QVI · VIXIT · ANN · lxxv · MENS · iI. · DIEB · xiiiI
DECESSIT · IDIB · DECEMBR · ANN · CHRIST · cI· · Icc · lxxxiiiI
SEPVLT · IN · AED · SANCT · PETR · WEST MONASTERIENS ·
xiiI · KAL · IANVAR · ANN · CHRIST · cI· · bcc · lxxxv
AMICI · ET · SODALES · LITTERARII
PECVNIA · CONLATA
H · M · FACIVND · CVRAVER.1291
On a scroll in his hand are the following words:
EMLAJAQERRIPOMXMAMSANIOREIGALOIBG.1292
On one side of the Monument – FACIEBAT JOHANNES BACON SCVLPTOR ANN. CHRIST. M.DCC.LXXXXV.1293
The Subscription for this monument, which cost eleven hundred guineas, was begun by the Literary Club and completed by the aid of Dr. Johnson’s other friends and admirers.]
b To prevent any misconception on this subject, Mr. Malone, by whom these lines were obligingly communicated, requests me to add the following remark: –
‘In justice to the late Mr. Flood, now himself wanting, and highly meriting, an epitaph from his country, to which his transcendent talents did the highest honour, as well as the most important service; it should be observed that these lines were by no means intended as a regular monumental inscription for Dr. Johnson. Had he undertaken to write an appropriated and discriminative epitaph for that excellent and extraordinary man, those who knew Mr. Flood’s vigour of mind, will have no doubt that he would have produced one worthy of his illustrious subject. But the fact was merely this: In Dec. 1789, after a large subscription had been made for Dr. Johnson’s monument, to which Mr. Flood liberally contributed, Mr. Malone happened to call on him at his house, in Berners-street, and the conversation turning on the proposed monument, Mr. Malone maintained that the epitaph, by whomsoever it should be written, ought to be in Latin. Mr. Flood thought differently. The next morning, in the postscript to a note on another subject, he mentioned that he continued of the same opinion as on the preceding day, and subjoined the lines above given.’
a As I do not see any reason to give a different character of my illustrious friend now, from what I formerly gave, the greatest part of the sketch of him in my Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, is here adopted.
a In the Olla Podrida,1296 a collection of Essays published at Oxford, there is an admirable paper upon the character of Johnson, written by the Reverend Dr. Horne, the late excellent Bishop of Norwich. The following passage is eminently happy: ‘To reject wisdom, because the person of him who communicates it is uncouth, and his manners are inelegant; – what is it, but to throw away a pine-apple, and assign for a reason the roughness of its coat?’
a Though a perfect resemblance of Johnson is not to be found in any age, parts of his character are admirably expressed by Clarendon in drawing that of Lord Falkland, whom the noble and masterly historian describes at his seat near Oxford: – ‘Such an immenseness of wit, such a solidity of judgement, so infinite a fancy, bound in by a most logical ratiocination. – His acquaintance was cultivated by the most polite and accurate men, so that his house was an University in less volume, whither they came, not so much for repose as study, and to examine and refine those grosser propositions, which laziness and consent made current in conversation.’
Bayle’s account of Menage may also be quoted as exceedingly applicable to the great subject of this work: – ‘His illustrious friends erected a very glorious monument to him in the collection entitled Menagiana. Those who judge of things aright, will confess that this collection is very proper to shew the extent of genius and learning which was the character of Menage. And I may be bold to say, that the excellent works he published will not distinguish him from other learned men so advantageously as this. To publish books of great learning, to make Greek and Latin verses exceedingly well turned, is not a common talent, I own; neither is it extremely rare. It is incomparably more difficult to find men who can furnish discourse about an infinite number of things, and who can diversify them an hundred ways. How many authours are there, who are admired for their works, on account of the vast learning that is displayed in them, who are not able to sustain a conversation. Those who know Menage only by his books, might think he resembled those learned men: but if you shew the Menagiana, you distinguish him from them, and make him known by a talent which is given to very few learned men. There it appears that he was a man who spoke off-hand a thousand good things. His memory extended to what was ancient and modern; to the court and to the city; to the dead and to the living languages; to things serious and things jocose; in a word, to a thousand sorts of subjects. That which appeared a trifle to some readers of the Menagiana, who did not consider circumstances, caused admiration in other readers, who minded the difference between what a man speaks without preparation, and that which he prepares for the press. And, therefore, we cannot sufficiently commend the care which his illustrious friends took to erect a monument so capable of giving him immortal glory. They were not obliged to rectify what they had heard him say; for, in so doing, they had not been faithful historians of his conversations.’
NOTES
1. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950, and London: Heinemann, 1951), pp. 43-4; 19 November 1762.
2. Joseph Addison, Cato (1713), V.i.1-9, p. 56.
3. London Journal, pp. 45-6.
4. Ibid., pp. 49–50.
5. Ibid., p. 139.
6. ‘I should live no more than I can record, as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in’ (journal entry for 17 March 1776: Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–76, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 265). Boswell slightly reworked this phrasing in his article on diaries in the London Magazine for March 1783: ‘Sometimes it has occurred to me that a man should not live more than he can record, as a farmer should not have a larger crop than he can gather in’ (Margery Bailey, ed., Boswell’s Column (London: William Kimber, 1951), p. 332).
7. London Journal, p. 149. Although it is run close by the scene (pp. 142-3) Boswell gives of a salacious conversation between himself, in the rakish character of ‘a valiant man who could gratify a lady’s loving desires five times in a night’, and a lady of fashion whom he calls ‘Lady Mirabel’. The name is an allusion to William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), where however it is the male lead who is called Mirabell. The reversal of names is typically Boswellian, in its revealing carelessness. Cf. also Boswell’s imagining himself as Macheath from The Beggar’s Opera (1728) when in a tavern with two whores: pp. 263-4.
8. Ibid., p. 260.
9. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 207-8.
10. For Boswell’s occasional backsliding and fitful commitment, from the consequences of which he was largely rescued by the assistance of Edmond Malone (who acted, in the words of Peter Martin, as ‘midwife’ to the Life of Johnson), see Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 144 – 64; Paul Korshin, ‘Johnson’s Conversation’, in Greg Clingham, ed., New Light on Boswell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 186; and Bruce Redford, Designing the Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 24-6. Direct evidence of Malone’s vital assistance can be found in Marshall Waingrow, ed., The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, 2nd edn, corrected and enlarged (Edinburgh, New Haven and London: Edinburgh University Press and Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 227, 256, 258, 294 and 462.
11. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787); Hester Lynch Thrale, later Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786); Isaac Reed and/or George Steevens, An Account of the Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Including Some Incidents of his Life (1784-5); Thomas Tyers, A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1785); William Cooke, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785); William Shaw, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson (1785); Joseph Towers, An Essay
on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1786); James Harrison, The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1786).
12. On the broader significance of the introduction of this pictorial detail, see Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 69–70 and 139–41.
13. Life of Johnson, below, p. 212.
14. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 117.
15. For a more typical expression of Boswell’s character, see the exchange of letters between Malone and Boswell over Boswell’s addition of the final four, self-praising, paragraphs to the ‘Advertisement’ to the second edition (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 408-9).
16. Redford, Designing the Life.
17. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 326.
18. Hamlet, I.ii.140. In Greek mythology Hyperion was either the father of the sun or the sun itself. He was dethroned by Apollo.
19. For Boswell’s pre-1763 publications, see George Watson, ed., The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. 2:1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 1211.
20. For the sense of moral crisis in mid-century, see particularly John Brown’s celebrated An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), a publishing phenomenon which went through seven editions in two years, and also John Leland’s A View of the Principal Deistical Writers, 3 vols. (1754-6).
21. Life of Johnson, below, p. 135. Compare Boswell’s delightfully un-self-aware comments on Johnson’s early friendship with Savage, ‘a man, of whom it is difficult to speak impartially, without wondering that he was for some time the intimate companion of Johnson; for his character was marked by profligacy, insolence, and ingratitude’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 93).
22. Ibid., p. 918.
23. Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’amitie’ (‘On affectionate relationships’), Essais, i.28, in (Euvres completes, eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat, ‘Bibliotheque de la Pleiade’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 181–93; The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 205–19.
24. Life of Johnson, below, p. 247.
25. In respect of Johnson, consider Boswell’s concluding estimate of him: ‘He was afflicted with a bodily disease, which made him often restless and fretful; and with a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 1004). Boswell himself of course was, in the words of David Daiches, ‘subject to periodic bouts of disabling melancholy’ (Clingham, ed., New Light on Boswell, p. 6). The correspondence which survives from the period of composition of the Life frequently alludes to Boswell’s labouring under ‘a sad mental cloud’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 256: cf. also pp. 216 and 219).
26. Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, and London: Heinemann, 1952), pp. 140 and 196.
27. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 368.
28. Essays collected as Boswell’s Column, ed. Margery Bailey (London: William Kimber, 1951). Quotations on pp. 23 and 25, from ‘On Periodical Papers’, London Magazine, 1 November 1777.
29. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 77 and 28. The reference is to Plutarch’s Moralia.
30. Ibid., p. 196.
31. Ibid., p. 136.
32. Rambler, 24 (1750); Life of Johnson, below, p. 84 – cf. also Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 97.
33. Life of Johnson, below, p. 500.
34. Although note the conclusion of the letter Johnson wrote Boswell on 27 August 1775, with its touching quotation from Hamlet, III.ii. 73 (Life of Johnson, below, p. 465).
35. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 35 and 55.
36. In July 1773, when Johnson had already known Boswell for over ten years; Piozzi, Anecdotes, pp. 31-2.
37. Tibullus, I.i.60; cf. Adventurer 58 (1753), where Johnson discusses the graceful reworking of this line by Ovid in his elegy on the death of Tibullus. For Johnson, this line of Tibullus was not just about companionship; as a site of repeated allusion, both by Johnson and by others, it itself nurtured and enacted a form of companionship. Life of Johnson, below, p. 992.
38. Ibid, p. 768, and Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 280.
39. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 552–61. See Sven Molin, ‘Boswell’s Account of the Johnson-Wilkes Meeting’, Studies in English Literature, 3 (1963), pp. 307–22; and, more recently, the sensitive account in Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 103–10.
40. Life of Johnson, below, p. 668. The ‘gentleman’ was in fact Boswell, as we know from his journal, and the suppression of the fact in the text of the Life is an interesting example of how Boswell’s personal vanity could come into conflict with his literary ambition to make the work as full and detailed as possible. In 1786, however, Boswell could be candid in a letter to Malone that his practice with Johnson was sometimes to ‘[tease] him long, to bring out all I could’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 114).
41. ‘Peter Pindar’ (i.e. John Wolcot) published in 1786 A Poetical and Congratulatory Epistle to James Boswell which however reported Johnson’s indignation and incredulity at the idea that Boswell might be his biographer: ‘Boswell write my life! why the fellow possesses not abilities for writing the life of an ephemeron’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 112, n. 4).
42. Life of Johnson, below, p. 731.
43. Ibid., p. 633.
44. When compiling the Life Boswell was advised by correspondents such as Anna Seward that he should not pass over in silence subjects where Johnson may have been in error: ‘The genuine lovers of the poetic science look with anxious eyes to Mr. Boswell, desiring that every merit of the stupendous mortal may be shewn in its fairest light; but expecting also, that impartial justice, so worthy of a generous mind, which the popular cry cannot influence to flatter the object of discrimination, nor yet the yearnings of remembered amity induce, to invest that object with unreal perfection, injurious, from the severity of his censures, to the rights of others’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 65).
45. For an estimation of the number of days Boswell and Johnson could have spent together – a surprisingly small number, as it turns out – see P. A. W. Collins, ‘Boswell’s Contact with Johnson’, Notes and Queries, 201 (1956), pp. 163-6.
46. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 262, 285, 320, 706, 975.
47. Ibid., p. 736.
48. Ibid., p. 758.
49. Ibid., p. 975.
50. Ibid., p. 706.
51. Ibid., p. 212.
52. Ibid., p. 296.
53. Ibid., p. 311. Cf. Reynolds and Boswell on Johnson’s unceremonious alacrity of riposte: ‘Sir Joshua observed to me the extraordinary promptitude with which Johnson flew upon an argument. “Yes, (said I,) he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with his sword; he is through your body in an instant”’ (ibid., p. 456.). Cf. also William Hamilton on the two modes of Johnsonian conversation (ibid., pp. 824-5).
54. Ibid., p. 235, 743.
55. Ibid., p. 232.
56. Ibid., p. 531. Cf. ‘Johnson could not brook appearing to be worsted in argument, even when he had taken the wrong side, to shew the force and dexterity of his talents’ (ibid., p. 824).
57. Ibid., p. 1006.
58. Ibid., p. 383.
59. Ibid., p. 866.
60. Ibid., p. 769.
61. Ibid., p. 918.
62. Ibid., pp. 142-3. For an excellent reading of this letter, see Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 141-2.
63. Ibid., p. 504.
64. Ibid., p. 442.
65. Ibid., p. 480.
66. This is the useful phrase of Daniel Astle writing to Boswell in December 1786 (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 144).
67. Life of Johnson, below, p. 248.
68. In his essay ‘On Ridicule’, published in November 1782, Boswell had approvingly quoted Brown’s dismissal of those ‘coxcombs’ who ‘vanquish Berkeley with a grin’ (Bailey, ed., Boswell’s Column, p. 315).
69. For the virtue of chastisement in education, see Life of Johnson, below, pp. 29–30. For Johnson’s dwelling upon religious punishments rather than redemption, see the quoted comments of Anna Seward (ibid., pp. 27-8).
70. Ibid., p. 472.
71. Ibid., p. 342.
72. ‘… in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning, which the conflux of dialects had supplied to the more homogeneous languages…’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ch. 4, I, 82-3).
73. Life of Johnson, below, p. 120.
74. Ibid., p. 218.
75. Ibid., p. 315. It was an image which attracted the Admiration and even envy of Samuel Parr (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 352).
76. Life of Johnson, below, p. 56.
77. Ibid., p. 61.
78. Ibid., p. 688.
79. Ibid., p. 804. Cf. ‘Sir, I have no objection to a man’s drinking wine, if he can do it in moderation. I found myself apt to go to excess in it, and therefore, after having been for some time without it, on account of illness, I thought it better not to return to it’ and ‘But it must be owned, that Johnson, though he could be rigidly abstemious, was not a temperate man either in eating or drinking’ (ibid., pp. 498, 246). Macaulay connected the exorbitancy of Johnson’s appetite to the reduced circumstances in which he found himself when he arrived in London to pursue a literary career: ‘He ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who, during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation. He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead, and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it, he drank it greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse’ (Macaulay, review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, reprinted in Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1877), p. 182.
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