Complete Works of Samuel Johnson, page 619
Johnson thought he was too busy about Corsica, and wrote to him: “Empty your head of Corsica, which I think has filled it rather too long.” But this was in March 1768, when Boswell’s Account of Corsica had already been published. It sold very well, a second and a third edition appearing within the year. Gray and other good judges spoke warmly of it and it seems that a French translation as well as two Dutch ones were made. It caused so much stir and aroused so much sympathy in England that Lord Holland was quite afraid we were going to be “so foolish as to go to war because Mr. Boswell has been in Corsica.” After this it was less likely than ever that Boswell would forget that island. Motives of vanity combined with his genuine enthusiasm to keep him full of it, and he replied to Johnson’s monition: “Empty my head of Corsica! empty it of honour, empty it of humanity, empty it of friendship, empty it of piety! No! while I live, Corsica and the cause of the brave islanders shall ever employ much of my attention and interest me in the sincerest manner.” It seems from his letters to Temple that he found these outbursts a great deal easier than living in a manner worthy of a friend of Paoli. But he did more than talk. He wrote to Chatham to try to interest him in Corsica, and received a reply three pages long applauding his generous warmth; he brought out a volume of British Essays in Favour of the Brave Corsicans, sent Paoli Johnson’s Works and, what was more substantial, forwarded a quantity of ordnance, to buy which he had managed to raise a subscription of 700 pounds. His desire to be a well-known man now began to receive some gratification and he frankly confesses his pleasure at having such men as Johnson, Hume and Franklin dining with him at his chambers. Nor will any reasonable man blame him. His snobbishness, if it is to be so called, was always primarily a snobbishness of mind and character, not of wealth or rank.
Nothing else of importance occurred to him in these years. He was much occupied with the great law-suit about the succession to the Douglas property, on which he wrote two pamphlets and was so sure of the justice of his view that he once dared to tell Johnson he knew nothing about that subject. He was with Johnson at Oxford in 1768 and they were already talking of going to the Hebrides together. The next year, 1769, saw the conquest of Corsica by the French to whom the Genoese had ceded their claims. The result was that Paoli came to London, where he lived till 1789, and Boswell was constantly with him. In this year he did at least one very foolish thing, and at least one very wise one. He made himself ridiculous by going to the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford and appearing in Corsican costume with “Viva la Libertà” embroidered on his cap. He also took the most sensible step of his whole life in marrying his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, on November 25. She never liked Johnson, and her husband had the candour to report an excellent sally of hers at his and his sage’s expense: “I have seen many a bear led by a man; but I never before saw a man led by a bear.” But though, as Boswell says, she could not be expected to like his “irregular hours and uncouth habits,” she never failed in courtesy to him: and he on his part was unwearied in sending friendly messages to his “dear enemy” as he called her, and was well aware of her importance to her husband. The event unhappily proved his prescience; for after her death in 1789, Boswell’s downward course was visibly accelerated.
After Boswell’s marriage there was no communication between him and Johnson for a year and a half, and they did not meet again till March 1772, when Boswell came to London, and stayed some time. The next year he came again, and, by Johnson’s active support, was elected a member of “The Club,” a small society of friends founded by Reynolds and Johnson in 1764. At first it met weekly for supper, but after a few years the members began the custom of dining together on fixed dates which has continued to the present day. Among the members when Boswell was elected were Johnson and Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith and Garrick. Gibbon and Charles Fox came in the next year, and Adam Smith in 1775. In 1780 the number of members was enlarged to forty which is still the limit. “The Club” has always maintained its distinction, and a recent article in the Edinburgh Review records that fifteen Prime Ministers have been members of it, as well as men like Scott, Tennyson, Hallam, Macaulay and Grote. The first advantage over and above pride and pleasure derived by Boswell from his election was the acquaintance of Burke, which he had long desired and retained through life. Burke said of him that he had so much good humour naturally that it was scarcely a virtue in him.
In the autumn of that year, 1773, Johnson and Boswell made their famous tour to the Hebrides. They, in fact, went over much more than the Hebrides, seeing the four Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Aberdeen and Glasgow, besides many less famous places. Johnson says they were everywhere “received like princes in their progress,” and though no doubt hospitality was freer in those days when travellers were few and inns poor, yet the whole story is a remarkable proof of Johnson’s fame and Boswell’s popularity. The University Professors vied with each other in paying civilities to Johnson, the town of Aberdeen gave him its freedom, and among their hosts were magnates like the Duke of Argyll, Lord Errol and Lord Loudoun, who “jumped for joy” at their coming, and great men of law or learning like Lord Monboddo and Lord Elibank.
By this time all the important events in Boswell’s life were over except the publication of his two great books, the Tour to the Hebrides and the Life of Johnson. During all the ten years which Johnson still had to live, except 1780 and 1782, the two friends managed to spend some time together, and when they did not, the friendship was maintained by correspondence. Boswell’s father died in 1782, and Boswell came into possession of the estate, worth 1,600 pounds a year. Johnson and Boswell took more than one “jaunt” in the country together, visiting Oxford, Lichfield and other places. They were at Oxford together in June 1784; but Johnson was then evidently failing. On their return to London, Boswell busied himself with the help of Reynolds in trying to get Johnson’s pension increased, so that he might be able to spend the winter abroad. Johnson was very pleased on hearing of the attempt, saying, when Boswell told him, “‘This is taking prodigious pains about a man.’ ‘O, sir,’ said Boswell, ‘your friends would do everything for you.’ He paused, grew more and more agitated, till tears started into his eyes, and he exclaimed with fervent emotion, ‘God bless you all.’ I was so affected that I also shed tears. After a short silence he renewed and extended his grateful benediction, ‘God bless you all, for Jesus Christ’s sake.’” Those were the last words Boswell heard under Johnson’s roof. The next day they both dined with Reynolds, and on July 2 Boswell left London, to see Johnson no more. Johnson died on the 13th of December 1784.
Fitful and unsuccessful legal and political ambitions occupied a large part of Boswell’s later years. He made some approaches to standing as a candidate for Ayrshire in 1784, and again in 1788, was called to the English Bar in 1786, attached himself to Lord Lonsdale, and hoped to enter Parliament for one of his boroughs, but seems to have got nothing out of his connection with that insolent old bully but a certain amount of humiliation and the Recordership of Carlisle. That unimportant office was the only substantial reward he received from all his long suit and service in the antechambers of law and politics. Whatever he achieved he owed to literature and the friends his love of literature had brought him. It was not the laird or the lawyer, but the friend and biographer of Johnson whom the Royal Academy appointed in 1791 to the complimentary office of their Secretary for Foreign Correspondence. And those last years, while they brought him disappointment in everything else, saw him take definite rank as a successful author. The Tour to the Hebrides was published in 1785, and sold out in a few weeks. The third edition was issued within a year of the appearance of the first. It was followed by the publication of Johnson’s famous Letter to Lord Chesterfield and of an account of his Conversation with George III, and finally in 1791 by the Life itself. A second edition of this was called for in 1793. Boswell only lived two years more. He died on May 19, 1795. He left two sons, Alexander, who became Sir Alexander, was the principal mover in the matter of the Burns Monument on the banks of Doon, and was killed in a duel in 1822; and James, who supplied notes for the third edition of his father’s great book, and edited the third Variorum Shakespeare, known as Boswell’s Malone, in 1821.
Such were the main outlines of the life of the biographer. We may now turn to those of the life which he owes his fame to recording. They are in most ways very unlike his own. Samuel Johnson was very far from being heir to a large estate and an ancient name. He was the son of a bookseller at Lichfield, and was born there on the 18th of September 1709, in a house which is now preserved in public hands in memory of the event of that day. His father’s family was so obscure that he once said, “I can hardly tell who was my grandfather.” His mother was Sarah Ford, who came of a good yeoman stock in Warwickshire. She was both a good and an intelligent woman. Samuel was the elder and only ultimately surviving issue of the marriage. A picturesque incident in his childhood is that his mother took him to London to be “touched” by Queen Anne for the scrofula, or “king’s evil,” as it was called, from which he suffered. He must have been one of the last persons to go through this curious ceremony, which the Georges never performed, though the service for it remained in the Book of Common Prayer for some years after the accession of George I. The boy made an impression upon people from the first. He liked to recall in later life that the dame who first taught him to read brought him a present of gingerbread when he was starting for Oxford, and told him he was the best scholar she had ever had. Afterwards he went to Lichfield School, and at the age of fifteen to Stourbridge. At both he was evidently held in respect by boys and masters alike. Probably the curious combination in him of the invalid and the prize-fighter which was conspicuous all through his life, already arrested attention in his boyhood. He played none of the ordinary games, but yet, as we have already seen, was acknowledged as a leader by the boys, and his abilities were the pride of the school. He already exhibited the amazing memory which enabled him in later life to dictate to Boswell his famous letter to Chesterfield rather than search for a copy, and to confute a person who praised a bad translation from Martial by a contemptuous “Why, sir, the original is thus,” followed by a recitation not only of the Latin original which it is not likely he had looked at for years, but also of the translation which he had only read once. So on another occasion when Baretti, who had read a little Ariosto with him some years before, proposed to give him some more lessons, but feared he might have forgotten their previous readings, “Who forgets, sir?” said Johnson, and immediately repeated three or four stanzas of the Orlando. To the lover of literature there is no possession more precious than a good verbal memory, and this Johnson enjoyed to a very unusual degree all through his life. But it is worth noting that he was entirely free from the defect which commonly results from an exceptional memory. He always thought and spoke for himself, and was never prevented from using his own mind and his own words by the fact that his memory supplied him abundantly with those of others. His scholarly friend Langton annoyed him by depending upon books too much in his conversation, and one of his compliments to Boswell was, “You and I do not talk from books.”
After he left Stourbridge he spent two years at home in desultory reading, “not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient writers, all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod,” the result of which was that when he went up to Oxford, the Master of his College said he was “the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there.” His College was Pembroke, of which he became a Commoner (not a Servitor, as Carlyle said) in 1728. The Oxford of that day was not a place of much discipline and the official order of study was very laxly maintained. It seems not to have meant much to Johnson, and he is described as having spent a good deal of his time “lounging at the College gates with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit and keeping from their studies.” Most good talkers find the first real sphere for their talent when they get to the University, and the best of all was not likely to be an exception, nor to resist that strongest of the intellectual temptations. But he did some solid reading, especially Greek, though he seemed to himself to be very idle, perhaps because his standard was so high that he used to say in later life, “I never knew a man who studied hard.” So when he confesses the imperfections of his Greek scholarship, and other people exaggerate his confession, it is well to remember the reply made by Jacob Bryant when Gifford in an argument quoted Johnson’s admission that “he was not a good Greek scholar,” “Sir, it is not easy for us to say what such a man as Johnson would call a good Greek scholar.” A man whose remedy for sleeplessness was to turn Greek epigrams into Latin was at any rate not ignorant of Greek.
Johnson was prevented by his poverty from getting the full advantages either out of the life or the studies of Oxford. His want of shoes prevented his attending lectures, his pride forbad him to receive doles of help, the friend, said to be a Mr. Corbet of Shropshire, on whose promises of support he had relied in going to Oxford, failed him, his father’s business went from little to less; with the inevitable result that he had to leave Oxford without a degree. This was in December 1729. But he had made an impression there, had a strong affection for his College, and liked going to stay there in the days of his glory. His usual host was one Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke, who had once been his tutor but told Boswell that the relation was only nominal; “he was above my mark.” When he left Oxford he returned to his Lichfield home, where his father died two months later, leaving so little behind him that all that Johnson received of his estate was twenty pounds. He seems to have remained at Lichfield, where the poverty of his family did not prevent his mixing with the most cultivated society of a town rich in cultivated people, till 1732, when he became an usher in a school at Market Bosworth. He hated this monotonous drudgery and left it after a few months, going to live with a Mr. Warren, a Birmingham bookseller of good repute, whom he helped by his knowledge of literature. While in Birmingham he did a translation of a Jesuit book about Abyssinia, for which Warren paid him five guineas. In 1734 he returned to Lichfield, tried without success to obtain subscribers for an edition of the poems of Politian, and offered to write in the Gentleman’s Magazine. It is difficult to see how he supported himself at this period: perhaps he was helped by his mother or by his brother who carried on the bookselling business till his death a little later. Anyhow it was just at this time that he took a step for which poverty generally finds the courage more quickly than wealth. He married Elizabeth Porter at St. Werburgh’s Church, Derby, in July 1735. Mrs. Porter was a widow twice his age and not of an attractive appearance; but there is no doubt that Johnson’s love for her was sincere and lasting. To the end of his life he remembered her frequently in his prayers “if it were lawful,” and kept the anniversary of her death with prayers and tears. Eighteen years after she died he could write in his private note-books that his grief for her was not abated and that he had less pleasure in any good that happened to him, because she could not share it: and in 1782 when she had been dead thirty years, and he was drawing near his own end, he prays for her and after doing so, noted “perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me.”
This was the inner truth of the relation between Johnson and his elderly wife, but it was natural and indeed inevitable that the world, the little world of their acquaintances, should have been chiefly alive to the humorous external aspect of the marriage, and one does not wonder that Beauclerk, whose married life was a scandal following on a divorce, should have enjoyed relating that Johnson had said to him, “Sir, it was a love marriage on both sides!” Johnson’s own account of the actual wedding is singular enough. “Sir, she had read the old romances, and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she could not keep up with me; and, when I rode a little slower, she passed me, and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the slave of caprice; and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed on briskly, till I was fairly out of her sight. The road lay between two hedges, so I was sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should soon come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be in tears.”
Mrs. Johnson was the widow of a Birmingham draper, and brought her husband several hundred pounds, part of which was at once spent in hiring and furnishing a large house at Edial near Lichfield where Johnson proposed to take pupils. But no pupils came except David Garrick and his brother, the sons of an old Lichfield friend, and the “academy” was abandoned after a year and a half. The lack of pupils, however, was perhaps a blessing in disguise, for it enabled Johnson to write most of his tragedy Irene, with which he went to London in March 1737. His pupil, David Garrick, went with him to study law, and when Garrick was a rich, famous and rather vain man, Johnson, who liked to curb the “insolence of wealth” once referred to 1737 as the year “when I came to London with twopence half-penny in my pocket; and thou, Davy, with three-halfpence in thine.” Nothing came of this first visit to the capital. He lived as best he could, dining for eightpence, and seeing a few friends, one of whom was Henry Hervey, son of the Earl of Bristol, of whose kindness he always retained an affectionate memory, so that he once said to Boswell, “If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him.” In the summer he returned to Lichfield, and finished his tragedy, after which he brought his wife back with him to London which was his home for the rest of his life. Efforts to get Irene performed were unsuccessful, but he soon began to write regularly for the Gentleman’s Magazine, of which he held so high an opinion that he looked “with reverence” on the house where it was printed. To this he contributed essays and was soon employed to write the Parliamentary Debates which, in the days before reporters, were made up with fictitious names from such scanty notes as could be got of the actual speeches. There is a story of his being, many years later, in a company who were praising a famous oration of Chatham, and were naturally a good deal startled by his quietly saying, “That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street.” He continued to do this work till 1743 when he became aware that the speeches were taken as authentic and refused to be “accessory to the propagation of falsehood.” But, while engaged in it, he had had no scruples about taking care “that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.”
