time, Richardson's novels alone excited his admiration. He could see little or no merit in Tom Jones, in Gulliver's Travels, or in Tristram Shandy. To Thomson's Castle of Indolence, he vouchsafed only a line of cold commendation, of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed on the Creation of that

portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore.1 Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal.2 Churchill was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt for the trash of Macpherson was indeed just; but it was, we suspect, just by chance. He despised the Fingal for the very reason which led many men of genius to admire it. He despised it, not because it was essentially common-place, but because it had a superficial air of originality.

He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions fashioned on his own principles. But when a deeper philosophy was required, when he undertook to pronounce judgment on the works of those great minds which "yield homage only to eternal laws," his failure was ignominious. He criticized Pope's Epitaphs excellently. But his observations on Shakspeare's plays and Milton's poems seem to us for the most part as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer himself, whom we take to have been the worst critic that ever lived.

Some of Johnson's whims on literary subjects can be compared only to that strange nervous feeling which made him uneasy if he had not touched every post between the Mitre tavern and his own lodgings. His preference of Latin epitaphs to English epitaphs is an instance. An English epitaph, he said, would disgrace Smollet. He declared that he would not pollute the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English epitaph on Goldsmith.3 What reason there can be for celebrating a British writer in Latin, which there was not for covering the Roman arches of triumph with Greek inscriptions, or for commemorating the deeds of the heroes of Thermopyla in Egyptian hieroglyphics, we are utterly unable to imagine.

1 See p. 258.

"

"

2 Macaulay was here writing from memory. The term barren rascal was applied by Johnson, not to Gray, but to Fielding (Boswell, Tour to the Hebrides, 6th April, 1772). Gray Johnson described as a dull fellow, "dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way and that made many people think him great. He was a mechanical poet" (Boswell, ii., 327, year 1775).

Johnson having composed a Latin epitaph on Goldsmith and sent it to Sir Joshua Reynolds to be considered by the club, its members, including Reynolds himself, Burke, Gibbon and Joseph Warton, drew up a round robin to the effect that the epitaph had better be in English, which called forth the reply in the text (Boswell, iii., 81-85, year 1776).

On men and manners, at least on the men and manners of a particular place and a particular age, Johnson had certainly looked with a most observant and discriminating eye. His remarks on the education of children, on marriage, on the economy of families, on the rules of society, are always striking, and generally sound. In his writings, indeed, the knowledge of life which he possessed in an eminent degree is very imperfectly exhibited. Like those unfortunate chiefs of the middle ages who were suffocated by their own chain-mail and cloth of gold, his maxims perish under that load of words which was designed for their defence and their ornament. But it is clear from the remains of his conversation, that he had more of that homely wisdom which nothing but experience and observation can give than any writer since the time of Swift. If he had been content to write as he talked, he might have left books on the practical art of living superior to the Directions to Servants.1

Yet even his remarks on society, like his remarks on literature, indicate a mind at least as remarkable for narrowness as for strength. He was no master of the great science of human nature. He had studied, not the genus man, but the species Londoner. Nobody was ever so thoroughly conversant with all the forms of life and all the shades of moral and intellectual character which were to be seen from Islington to the Thames, and from Hyde-Park corner to Mile-end green. But his philosophy stopped at the first turnpike-gate. Of the rural life of England he knew nothing; and he took it for granted that every body who lived in the country was either stupid or miserable. "Country gentlemen," said he, "must be unhappy; for they have not enough to keep their lives in motion;" 3 as if all those peculiar habits and associations which made Fleet Street and Charing Cross the finest views in the world to himself had been essential parts of human nature. Of remote countries and past times he talked with wild and ignorant presumption. "The Athenians of the age of Demosthenes," he said to Mrs. Thrale, "4 were a people of brutes, a barbarous people.” 4 In con

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1 It is difficult to understand this reference to the Directions to Servants which, under cover of instruction, are a satire on the failings of servants and masters, displaying Swift's strong sense, keen wit and fierce contempt for human weakness, but scarcely affording rules for "the practical art of living."

2 Dr. Birkbeck Hill has shown the exaggeration of this statement. Johnson spent a considerable portion of his time outside London and must have seen something of country life (Hill's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. iii., Appendix B, p. 450).

8 Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 25th August,

Life of Johnson, ii., 211 (year 1773).

versation with Sir Adam Ferguson he used similar language. "The boasted Athenians," he said, " were barbarians. The mass of every people must be barbarous where there is no printing." The fact was this: he saw that a Londoner who could not read was a very stupid and brutal fellow he saw that great refinement of taste and activity of intellect were rarely found in a Londoner who had not read much; and, because it was by means of books that people acquired almost all their knowledge in the society with which he was acquainted, he concluded, in defiance of the strongest and clearest evidence, that the human mind can be cultivated by means of books alone. An Athenian citizen might possess very few volumes; and the largest library to which he had access might be much less valuable than Johnson's bookcase in Bolt Court. But the Athenian might pass every morning in conversation with Socrates, and might hear Pericles speak four or five times every month. He saw the plays of Sophocles and Aristophanes: he walked amidst the friezes of Phidias and the paintings of Zeuxis: he knew by heart the choruses of Æschylus: he heard the rhapsodist at the corner of the street reciting the shield of Achilles or the Death of Argus: he was a legislator, conversant with high questions of alliance, revenue, and war: he was a soldier, trained under a liberal and generous discipline: he was a judge compelled every day to weigh the effect of opposite arguments. These things were in themselves an education, an education eminently fitted, not, indeed, to form exact or profound thinkers, but to give quickness to the perceptions, delicacy to the taste, fluency to the expression, and politeness to the manners. All this was overlooked. An Athenian who did not improve his mind by reading was, in Johnson's opinion, much such a person as a Cockney who made his mark, much such a person as black Frank before he went to school,2 and far inferior to a parish clerk or a printer's devil.

Johnson's friends have allowed that he carried to a ridiculous extreme his unjust contempt for foreigners. He pronounced the French to be a very silly people, much behind us, stupid, ignorant creatures. And this judgment he formed after having

1 Boswell, ii., 170 (year 1772).

2 Mr. Francis Barber, his faithful negro servant," who came into Johnson's service in 1752, whom he sent to school and whom he liberally remembered in his will.

3 Expressions to much the same effect as those alleged in the text will be found in Boswell, iv., 15 (year 1780).

been at Paris about a month, during which he would not talk French, for fear of giving the natives an advantage over him in conversation. He pronounced them, also, to be an indelicate people, because a French footman touched the sugar with his fingers. That ingenious and amusing traveller, M. Simond,2 has defended his countrymen very successfully against Johnson's accusation, and has pointed out some English practices which, to an impartial spectator, would seem at least as inconsistent with physical cleanliness and social decorum as those which Johnson so bitterly reprehended. To the sage, as Boswell loves to call him, it never occurred to doubt that there must be something eternally and immutably good in the usages to which he had been accustomed. In fact, Johnson's remarks on society beyond the bills of mortality, are generally of much the same kind with those of honest Tom Dawson, the English footman in Dr. Moore's Zeluco.3 66 'Suppose the king of France has no sons, but only a daughter, then, when the king dies, this here daughter, according to that there law, cannot be made queen, but the next near relative, provided he is a man, is made king, and not the last king's daughter, which, to be sure, is very unjust. The French footguards are dressed in blue, and all the marching regiments in white, which has a very foolish appearance for soldiers; and as for blue regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the artillery."

Johnson's visit to the Hebrides introduced him to a state of society completely new to him; and a salutary suspicion of his own deficiencies seems on that occasion to have crossed his mind for the first time. He confessed, in the last paragraph of his Journey, that his thoughts on national manners were the thoughts of one who had seen but little, of one who had passed his time almost wholly in cities. This feeling, however, soon passed away. It is remarkable that to the last he entertained a fixed contempt for all those modes of life and those studies which tend to emancipate the mind from the prejudices of a particular age or a particular nation. Of foreign travel and of history he spoke with the fierce and boisterous contempt of

1 Boswell, ii., 403 (year 1775); iii., 352 (year 1778).

2 Louis Simond, 1767-1831, left France in 1792, and, after travelling in America, lived some time in England. Returning to France he published after Waterloo his Voyage d'un Français en Angleterre. He also published accounts of his travels in Switzerland and Italy.

3 John Moore, M. D., 1729-1802, a physician and a copious author, published in 1786 his first and best novel Zeluco; various Views of Human Nature taken from Life and Manners, Foreign and Domestic.

2

ignorance. "What does a man learn by travelling? Is Beauclerk the better for travelling? What did Lord Charlemont learn in his travels, except that there was a snake in one of the pyramids of Egypt?" History was, in his opinion, to use the fine expression of Lord Plunkett, an old almanack: historians could, as he conceived, claim no higher dignity than that of almanack-makers; and his favourite historians were those who, like Lord Hailes, aspired to no higher dignity. He always spoke with contempt of Robertson.5 Hume he would not even read. He affronted one of his friends for talking to him about Catiline's conspiracy, and declared that he never desired to hear of the Punic war again as long as he lived.

6

Assuredly one fact which does not directly affect our own interests, considered in itself, is no better worth knowing than another fact. The fact that there is a snake in a pyramid, or the fact that Hannibal crossed the Alps, are. in themselves as unprofitable to us as the fact that there is a green blind in a particular house in Threadneedle Street, or the fact that a Mr. Smith comes into the city every morning on the top of one of the Blackwall stages. But it is certain that those who will not crack the shell of history will never get at the kernel. Johnson,

1 Dr. Birkbeck Hill (vol. iii., Appendix B.) has denied this accusation, adducing schemes of foreign travel formed by Johnson.

2 Boswell, iii., 352 (year 1778), not exactly quoted.

See Parliamentary Debates, 28th February, 1825. William Conyngham Plunkett, 1764-1854, the eminent Irish lawyer and orator who distinguished himself as an opponent of the Union and an advocate of Catholic Emancipation. He was created a peer in 1827 and was Chancellor of Ireland from 1830 to 1841.

David Dalrymple, Sir, Lord Hailes, 1726-1792, was a Scotch judge with a taste for learning. His chief historical work was the Annals of Scotland from Malcolm Canmore to the Accession of the House of Stuart, publisheď 1776-1779. The Annals have been praised as "in this country a unique example of a matter-of-fact history in which every point is verified by reference to the original source from which it is derived." The circumstances that Lord Hailes had been educated in England, that he was the intimate friend of several clergymen of the English Church, and that he had written as a Christian apologist against Gibbon may have contributed to raise him in Johnson's opinion.

5 William Robertson, 1721-1793, who published in 1759 a History of Scotland, in 1769 a History of the Emperor Charles V., and in 1777 a History of America, was placed by his contemporaries in the first rank of historians, but has been left behind by the progress of historical knowledge. The same may be said of David Hume. That Robertson was a lax Presbyterian and Hume an avowed freethinker no doubt influenced Johnson's judgment of their historical writings.

"I asked him once concerning the conversational powers of a gentleman with whom I was myself unacquainted. 'He talked to me at club one day,' replies our doctor, concerning Catiline's conspiracy-'so I withdrew my attention and thought about Tom Thumb'" (Anecdotes by Mrs. Piozzi, who also mentions his dislike to hearing of the Punic war, pp. 80, 81).