The the various modes of illustrious achievement. All the GREAT NATIONS OF EUROPE supply their men of thought and action, their great sovereigns, their founders of governments, their distinguished military chieftains, their statesmen, their philanthropists, their scientific discoverers, their poets and artists. new birth of ITALY is exhibited in the record of Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emanuel, and the early rule of Pope Pius; FRANCE has her Marie Antoinette, her Charlotte Corday, her Napoleons, her Thiers; RUSSIA, her Alexander, with his grand work of national reform; GERMANY emerges from the old revolution with her Goëthe, Schiller, Humboldt, to enter upon the empire with King William, Bismarck and Von Moltke; ENGLAND is illustrated from the days of Johnson to those of Dickens and Tennyson in literature; she has her statesmen in Bright, Cobden and Gladstone; her warriors on sea and land in Nelson and Wellington; her philanthropists of both sexes from Wilberforce to Florence Nightingale; her race of female novelists from Jane Austen to Charlotte Bronte; her inventors in such examples as Stephenson and Faraday; SCOTLAND has her Burns, Scott and Livingstone; IRELAND her Burke, Goldsmith, Edgeworth, Curran, Grattan, and O'Connell; while in the UNITED STATES, all of the classes we have alluded to are represented in Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Grant, Webster, Fulton, Morse, Peabody, Bryant and others of either sex, and so we might enumerate the whole of the hundred and more subjects of these biographies. In no work of the kind, thus far published, has the same attention been given to FEMALE BIOGRAPHY AND PORTRAITURE. One-third of the portraits will be of illustrious women, eminent in history, literature, art or philanthropy. It has been the object to present these "lives" of persons of eminence sufficiently in detail to interest the reader in their personal history; to exhibit, to the young particularly, the foundation of their success in early self-denial and resolution; to include all that can be gathered within the necessary limits to display the strong, essential elements of character. The artistical department of the work is greatly indebted to the ability of our native painter, MR. ALONZO CHAPPel. In many instances the portraits have been re-drawn by him, while the selection of originals has been made from the most eminent painters, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Paul de la Roche, and others. They are here presented in a novel style, with characteristic accessories. Unusual pains have been taken in this country and in Europe, to obtain the most reliable authorities; while the engraving of the whole has been entrusted to experienced artists of the highest reputation in London and New York, at a great outlay of cost. / SAMUEL JOHNSON. [N all English biography it is adall English biography it is admitted that the Life of Samuel Johnson, as exhibited by Boswell and his associates in the work, stands forth the fullest in detail and least likely to be exhausted in interest, one generation succeeding another since it was written and the latest still perusing it with eager curiosity. Never before or since, has so minute and faithful a record been given to the world of the personal career of a man of letters, probably of any man in any station of life. The nearest approach to the narrative in English literature is one inspired by it, the life of Sir Walter Scott, by Lockhart, but that is comparatively a simple production when placed by the side of the performance of his elder countryman. Of Burns, also, we know a great deal, as we do of the personality of Scott. The names of these men bring before us at once their noble traits of character, and we may conceive on the instant how they would think and act under any cir cumstances. So too of others of whom less has been written. We may know the men; but we do not know so much of them as we may gather in a few hours from our book-shelves of the life he wrote of Johnson. Between what he wrote of himself and what was written of him by others, of whom his great biographer was only the chief, what with the revelations of his diaries, the candor of his correspondence and the vigorous impression of himself upon his moral writings, we may be inti mately acquainted with him in his inner as well as his outer life through the entire seventy-five years of his existence. For the story begins with his cradle. He was anecdotical even in his infancy. Non sine diis animosus infans. His friend, Sir Joshua Reynolds, turning his pencil in later years from that scarred and seamed countenance, immortal on his canvas, in a fanciful picture portrayed the child as he may then have appeared, a companion to his infant Hercules: "The baby figure of the giant mass, Of things to come at large." The portrait is that of a vigorous, healthy child, and in that respect it was but imaginary, for the real Johnson was, in his early years, sickly and diseased, so miserable an object one of his aunts afterwards told him that 662 a "store of fine pictures and paper-hang ings" which were to be sold precisely at noon "that they may be viewed by daylight;" for Michael Johnson was a conscientious man and would practice no deception even in the sale of pictures. He was of a strong and robust frame, but of a melancholy temperament, arising it may be from a scrofulous taint which his son inherited with his disposition. The mother of Johnson is described by Boswell as woman of distinguished understanding;" but from the account we have of her from her son she was quite illiterate, so that she could not sympathize at all with her husband's love of books; nor was she able to assist him in his business as it became less prosperous and the family encountered the hardships of poverty. Her uneducated piety was sometimes troublesome to her son in his boyhood when she kept him home on Sundays to read the dull and sombre homilies of "The Whole Duty of Man;" but she was kind to him with a mother's fondness enhanced by his sufferings from ill-health, and he always entertained a grateful recollection of her. "she would not have picked such a poor creature up in the street." But Reynolds, always a poet painter, was intent upon a glorification of his subject. This seemingly unhapThis seemingly unhappy child came into the world in the city of Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, on the 18th of September, 1706. The house in which he was born is still standing in 1872 a familiar object to many pilgrims at the corner of a street opening named St. Mary's Square, "a tall and thin house of three stories with a square front and a roof rising steep and high," as it is described by Nathaniel Hawthorne who visited it, and as it may be seen represented in many familiar engravings. Here at the time of the birth of his son Samuel, Michael Johnson, a native of Derbyshire, of obscure extraction, was settled in a humble way as a book seller and stationer. When he was more than fifty he was married to Sarah Ford, of a peasant family in Warwickshire. She was then at the age of forty. Two sons were born to them-Samuel, three years after the union, and three years later, Nathaniel, who died at the age of twenty-five. In the year of his son's birth, Michael Johnson was sheriff of the county; he owned the house in which he resided and generally bore a respectable position in the place. His business as a bookseller was extended by his excursions into the neighboring towns where he opened a shop on market days, held auctions and offered for sale works of various kinds,-law, history, mathematics and a good stock of divinity for the serious and, "to please the ladies," as one of his circulars informs us, a The first authentic anecdote of Johnson, as a child, belongs to his third year, when being thirty months old, at the advice of Sir John Floyer, a notable physician at Lichfield, he was taken by his mother to London to be relieved of his scrofulous disease, the King's Evil, as it was called, by the magical touch of Queen Anne, who, following the royal precedents from the days of Edward the Confessor, as may be read in Shakspeare, was supposed to be gifted with power to relieve that com |