well-known occasion when he gave Sir Adam Ferguson a bit of his mind. Sir Adam had innocently enough observed that the Crown had too much power. Thereupon Johnson : "Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the Crown? The Crown has not power enough. When I say that all governments are alike, I consider that in no government power can be abused long; mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny that will keep us safe under every form of government." This is not and never was the language of Toryism. It is a much more intellectual "ism." It is indifferentism. So, too, in his able pamphlet, "The False Alarm," which had reference to Wilkes and the Middlesex election, though he no doubt attempts to deal with the constitutional aspect of the question, the real strength of his case is to be found in passages like the following: "The grievance which has produced all this tempest of outrage, the oppression in which all other oppressions are included, the invasion which has left us no property, the alarm that suffers no patriot to sleep in quiet, is comprised in a vote of the House of Commons, by which the freeholders of Middlesex are deprived of a Briton's birthright-representation in Parliament. They have, indeed, received the usual writ of election; but that writ, alas! was malicious mockery; they were insulted with the form, but denied the reality, for there was one man excepted from their choice. The character of the man, thus fatally excepted, I have no purpose to delineate. Lampoon itself would disdain to speak ill of him of whom no man speaks well. Every lover of liberty stands doubtful of the fate of posterity, because the chief county in England cannot take its representative from a jail." Temperament was of course at the bottom of this indifference. Johnson was of melancholy humor and profoundly skeptical. Cynical he was not he loved his fellow-men; his days were full of Little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. But he was as difficult to rouse to enthusiasm about humanity as is Mr. Justice Stephen. He pitied the poor devils, but he did not believe in them. They were neither happy nor wise, and he saw no reason to believe they would ever become either. "Leave me alone," he cried to the sultry mob bawling "Wilkes and Liberty." "I at least am not ashamed to own that I care for neither the one nor the other." No man, however, resented more fiercely than Johnson any unnecessary interference with men who were simply going their own way. The Highlanders only knew Gaelic, yet political wiseacres were to be found objecting to their having the Bible in their own tongue. Johnson flew to arms: he wrote one of his monumental letters; the opposition was quelled, and the Gael got his Bible. So too the wicked interference with Irish enterprise, so much in vogue during the last century, infuriated him. "Sir," he said to Sir Thomas Robinson, "you talk the language of a savage. of a savage. What, sir! would you prevent any people from feeding themselves, if by any honest means they can do so?" Were Johnson to come to life again, total abstainer as he often was, he would, I expect, denounce the principle involved in "Local Option." I am not at all sure he would not borrow a guinea from a bystander and become a subscriber to the "Property Defence League"; and though it is notorious that he never read any book all through, and never could be got to believe that anybody else ever did, he would, I think, read a larger fraction of Mr. Spencer's pamphlet, "Man versus the State,' than of any other "recent work in circulation." The state of the Strand, when two vestries are at work upon it, would, I am sure, drive him into open rebellion. As a letter writer Johnson has great merits. Let no man despise the epistolary art. It is said to be extinct. I doubt it. Good letters were always scarce. It does not follow that, because our grandmothers wrote long letters, they all wrote good ones, or that nobody nowadays writes good letters because most people write bad ones. Johnson wrote letters in two styles. One was monumental more suggestive of the chisel than the pen. In the other there are traces of the same style, but, like the old Gothic architecture, it has grown domesticated, and become the fit vehicle of plain tidings of joy and sorrow-of affection, wit, and fancy. The letter to Lord Chesterfield is the most celebrated example of the monumental style. From the letters to Mrs. Thrale many good examples of the domesticated style might be selected. One must suffice: If "Queeney has been a good girl, and wrote me a letter. Burney said she would write, she told you a fib. She writes nothing to me. She can write home fast enough. I have a good mind not to tell her that Dr. Bernard, to whom I had recommended her novel, speaks of it with great commendation, and that the copy which she lent me has been read by Dr. Lawrence three times over. And yet what a gypsy it is. She no more minds me than if I were a Branghton. Pray, speak to Queeney to write again. . . . Now you think yourself the first writer in the world for a letter about nothing. Can you write such a letter as this? So miscellaneous, with such noble disdain of regularity, like Shakspeare's works; such graceful negligence of transition, like the ancient enthusiasts. The pure voice of Nature and of Friendship. Now, of whom shall I proceed to speak? of whom but Mrs. Montague? Having mentioned Shakspeare and Nature, does not the name of Montague force itself upon me? Such were the transitions of the ancients, which now seem abrupt, because the intermediate idea is lost to modern understandings." But the extract had better end, for there are (I fear) "modern understandings" who will not perceive the "intermediate idea" between Shakspeare and Mrs. Montague, and to whom even the name of Branghton will suggest no meaning. Johnson's literary fame is, in our judgment, as secure as his character. Like the stone which he placed over his father's grave at Lichfield, and which, it is shameful to think, has been removed, it is "too massy and strong" to be ever much affected by the wind and weather of our literary atmosphere. "Never," so he wrote to Mrs. Thrale, "let criticisms operate upon your face or your mind; it is very rarely that an author is hurt by his critics. The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out; but it often dies in the socket. From the author of "Fitzosborne's Letters' I cannot think myself in much danger. I met him only once, about thirty years ago, and in some small dispute soon reduced him to whistle." Dr. Johnson is in no danger from anybody. None but Gargantua could blow him out, and he still burns brightly in his socket. How long this may continue who can say? It is a far cry to 1985. Science may by that time have squeezed out literature, and the author of the "Lives of the Poets" may be dimly remembered as an odd fellow who lived in the Dark Ages, and had a very creditable fancy for making chemical experiments. On the other hand, the Spiritualists may be in possession, in which case the Cock Lane Ghost will occupy more of public attention than Boswell's hero, who will, perhaps, be reprobated as the profane utterer of these idle words: "Suppose I know a man to be so lame that he is absolutely incapable to move himself, and I find him in a different room from that in which I left him, shall I puzzle myself with idle conjectures that perhaps his nerves have by some unknown change all at once become effective? No, sir, it is clear how he got into a different room - he was carried." We here part company with Johnson, bidding him a most affectionate farewell, and leaving him in undisturbed possession of both place and power. His character will bear investigation and some of his books perusal. The latter, indeed, may be submitted to his own test, and there is no truer one. A book, he wrote, should help us either to enjoy life or to endure it. His frequently do both. THE PLEASURES OF MEMORY. BY SAMUEL ROGERS. [SAMUEL ROGERS: an English poet, born at Newington Green, London, July 30, 1763; died in London, December 18, 1855. He was carefully educated by private tutors, and when about seventeen years old entered his father's bank, where he remained during the rest of his life, succeeding his father as proprietor in 1793. His best-known poem, "The Pleasures of Memory" (1792), passed through many editions. His other works include "The Voyage of Columbus" (1812), “Jacqueline" (1813), "Human Life" (1819), and "Italy" (1822).] SWEET MEMORY, wafted by thy gentle gale, Oft up the tide of Time I turn my sail, Ages and climes remote to Thee impart The friends of Reason, and the guides of Youth, |