"SIR, "TO DOCTOR SAMUEL JOHNSON. "I have this moment received your letter, dated the 19th, and returned from Bath. "In the beginning of the summer I placed one in the Chartreux, without the sanction of a recommendation so distinct and so authoritative as yours of Macbean; and I am afraid that, according to the establishment of the House, the opportunity of making the charity so good amends will not soon recur. But whenever a vacancy shall happen, if you'll favour me with notice of it, I will try to recommend him to the place, even though it should not be my turn to nominate. "I hope you will forgive the liberty I take, in soliciting your interposition with his Grace the Archbishop: my first petition was successful, and I therefore venture on a second. "The matron of the Chartreux is about to resign her place, and Mrs. Desmoulins, a daughter of the late Dr. Swinfen, who was well known to your father, is desirous of succeeding her. She has been accustomed, by keeping a boarding school, to the care of children, and I think is very likely to discharge her duty. She is in great distress, and therefore may probably receive the benefit of a charitable foundation. If you wish to see her, she will be willing to give an account of herself. "If you shall be pleased, Sir, to mention her favourably to his Grace, you will do a great act of kindness to, "Sir, your most obliged "And most humble Servant, SELF-ABASEMENT. 375 Thus the old man moves on in the seemingly quiet round of his daily life, doing many little acts of mercy as he goes-scattering at every step almost the divine seed of some beautiful unostentatious deed. Yet here are two sentences from his Meditations on his last birthday,-sentences which make one reflect for a moment : "I am now beginning the seventy-second year of my life, with more strength of body, and greater vigour of mind, than I think is common at that age. Surely I shall not spend my * whole life with my own total disapprobation." Those touching letters, then, on behalf of poor friends who have appealed to him to whom the needy never appeal in vain, have not come back as sunshine to brighten the closing days of the writer of them. Here is a man who, at seventy years of age, gave the world the first half of a work which will last while our language holds together, and who, in the course of a few months, will be ready with the rest: a man whose every word almost is a wise saying and whose every letter is a kind act—and yet this man's deepest thought and most inward feeling is, that he has done, and is doing, nothing; that he is an unprofitable servant at the best. Let us see to it that we estimate aright those stern selfupbraidings; that we discern in them the fruit of the man's true nobility of soul; that we recognise in them his strongest claim to a place among the immortals-who all toiled and saw not the result, fought and fell without knowing on which side the victory lay, laboured hard and sorrowed heavily through all the years. "There's many a good bit of work done with a sad heart." 376 A GREAT WORK. CHAPTER XXXIX "LIVES OF THE POETS" CONCLUDED-CHARACTERISTIC LETTER THE DOCTOR AN EXECUTOR-CONVERSATIONS. (1781.) "SOME time in March (1781) I finished 'The Lives of the Poets,' which I wrote in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste. Written, I hope, in such a manner as may tend to the promotion of piety." This was Johnson's last and greatest contribution to the literature of our country; and it is a masterly piece of work. Written at any period of our Author's life it must have been called a triumph of mind, but, conceived of as written at the age of threescore years and ten, it must be held a triumph of mind over matter. It is the sharpest, clearest, fullest, richest, and easiest of all the Doctor's writings: the ripest fruit of his massive intellect and great heart. It is not a mere book made; it is a great work done. It is a noble series of philosophical discussions, moral paintings, and critical dissertations all combined: a body of literary biography in the strictest sense of the word. We should be willing to stake our Author's credit as the intellectual hero of his time on this work alone. The lives of Cowley, Dryden, Pope, Milton, and Savage are specially admirable. We admit that a few of the authors have, though only in one or two respects, received scant justice from their biographer. The Doctor has certainly been unfair to the poetry of Gray and to the politics of Milton: he did not understand the one, and he did not like the other. But, on the whole, we must claim for these "Lives of the Poets" the merit of grand impartiality, in addition to all A CHARACTERISTIC LETTER. : 377 their other excellences. What Johnson said of those who assailed him at the time for his alleged injustice to one or two of the poets, he would have repeated now as a sufficient answer to more recent objectors: "Sir, I considered myself as entrusted with a certain portion of truth. I have given my opinion sincerely let them show where they think me wrong." But even then all sounds of blame were quickly drowned by loud applause; and any condemnatory judgments of our own time would be still more easily put down. As the Doctor himself says magnificently in a letter to Mrs. Thrale: "The blaze of reputation cannot be blown out, but it often dies in the socket; a very few names may be considered as perpetual lamps that shine unconsumed." And his is one of those ever-burning flames, which cannot be blown out, and has no chance * of dying in the socket. In the February of this year Boswell wrote to Johnson complaining of having been vexed by a recurrence of a question that troubled him often-that of Liberty and Necessity-and mentioning that he hoped to meet the Doctor soon in London. The Doctor's reply is brief, but thoroughly characteristic: "DEAR SIR, "TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ. 66 'March 14, 1781. "I hoped you had got rid of all this hypocrisy of misery. What have you to do with Liberty and Necessity? Or what more than to hold your tongue about it? Do not doubt but I shall be most heartily glad to see you here again, for I love every part about you but your affectation of distress. "I have at last finished my Lives, and have laid up for you a load of copy, all out of order, so that it will amuse you a long time to set it right. Come to me, my dear Bozzy, and let us be as We will go again to the Mitre, and talk old happy as we can. times over. "I am, dear Sir, "Yours affectionately, "SAM. JOHNSON." Two sentences of this little letter ought to be written in gold: 378 THE DOCTOR'S PECULIARITIES. "What have you to do with Liberty and Necessity? Or what more than to hold your tongue about it?” But Necessity and Liberty both combined to take Boswell periodically to London : it seemed to be necessary that he should resolve to go, and then he luckily found himself at liberty to carry out his resolution. On the last occasion he had found his friend in bed: this time he met him walking in Fleet Street. The Doctor's walk was peculiar, and has been thus described: "When he walked the streets, what with the constant roll of his head and the concomitant motion of his body, he appeared to make his way by that motion, independent of his feet." He was usually much stared at as he moved along, but his large size effectually checked all tendency to laughter. Mr. Langton saw him one day, in a fit of absent-mindedness, inadvertently drive the load off a porter's back, and then walk briskly on as if nothing had happened. The porter was mightily enraged, and had evidently thoughts of following to take his revenge, but he looked again at the retreating figure and decided he had better not. Speaking of the Doctor's walk reminds us of another remarkable peculiarity of his which we shall let Boswell describe: "This was his anxious care to go out or in at a door or passage, by a certain number of steps from a certain point, or at least so as that either his right or his left foot (I am not certain which) should constantly make the first actual movement when he came close to the door or passage. Thus I conjecture; for I have, upon innumerable occasions, observed him suddenly stop, and then seem to count his steps with a deep earnestness; and when he had neglected, or gone wrong in this sort of magical movement, I have seen him go back again, put himself in a proper posture to begin the ceremony, and having gone through it, break from his abstraction, walk briskly on, and join his companion." When the two friends met in Fleet Street that day they were hurrying in different directions; so Boswell could only promise to call on the morrow. The Doctor said he was engaged to go out in the morning. "Early, Sir ?"-" Why, Sir, a London morning does not go with the sun." |