Where each old poetic mountainInspiration breathes around,Every shade and hallow'd fountainMurmurs deep a solemn sound.
In the following year (1775) he made his usual visit to the midland counties, and accompanied the Thrales in a Tour to Paris, from whence they returned by way of Rouen. This was the only time he was on the Continent. It is to be regretted that he left only some imperfect notes of his Journey; for there could scarcely have failed to be something that would have gratified our curiosity in his observations on the manners of a foreign country. We find him in the next year (1776) removing from Johnson's Court, No. 7, to Bolt Court, Fleet-street, No. 8; from whence at different times he made excursions to Lichfield and Ashbourne; to Bath with the Thrales; and, in the autumn, to Brighthelmstone, where Mr. Thrale had a house. This gentleman had, for some time, fed his expectations with the prospect of a journey to Italy. "A man," said Johnson, "who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. The grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean." Much as he had set his heart on this journey, and magnificent as his conceptions were of the promised land, he was employed with more advantage to his own country at home; for, at the solicitation of the booksellers, he now (1777) undertook to write the Lives of the English Poets. The judicious selection of the facts which he relates, the vivacity of the narrative, the profoundness of the observations, and the terseness of the style, render this the most entertaining, as it is, perhaps, the most instructive of his works. His criticisms, indeed, often betray either the want of a natural perception for the higher beauties of poetry, or a taste unimproved by the diligent study of the most perfect models; yet they are always acute, lucid, and original. That his judgment is often warped by a political bias can scarcely be doubted; but there is no good reason to suspect that it is ever perverted by malevolence or envy. The booksellers left it to him to name his price, which he modestly fixed at 200 guineas; though, as Mr. Malone says, 1000 or 1500 would have been readily given if he had asked it. As he proceeded, the work grew on his hands. In 1781 it was completed; and another 100_l_. was voluntarily added to the sum which had been at first agreed on. In the third edition, which was called for in 1783, he made several alterations and additions; of which, to shew the unreasonableness of murmurs respecting improved editions, it is related in the Biographical Dictionary [12], on the information of Mr. Nichols, that though they were printed separately, and offered gratis to the purchasers of the former editions, scarcely a single copy was demanded.
This was the last of his literary labours; nor do we hear of his writing any thing for the press in the meanwhile, except such slight compositions as a prologue for a comedy by Mr. Hugh Kelly, and a dedication to the King of the Posthumous Works of Pearce, Bishop of Rochester.
His body was weighed down with disease, and his mind clouded with apprehensions of death. He sought for respite from these sufferings in the usual means—in short visits to his native place, or to Brighthelmstone, and in the establishment of new clubs. In 1781, another of these societies was, by his desire, formed in the city. It was to meet at the Queen's Arms, in St. Paul's Churchyard; and his wish was, that no patriot should be admitted. He now returned to the use of wine, which, when he did take it, he swallowed greedily.
About this time Mr. Thrale died, leaving Johnson one of his executors, with a legacy of 200_l_. The death of Levett, in the same year, and of Miss Williams, in 1783, left him yet more lonely. A few months before the last of these deprivations befel him, he had a warning of his own dissolution, which he could not easily mistake. The night of the 16th of June, on which day he had been sitting for his picture, he perceived himself, soon after going to bed, to be seized with a sudden confusion and indistinctness in his head, which seemed to him to last about half a minute. His first fear was lest his intellect should be affected. Of this he made experiment, by turning into Latin verse a short prayer, which he had breathed out for the averting of that calamity. The lines were not good, but he knew that they were not so, and concluded his faculties to be unimpaired. Soon after he was conscious of having suffered a paralytic stroke, which had taken away his speech. "I had no pain," he observed afterwards, "and so little dejection in this dreadful state, that I wondered at my own apathy, and considered, that perhaps death itself, when it should come, would excite less horror than seems now to attend it." In hopes of stimulating the vocal organs, he swallowed two drams, and agitated his body into violent motion, but it was to no purpose; whereupon he returned to his bed, and, as he thought, fell asleep. In the morning, finding that he had the use of his hand, he was in the act of writing a note to his servant, when the man entered. He then wrote a card to his friend and neighbour, Mr. Allen, the printer, but not without difficulty, his hand sometimes, he knew not why, making a different letter from that which he intended; his next care was to acquaint Dr. Taylor, his old schoolfellow, and now a prebendary of Westminster, with his condition, and to desire he would come and bring Dr. Heberden with him. At the same time, he sent in for Dr. Brocklesby, who was his near neighbour. The next day his speech was restored, and he perceived no deterioration, either in his memory or understanding. In the following month he was well enough to pass a week at Rochester, with Mr. Langton, and to appear again at the Literary Club; and at the end of August, to make a visit to Mr. Bowles, at Heale, near Salisbury, where he continued about three weeks.
On his return to London, he was confined to the house by a fit of the gout, a disorder which had once attacked him, but with less violence, ten years before, and to which he was now reconciled, by being taught to consider it as an antagonist to the palsy. To this was added, a sarcocele, which, as it threatened to render excision necessary, caused him more uneasiness, though he looked forward to the operation with sufficient courage; but the complaint subsided of itself.
When he was able to go about again, that society might be insured to him at least three days in the week, another club was founded at the Essex Head, in Essex street, where an old servant of Mr. Thrale's was the landlord. "Its principles (he said) were to be laid in frequency and frugality; and he drew up a set of rules, which he prefaced with two lines from a Sonnet of Milton.
To-day resolve deep thoughts with me to drench,In mirth that after no repenting draws."
The number was limited to twenty-four. Each member present engaged himself to spend at least sixpence; and, to pay a forfeit of three-pence if he did not attend. But even here, in the club-room, after his sixpence was duly laid down, and the arm chair taken, there was no security for him against the intrusion of those maladies which had so often assailed him. On the first night of meeting (13th of December, 1783) he was seized with a spasmodic asthma, and hardly made his way home to his own house, where the dropsy combined with asthma to hold him a prisoner for more than four months. An occurrence during his illness, which he mentioned to Boswell, deserves notice, from the insight which it gives into his peculiar frame of mind. "He had shut himself up, and employed a day in particular exercises of religion—fasting, humiliation, and prayer. On a sudden, he obtained extraordinary relief, for which he looked up to heaven with grateful devotion. He made no direct inference from the fact; but from his manner of telling it," adds Boswell, "I could perceive that it appeared to him as something more than an incident in the common course of events." Yet at this time, with all his aspirations after a state of greater perfectness, he was not able to bear the candour of Langton, who, when Johnson him desired to tell him sincerely wherein he had observed his life to be faulty, brought him a sheet of paper, on which were written many texts of Scripture, recommendatory of Christian meekness.
At the beginning of June he had sufficiently rallied his strength to set out with Boswell, for Oxford, where he remained about a fortnight, with Dr. Adams, the master of Pembroke, his old college. In his discourse, there was the same alternation of gloominess and gaiety, the same promptness of repartee, and keenness of sarcasm, as there had ever been.
Several of his friends were now anxious that he should escape the rigour of an English winter by repairing to Italy, a measure which his physicians recommended, not very earnestly indeed, and more I think in compliance with his known wishes, than in expectation of much benefit to his health. It was thought requisite, however, that some addition should previously be made to his income, in order to his maintaining an appearance somewhat suitable to the character which he had established throughout Europe by his writings. For this purpose, Boswell addressed an application to the Ministry, through Lord Thurlow, who was then Chancellor. After some accidental delay, and some unsuccessful negotiation on the part of Lord Thurlow, who was well disposed to befriend him, during which time Johnson was again buoyed up with the prospect of visiting Italy, an answer was returned which left him no reason to expect from Government any further assistance than that which he was then receiving in the pension already granted him. This refusal the Chancellor accompanied with a munificent offer of supply out of his own purse, which he endeavoured to convey in such a manner as should least alarm the independent spirit of Johnson. "It would be a reflection on us all, (said Thurlow,) if such a man should perish for want of the means to take care of his health." The abilities of Thurlow had always been held in high estimation by Johnson, who had been heard to say of him, "I would prepare myself for no man in England but Lord Thurlow. When I am to meet with him, I should wish to know a day before." One day, while this scheme was pending, Johnson being at the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds, was overcome by the tenderness of his friends, and by the near view, as he thought, of this long-hoped Italian tour being effected, and exclaimed with much emotion, "God bless you all;" and then, after a short silence, again repeating the words in a form yet more solemn, was no longer able to command his feelings, but hurried away to regain his composure in solitude.
After all these efforts, Johnson was fated to disappointment; and the authors of his disappointment have incurred the sentence denounced on them by the humanity of Thurlow. In this, Dr. Brocklesby, the physician, has no share; for by him a noble offer of £100 a year was made to Johnson during his life.
In the meantime he had paid the summer visit, which had now become almost an annual one to his daughter-in-law, at Lichfield, from whence he made an excursion to Dr. Taylor's, at Ashbourne, and to Chatsworth, still labouring under his asthma, but willing to believe that as Floyer, the celebrated physician of his native city, had been allowed to pant on till near ninety, so he might also yet pant on a little longer. Whilst he was on this journey, he translated an ode of Horace, and composed several prayers. As he passed through Birmingham and Oxford, he once more hailed his old schoolfellow Hector, and his fellow collegian, Adams. It is delightful to see early intimacies thus enduring through all the accidents of life, local attachments unsevered by time, and the old age and childhood of man bound together by these natural charities. The same willow tree which Johnson had known when a boy, was still his favourite, and still flourishing in the meadow, near Lichfield. Hector (whom I can remember several years after, a man of erect form, and grave deportment) still met him with the same, or perhaps more cordiality than in their first days; and the virtues of Adams, which he had seen opening in their early promise, had now grown up to full maturity. To London he returned, only to prove that death was not the terrible thing which he had fancied it. He arrived there on the 15th of November. In little more than a fortnight after, when Dr. Brocklesby (with whom three other eminent physicians, and a chirurgeon, were in the habit of attending him gratuitously) was paying him a morning visit, he said that he had been as a dying man all night, and then with much emphasis repeated the words of Macbeth:
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased;Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow;Raze out the written troubles of the brainAnd, withsomesweet oblivious antidote,Cleanse the foul bosom of that perilous stuffWhich weighs upon the heart?
To which Brocklesby promptly returned the answer, which is made by the doctor in that play,
—Therein the patientMust minister unto himself.
He now committed to the flames a large mass of papers, among which were two 4to. volumes, containing a particular account of his life, from his earliest recollections.
His few remaining days were occasionally cheered by the presence of such men as have been collected about a death-bed in few ages and countries of the world—Langton, Reynolds, Windham, and Burke. Of these, none was more attentive to him than Mr. Langton, of whom he had been heard to say, I could almost wish "anima mea sit cum Langtono," and whom he now addressed in the tender words of Tibullus,
Te teneam moriens deficiente manu.
At another time, Burke, who was sitting with him in the company of four or five others, expressed his fear that so large a number might be oppressive to him, "No, Sir," said Johnson, "it is not so; and I must be in a wretched state, indeed, when your company would not be a delight to me." Burke's voice trembled, when he replied, "My dear Sir, you have always been too good to me." These were the last words that passed between them. Mr. Windham having settled a pillow for him, he thanked him for his kindness.
This will do (said he,) all that a pillow can do. Of Sir Joshua Reynolds he made three requests, which were readily granted; to forgive him thirty pounds which he had borrowed of him; to read the Bible; and never to use his pencil on a Sunday. The church service was frequently read to him by some clergyman of his acquaintance. On one of these occasions, when Mr. Nichols was present, he cried out to Mr. Hoole, who was reading the Litany, "Louder, my dear Sir, louder, I entreat you, or you pray in vain;" and when the service was done, he turned to a lady who had come to pray with him, and said to her with much earnestness, "I thank you, Madam, very heartily, for your kindness in joining me in this solemn service. Live well, I conjure you, and you will not feel the compunction at the last which I now feel."
He entreated Dr. Brocklesby to dismiss any vain speculative opinions that he might entertain, and to settle his mind on the great truths of Christianity. He then insisted on his writing down the purport of their conversation; and when he had done, made him affix his signature to the paper, and urged him to keep it for the remainder of his life. The following is the account communicated to Boswell by this affectionate physician, who was very free from any suspicion of fanaticism, as indeed is well shewn by Johnson's discourse with him.
"For some time before his death, all his fears were calmed and absorbed by the prevalence of his faith, and his trust in the merits and propitiation of Jesus Christ." "He talked often to me about the necessity of faith in the sacrifice of Jesus, as necessary beyond all good works whatever, for the salvation of mankind." "He pressed me to study Dr. Clarke, and to read his Sermons. I asked him why he pressed Dr. Clarke, an Arian. 'Because (said he) he is fullest on the propitiatory sacrifice.'" This was the more remarkable, because his prejudice against Clarke, on account of the Arianism imputed to him, had formerly been so strong, that he made it a rule not to admit his name into his Dictionary.
He desired Dr. Brocklesby to tell him whether he could recover, charging him to give a direct answer. The Doctor having first asked whether he could bear to hear the whole truth, told him that without a miracle he could not recover. "Then," said Johnson, "I will take no more physic, or even opiates; for I have prayed that I may render up my soul to God unclouded." He not only kept this resolution, but abstained from all food, excepting such as was of the weakest kind. When Mr. Windham pressed him to take something more generous, lest too poor a diet should produce the effects which he dreaded, "I will take any thing," said he, "but inebriating sustenance."
Mr. Strahan, the clergyman, who administered to him the comforts of religion, affirmed that after having been much agitated, he became tranquil, and continued so to the last.
On the eighth and ninth of December, he made his will, by which he bequeathed the chief of his property to Francis Barber, his negro servant. The value of this legacy is estimated by Sir John Hawkins, at near £1500. From this time he languished on till the twelfth. That night his bodily uneasiness increased; his attendants assisted him every hour to raise himself in his bed, and move his legs, which were in much pain; each time he prayed fervently; the only support he took was cyder and water. He said he was prepared, but the time to his dissolution seemed long. At six in the morning he inquired the hour; and, being told, observed that all went on regularly, and that he had but a few hours to live. In two hours after, he ordered his servant to bring him a drawer, out of which he chose one lancet, from amongst some others, and pierced his legs; and then seizing a pair of scissars that lay near him, plunged them into both his calves, no doubt with the hopes of easing them of the water; for he had often reproached his medical attendants with want of courage in not scarifying them more deeply. At ten he dismissed Mr. Windham's servant, who was one of those who had sat up with him, thanking him, and desiring him to bear his remembrance to his master. Afterwards a Miss Morris, the daughter of one of his friends, came into the room to beg his blessing; of which, being informed by his servant Francis, he turned round in his bed, and said to her, "God bless you, my dear." About seven in the evening he expired so quietly, that those about him did not perceive his departure. His body being opened, two of the valves of the aorta were found to be ossified; the air cells of the lungs unusually distended; one of the kidneys consumed, and the liver schirrous. A stone, as large as a common gooseberry, was in the gall-bladder.
On the 20th of December, he was interred in Westminster Abbey, under a blue flagstone, which bears this inscription.
Samuel Johnson, LLD.Obiit XIII. die Decembris,Anno DominiMDCCLXXXIV.Aetatis suae LXXV.
He was attended to his grave by many of his friends, particularly such members of the Literary Club as were then in London; the pall being borne by Burke, Sir Joseph Banks, Windham, Langton, Sir Charles Bunbury, and Colman. Monuments have been erected to his memory, in the cathedrals of Lichfield and St. Paul's. That in the latter consists of his statue, by Bacon, larger than life, with an epitaph from the pen of Dr. Parr.
[Greek: Alpha-Omega]Samueli JohnsonGrammatico et CriticoScriptorum Anglicorum litterate peritoPoetae luminibus sententiarumEt ponderibus verborum admirabiliMagistro virtutis gravissimoHomini optimo et singularis exempli.Qui vixit ann. lxxv. Mens. il. Dieb. xiiiil.Decessit idib. Dec. ann. Christ. clc. lccc. lxxxiiil.Sepult. in AED. Sanct. Petr. Westmonasteriens.xiil. Kal. Januar. Ann. Christ, clc. lccc. lxxxv.Amici et Sodales LitterariiPecunia ConlataH.M. Faciund. Curaver.
In the hand there is a scroll, with the following inscription:—
[Greek: ENMAKARESSIAPONOANTAXIOS EIAEAMOIBAE.]
Besides the numerous and various works which he executed, he had at different times, formed schemes of a great many more, of which the following catalogue was given by him to Mr. Langton, and by that gentleman presented to his Majesty.
Divinity.
A small Book of Precepts and Directions for Piety; the hint taken from the directions in Morton's exercise.
Philosophy, History, and Literature in general.
History of Criticism, as it relates to judging of authors, from Aristotle to the present age. An account of the rise and improvements of that art: of the different opinions of authors, ancient and modern.
Translation of the History of Herodian.
New Edition of Fairfax's Translation of Tasso, with notes, glossary, &c.
Chaucer, a new edition of him, from manuscripts and old editions, with various readings, conjectures, remarks on his language, and the changes it had undergone from the earliest times to his age, and from his to the present; with notes, explanatory of customs, &c. and references to Boccace, and other authors from whom he has borrowed, with an account of the liberties he has taken in telling the stories; his life, and an exact etymological glossary.
Aristotle's Rhetoric, a translation of it into English.
A Collection of Letters, translated from the modern writers, with some account of the several authors.
Oldham's Poems, with notes, historical and critical.
Roscommon's Poems, with notes.
Lives of the Philosophers, written with a polite air, in such a manner as may divert as well as instruct.
History of the Heathen Mythology, with an explication of the fables, both allegorical and historical; with references to the poets.
History of the State of Venice, in a compendious manner.
Aristotle's Ethics, an English translation of them, with notes.
Geographical Dictionary, from the French.
Hierocles upon Pythagoras, translated into English, perhaps with notes.This is done by Norris.
A Book of Letters, upon all kinds of subjects.
Claudian, a new edition of his works, "cum notis variorum," in the manner of Burman.
Tully's Tusculan Questions, a translation of them.
Tully's De Natura Deorum, a translation of those books.
Benzo's New History of the New World, to be translated.
Machiavel's History of Florence, to be translated.
History of the Revival of Learning in Europe, containing an account of whatever contributed to the restoration of literature; such as controversies, printing, the destruction of the Greek empire, the encouragement of great men, with the lives of the most eminent patrons, and most eminent early professors of all kinds of learning in different countries.
A Body of Chronology, inverse, with historical notes.
A Table of the Spectators, Tatlers, and Guardians, distinguished by figures into six degrees of value, with notes, giving the reasons of preference or degradation.
A Collection of Letters from English Authors, with a preface, giving some account of the writers; with reasons for selection, and criticism upon styles; remarks on each letter, if needful.
A Collection of Proverbs from various languages.—Jan. 6—53.
A Dictionary to the Common Prayer, in imitation of Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible.—March,—52.
A Collection of Stories and Examples, like those of Valerius Maximus.—Jan. 10,—53.
From Elian, a volume of select Stories, perhaps from others.—Jan. 28,— 53.
Collection of Travels, Voyages, Adventures, and Descriptions ofCountries.
Dictionary of Ancient History and Mythology.
Treatise on the Study of Polite Literature, containing the history of learning, directions for editions, commentaries, &c.
Maxims, Characters, and Sentiments, after the manner of Bruyere, collected out of ancient authors, particularly the Greek, with Apophthegms.
Classical Miscellanies, select translations from ancient Greek and Latin authors.
Lives of Illustrious Persons, as well of the active as the learned, in imitation of Plutarch.
Judgment of the learned upon English Authors.
Poetical Dictionary of the English Tongue.
Considerations upon the Present State of London.
Collection of Epigrams, with notes and observations.
Observations on the English Language, relating to words, phrases, and modes of speech.
Minutiae Literariae; miscellaneous reflections, criticisms, emendations, notes.
History of the Constitution.
Comparison of Philosophical and Christian Morality, by sentences collected from the moralists and fathers.
Plutarch's Lives, in English, with notes.
Poetry, and Works of Imagination.
Hymn to Ignorance.
The Palace of Sloth, a vision.
Coluthus, to be translated.
Prejudice, a poetical Essay.
The Palace of Nonsense, a vision.
In his last illness, he told Mr. Nichols [13] that he had thought of translating Thuanus, and when that worthy man (in whom he had begun to place much confidence) suggested to him that he would be better employed in writing a Life of Spenser, by which he might gratify the King, who was known to be fond of that poet, he replied that he would readily do it if he could obtain any new materials.
His stature was unusually high, and his person large and well proportioned, but he was rendered uncouth in his appearance by the scars which his scrophulous disease had impressed upon him, by convulsive motions, and by the slovenliness of his garb. His eyes, of which the sight was very imperfect, were of a light grey colour, yet had withal a wildness and penetration, and at times a fierceness of expression, that could not be encountered without a sensation of fear. He had a strange way of making inarticulate sounds, or of muttering to himself in a voice loud enough to be overheard, what was passing in his thoughts, when in company. Thus, one day, when he was on a visit to Davies the bookseller, whose pretty wife is spoken of by Churchill, he was heard repeating part of the Lord's Prayer, and, on his saying, lead us not into temptation, Davies turned round, and whispered his wife, "You are the occasion of this, my dear."
It is said by Boswell, that "his temperament was so morbid, that he never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs: when he walked, it was the struggling gait of one in fetters; when he rode, he had no command or direction of his horse, but was carried as if in a balloon." His daily habits were exceedingly irregular; he took his meals at unusual hours; and either ate voraciously, or abstained rigorously. He studied by fits and starts; but when he did read, it was with such rapidity and eagerness, that, as some one said, it seemed as if he would tear out the heart of the book he was upon. He could with difficulty believe any one who spoke of having read any book from the beginning to the end. His mode of composition was in like manner vigorous and hasty; though his sentences have all the appearance of being measured; but it was his custom to speak no less than to write with a studious attention to the numerousness of his phrase, so that he was enabled to do that by habit which others usually accomplish by a particular effort.
In matters of fact, his regard to truth was so punctilious, that it was observed he always talked as if he was talking upon oath; and he was desirous of exacting the same preciseness from those over whom he had authority or influence. He had, however, a practice that was not entirely consistent with this love of veracity; for he would sometimes defend that side of a question, which he thought wrong, because it afforded him a more favourable opportunity of exhibiting his reasoning or his wit. Thus when he began, "Why, Sir, as to the good or evil of card-playing;" Garrick would make this arch comment on his proem; "Now he is considering which side he shall take." It may he urged that his hearers were aware of this propensity which he had
—To make the worse appearThe better argument,
and were therefore in no danger of being misled by it. But an excuse of the same kind will serve for the common liar, that he is known, and therefore disbelieved. It behoved him to be the more scrupulous in this particular, because he knew that Boswell took minutes of his ordinary conversation. Some of his idle sophisms, which thus became current, have, I fear, led to serious mischief; such as the opinion that an author may be at liberty to deny his having written a book to which he has not affixed his name; his extenuation of incontinence in the master of a family, and the gloss he put on the crime of covetousness; which last error was not confined to his conversation, but mingled itself with his writings, though no one could well be freer from any taint of the vice in his own life. Many a man may have indulged his inclinations to evil, with much less compunction, while he has imagined himself sheltered under the sanction of the moralist who watches one side of the entrance into the nave of St. Paul's.
There was, in his mind, a strange mixture of credulity and doubtfulness. He did not disbelieve either in the existence of ghosts, or in the possibility of commuting other metals into gold; but was very slow to credit any fact that was at all extraordinary. He would tell of Cave's having seen an apparition, without much apparent doubt; and, with more certainty, of his having been himself addressed by the voice of his absent mother. The deception practised by the girl in Cock Lane, who was a ventriloquist, is well known to have wrought on him so successfully, as to make him go and watch in the church, where she pretended the spirit of a young woman to be, which had disclosed to her the manner of its having been violently separated from the body. On this occasion, Boswell endeavours in vain to clear him from the imputation of a weakness, which was but too agreeable to the rest of his character. Yet on Hume's argument against miracles, that it is more probable witnesses should lie or be mistaken than that they should happen, he remarked, as I think, very judiciously, that Hume, taking the proposition simply, is right; but that the Christian revelation is not proved by the miracles alone, but as they are connected with prophecies, and with the doctrines in confirmation of which the miracles were wrought.
He was devout, moral, and humane; frequent and earnest in his petitions for the divine succour, anxious to sublime his nature by disengaging it from worldly soil, and prompt to sympathise with the sorrows, and out of his scanty means, to relieve the necessities of others; but such is the imperfection of man, that his piety was apt to degenerate into superstition; his abstinence yielded to slight temptations, and his charity was often not proof against a discrepancy of opinion either in politics or literature.
Among his friends, Beauclerk seems most to have engaged his love, Langton his respect, and Burke his admiration. The first was conspicuous for wit, liveliness of feelings, and gaiety; the next for rectitude of conduct, piety, and learning; the last for knowledge, sagacity, and eloquence. His praise of Reynolds, that he was the most invulnerable of men, one of whom, if he had a quarrel with him, he should find it the most difficult to say any ill, was praise rather of the negative kind. The younger Warton, he contrived to alienate from him, as is related in the life of that poet. There was, indeed, an entire harmony in their political principles; but questions of literature touch an author yet more sensibly than those of state; and the "idem sentire de republica," was an imperfect bond of amity between men who appreciated so differently the Comus and Lycidas of Milton, and the Bucolics of Theocritus. To Savage and Goldsmith he was attached by similarity of fortunes and pursuits. A yet closer bond of sympathy united him with Collins, as the reader will see in the following extracts from letters which he wrote to Dr. Warton.
How little can we exult in any intellectual powers or literary entertainments, when we see the fate of poor Collins. I knew him a few years ago, full of hopes and full of projects, versed in many languages, high in fancy, and strong in retention. This busy and forcible mind is now under the government of those who lately would not have been able to comprehend the least and most narrow of its designs.—March 8, 1754.
Poor dear Collins. Let me know whether you think it would give him pleasure that I should write to him. I have often been near his state, and therefore have it in great commisseration. * * *
What becomes of poor dear Collins? I wrote him a letter which he never answered. I suppose writing is very troublesome to him. That man is no common loss. The moralists all talk of the uncertainty of fortune, and the transitoriness of beauty; but it is yet more dreadful to consider that the powers of the mind are equally liable to change, that understanding may make its appearance, and depart, that it may blaze and expire.—April 15, 1756.[14]
Difference of opinion respecting the American war did not separate him from Burke and Fox; and when the nation was afterwards divided by the struggle between the court and populace on one side and the aristocracy on the other, though his principles determined him to that party in which he found the person though perhaps not the interests of his sovereign, yet his affections continued with the great leader in the House of Commons, who was opposed to it. "I am," said he, "for the King against Fox; but I am for Fox against Pitt. The King is my master; but I do not know Pitt; and Fox is my friend;" and to Burke, when he was a candidate for a seat in the new Parliament, he wished, as he told him with a smile, "all the success that an honest man could wish him." Even towards Wilkes his asperity was softened down into good humour by their meeting together over a plentiful table at the house of Dilly the bookseller.
When he had offended any by contradiction or rudeness, it was seldom long before he sought to be reconciled and forgiven. But though his private enmities were easily appeased, yet where he considered the cause of truth to be concerned, his resentment was vehement and unrelenting. That imposture, particularly, which he with good reason supposed Macpherson to have practised on the world with respect to the poems of Ossian, provoked him to vengeance, such as the occasion seemed hardly to demand.
Of his dry pleasantry in conversation there are many instances recorded. When one of his acquaintances had introduced him to his brother, at the same time telling him that he would find him become very agreeable after he had been some time in his company, he replied, "Sir, I can wait." To a stupid justice of the peace, who had wearied him with a long account of his having caused four convicts to be condemned to transportation, he answered, "I heartily wish I were a fifth;" a repartee that calls to our mind Horace's answer to the impertinent fellow:
Omnes composui; Felices! mine ego resto.
A physician endeavouring to bring to his recollection that he had been in his company once before, mentioned among other circumstances his having that day worn so fine a coat, that it could not but have attracted his notice. "Sir," said Johnson, "had you been dipped in Pactolus, I should not have noticed you." He could on occasion be more polite and complimentary. When Mrs. Siddons, with whom, in a letter to Mrs. Thrale, he expressed himself highly pleased, paid him a visit, there happened not to be any chair ready for her. "Madam," said he, "you who so often occasion the want of seats to others will the more readily excuse the want of one yourself."
His scholarship was rather various than accurate or profound. Yet Dr. Burney, the younger, supposed him capable of giving a Greek word for almost every English one. Romances were always a favourite kind of reading with him. Felixmarte of Hircania was his regular study during part of a summer which he spent in the country at the parsonage-house of Dr. Percy. On a journey to Derbyshire, when he had in view his Italian expedition, he took with him Il Palermino d'Inghilterra, to refresh his knowledge of the language. To this taste he had been heard to impute his unsettled disposition, and his averseness from the choice of any profession. One of the most singular qualities of his mind was the rapidity with which it was able to seize and master almost any subject, however abstruse or novel, that was offered to its speculation. To this quickness of apprehension was joined an extraordinary power of memory, so that he was able to recall at pleasure most passages of a book, which had once strongly impressed him. In his sixty-fourth year, he attempted to acquire the low Dutch language. He had a perpetual thirst of knowledge; and six months before his death requested Dr. Burney to teach him the scale of music. "Teach me," said Johnson to him, "at least, the alphabet of your language." What he knew, he loved to communicate. According to that description of the stu-[**possibly "student"—rest of word(s) missing in original] in Chaucer,
Gladly would he teach, and gladly learn.
These endowments were accompanied with a copiousness of words, in which it would be difficult to name any writer except Barrow that has surpassed him. Yet his prose style is very far from affording a model that can safely be proposed for our imitation. He seems to exert his powers of intellect and of language indiscriminately, and with equal effort, on the smallest and the most important occasions; and the effect is something similar to that of a Chinese painting, in which, though all the objects separately taken are accurately described, yet the whole is entirely wanting in a proper relief of perspective. What is observed by Milton of the conduct of life, may be applied to composition, "that there is a scale of higher and lower duties," and he who confuses it will infallibly fall short of that proportion which is necessary to excellence no less in matters of taste than of morals.
He was more intent in balancing the period, than in developing the thought or image that was present to his mind. Sometimes we find that he multiplies words without amplifying the sense, and that the ear is gratified at the expense of the understanding. This is more particularly the case in the Ramblers, which being called for at short and stated intervals, were sometimes composed in such haste, that he had not leasure even to read them before they were printed; nor can we wonder at the dissatisfaction he expressed some years afterwards, when he exclaimed that he thought they had been better. In the Idler there is more brevity, and consequently more compression.
When Johnson trusts to his own strong understanding in a matter of which he has the full command, and does not aim at setting it off by futile decorations, he is always respectable, and sometimes great. But when he attempts the ornamental, he is heavy and inelegant; and the awkwardness of his efforts is more perceptible from the hugeness of the body that is put in motion to produce them. He is like the animal whom Milton describes as making sport for our first parents in Paradise—
—Th' unwieldy elephant,To make them mirth, used all his might.
It is a good beast for carrying a burden or trampling down a foe, but a very indifferent one at a lavolta or a coranto.
His swelling style is readily counterfeited. Our common advertisements have amply revenged themselves for his ridicule of their large promises in the Idler, by clothing those promises in language as magnificent as his own. It is much less easy to catch the subtle graces of Addison. At the conclusion of the Rambler, he boasts that "he has laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations."
The result of his labour is awkward stateliness and irksome uniformity. In his dread of incongruous idioms he writes almost without any idiom at all.
He has sometimes been considered as having innovated on our tongue by introducing big words into it from the Latin: but he commonly does no more than revive terms which had been employed by our old writers and afterwards fallen into disuse; nor does he, like them, employ even these terms in senses which scholars only would be likely to understand.
At the time of writing the Dictionary, he had a notion that our language "for almost a century had been departing from its original Teutonic character, and deviating towards a Gallic structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it by making our ancient volumes the ground-work of style, admitting among the additions of later times, only such as may supply real deficiencies, such as are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with our native idiom." But a little reflection will shew us the vanity of this attempt. Since the age of Chaucer, at least, that is for more than 400 years, our language has been increased by continual transfusions from the French. To these have been added, from time to time, similar accessions from other languages, both ancient and modern. Thus a copiousness and a flexibility, which in the instance of the Greek seem to have arisen out of that subtilty of intellect which gave birth to endless subdivision and distinction, have been in some measure compensated in our own by the influxes which it has received from the languages of many other people; and have been yet further improved by that liberty which it is to be hoped we shall always retain, each man, of speaking his thoughts after his own guise, without too much regard to any set mode or fashion.
He had before said, in this same preface, that "our knowledge of the northern literature is so scanty, that of words undoubtedly Teutonic the original is not always to be found in any ancient language; and I have therefore," he adds, "inserted Dutch or German substitutes, which I consider not as radical, but parallel; not as the parents, but sisters of the English." And in his history of the English language, speaking of our Saxon ancestors, to whom we must, I suppose, go for that Teutonic original which he so strongly recommends, he observes that, "their speech having been always cursory and extemporaneous, must have been artless and unconnected, without any modes of transition or involution of clauses, which abruptness and inconnection may be found even in their later writings." Of the additions which have been made to this our original poverty, who shall say what ought to be rejected, and what retained? who shall say what deficiencies are real, and what imaginary? what the genius of our tongue may admit of, and what it must refuse? and in a word, what that native idiom is, a coalition with which is to be thus studiously consulted?
Throughout his Lives of the Poets, he constantly betrays a want of relish for the more abstracted graces of the art. When strong sense and reasoning were to be judged of, these he was able to appreciate justly. When the passions or characters were described, he could to a certain extent decide whether they were described truly or no. But as far as poetry has relation to the kindred arts of music and painting, to both of which he was confessedly insensible, it could not be expected that he should have much perception of its excellences. Of statuary, he said that its value was owing to its difficulty; and that a fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that nearly resembles a man. What shall be thought of his assertion, that before the time of Dryden there was no poetical diction, no system of words at once refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts, and "that words too familiar or too remote, defeat the purpose of a poet?" It might with more show of reason be affirmed, that in proportion as our writers have adopted such a system as he speaks of, and have rejected words for no other cause than that they were either too familiar or too remote, we have been receding from the proper language of poetry. One of the chief ornaments, or more properly speaking, the constituents of poetical language, is the use of metaphors; and metaphors never find their way to the mind more readily, or affect it more powerfully, than when they are clothed in familiar words. Even a naked sentiment will lose none of its force from being conveyed in the most homely terms which our mother tongue can afford. They are the sounds which we have been used to from our infancy, which have been early connected with our hopes and fears, and still continue to meet us in our own homes and by our firesides, that will most certainly awaken those feelings with which the poet is chiefly concerned. As for the terms which Johnson calls remote, if I understand him rightly, they too may be employed occasionally, either when the attention is to be roused by something unusual, or for the sake of harmony; or it may be for no other reason than because the poet chooses thus to diversify his diction, so as to give a stronger relief to that which is familiar and common, by the juxtaposition of its contrary. Of this there can be no doubt, that, whoever lays down such arbitrary rules as Johnson has here prescribed, will find himself mocked at every turn by the power of genius, which meets with nothing in art or nature that it cannot convert to its own use, and which delights to produce the greatest effects by means apparently the most inadequate.
He particularly valued himself on the Life of Cowley, for the sake of those observations which he had introduced into it on the metaphysical poets. Here he has mistaken the character of Marino, whom he supposes to be at the head of them. Marino abounds in puerile conceits; but they are not far-fetched, like those of Donne and Cowley; they generally lie on the surface, and often consist of nothing more than a mere play upon words; so that, if to be a punster is to be a metaphysician, Marino is a poetical Heraclitus. But Johnson had caught the cant of the age, in which it was usual to designate almost any thing absurd or extravagant by the name of metaphysical.
It is difficult to suppose that he had read some of the works on which he passes a summary sentence. The comedy of Love's Riddle, which he says, "adds little to the wonders of Cowley's minority," deserved to be commended at least for the style, which is a specimen of pure and unaffected English. Of Congreve's novel, he tells us, that he had rather praise it than read it. Judging from the letters of Congreve, his only writings in prose which it has been my good fortune to meet with, and which, as I remember, contain some admirable remarks on the distinction between wit and humour, I should conclude that one part of his character as a writer has yet to make its way to the public notice. I have heard it observed by a lady, that Johnson, in his Life of Milton, is like a dog incensed and terrified at the presence of some superior creature, at whom he snarls, then runs away, and then returns to snarl again. If the comparison be a just one, it may be added, in extenuation of Johnson's malignity, that he is at least a dog who thinks himself to be attacking the inveterate foe of his master; for Milton's hostility to a kingly government was the crime which he could not forgive.
The mention of Milton, and of his politics, brings to my mind two sayings of Johnson's that were related to me by Mr. Price, of Lichfield. After passing an evening together at Mr. Seward's, the father of the poetess, where, in the course of conversation, the words "Me miserable!" in Paradise Lost, had been commended as highly pathetic, they had walked some way along the street in silence, which the good man was not likely first to break, when Johnson suddenly stopped, and turning round to him, exclaimed, "Sir! don't you think that 'Me miserable' is miserable stuff?" On another occasion he thus whimsically described the different manner in which he felt himself disposed towards a Whig and a Tory. "If," said he, "I saw a Whig and a Tory drowning, I would first save the Tory; and when I saw that he was safe, not till then, I would go and help the Whig; but the dog should duck first; the dog should duck;" laughing with pleasure at the thoughts of the Whig's ducking.
The principal charm of the Lives of the Poets is in the store of information which they contain. He had been, as he says somewhere of his own father, "no careless observer of the passages of the times." In the course of a long life, he had heard, and read, and seen much; and this he communicates with such force and vivacity, and illustrates by observations so pertinent and striking, that we recur again and again to his pages as we would to so many portraits traced by the hand of a great master, in spite of our belief that the originals were often misrepresented, that some were flattered, and the defects of others still more overcharged. In his very errors as a critic there is often shewn more ability than in the right judgments of most other. When he is most wrong, he gives us some good reason for his being so. He is often mistaken, but never trivial and insipid. It is more safe to trust to him when he commends than when he dispraises; when he enlarges the boundaries of criticism which his predecessors had contracted, than when he sets up new fences of his own. The higher station we can take, the more those petty limits will disappear, which confine excellence to particular forms and systems. The critic who condemns that which the generality of mankind, or even the few of those more refined in their taste, have long agreed in admiring, may naturally conclude the fault to be in himself; that there is in his mind or his organs some want of capacity for the reception of a certain species of pleasure. When Johnson rejected pastoral comedy, as being representative ofscenesadapted chiefly "to please barbarians and children," he might have suspected that his own eye-sight, rather than pastoral comedy, was to blame. When he characterized blank verse, "as verse only to the eye," he might reasonably have questioned the powers of his own hearing. But this, and more than this, we may forgive him, for his successful vindication of Shakspeare from the faults objected to him by the French critics.
It is in his biographical works that Johnson is most pleasing and most instructive. His querulousness takes away much both from the agreeableness and the use of his moral writings. Addison has represented our nature in its most attractive forms; but Swift makes us turn with loathing from its deformities, and Johnson causes us to shudder at its misery.
Like most of the writers of that time, he made use of his poetry only as the means of introducing himself to the public. We cannot regret, as in the case of Goldsmith, that he put it to no further service. He took little delight in those appearances either of nature or art, for which the poet ought to have the eye of a painter. Nor had he much more sense of the elegant in numbers and in sound. There were indeed certain rounds of metrical arrangement which he loved to repeat, but he could not go beyond them. How very limited his perceptions of this kind were, we may be convinced by reading his strictures on Dionysius the Halicarnassian in the Rambler, and the opinions on Milton's versification, which in the Idler he has put into the mouth of a minute critic, only to ridicule them, though they are indeed founded in truth. Johnson was not one of those whom Plato calls the [Greek: philaekooi kai philotheamones], "who gladly acknowledge the beautiful wherever it is met with, in sounds, and colours, and figures, and all that is by art compounded from these;" much less had he ascended "to that abstract notion of beauty" which the same philosopher considers it so much more difficult to attain.[15]
In his tragedy, the dramatis personae are like so many statues "stept from their pedestal to take the air." They come on the stage only to utter pompous sentiments of morality, turgid declamation, and frigid similes. Yet there is throughout, that strength of language, that heavy mace of words, with which, as with the flail of Talus, Johnson lays every thing prostrate before him. This style is better suited to his imitations of the two satires of Juvenal. Of the first of these, "the London," Gray, in a letter to Horace Walpole, says that "to him it is one of those few imitations, that has all the ease and all the spirit of an original." The other is not at all inferior to it. Johnson was not insensible to such praise; and, could he have known how favourably Gray had spoken of him, would, I doubt not, have been more just to that poet, whom, besides the petulant criticism on him in his Life, he presumed in conversation to call "a heavy fellow."
In his shorter poems it appears as if nature could now and then thrust herself even into the bosom of Johnson himself, from whom we could scarcely have looked for such images as are to be found in the following stanzas.
By gloomy twilight half reveal'd,With sighs we view the hoary hill,The leafless wood, the naked field,The snow-stopp'd cot, the frozen rill.
No music warbles through the grove,No vivid colours paint the plain;No more with devious steps I roveThrough verdant paths, now sought in vain.
Aloud the driving tempest roars,Congeal'd impetuous showers descend;Haste, close the window, bar the doors,Fate leaves me Stella and a friend.
Sappho herself might have owned a touch of passionate tenderness, that he has introduced into another of these little pieces:
—The Queen of nightRound us pours a lambent light,Light that seems but just to showBreasts that beat, and cheeks that glow.
His Latin poetry is not without a certain barbaric splendour; but it discovers, as might be expected, no skill in the more refined graces of the Augustan age. The verse he quoted to Thomas Warton as his favourite, from the translation of Pope's Messiah,
Vallis aromaticas fundit Saronica nubes,
evinces that he could be pleased without elegance in a mode of composition, of which elegance is the chief recommendation. If we wished to impress foreigners with a favourable opinion of the taste which our countrymen have formed for the most perfect productions of the Roman muse, we should send them, not to the pages of Johnson, but rather to those of Milton, Gray, Warton, and some of yet more recent date.
It was the chance of Johnson to fall upon an age that rated his great abilities at their full value. His laboriousness had the appearance of something stupendous, when there were many literary but few very learned men. His vigour of intellect imposed upon the multitude an opinion of his wisdom, from the solemn air and oracular tone in which he uniformly addressed them. He would have been of less consequence in the days of Elizabeth or of Cromwell.
FOOTNOTES: [1] Bull's Fifth Sermon. [2] In a note to Johnson's Works, 8vo. Edition, 1810, it is said that this is rendered improbable by the account given of Colson, by Davies, in his life of Garrick, which was certainly written under Dr. Johnson's inspection, and, what relates to Colson, probably from Johnson's confirmation. [3] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. v. p. 696. [4] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. v, p. 15 [5] Ibid. vol. viii. [6] Warburton's Letters, 8vo. Edit. p. 369. [7] This defect has probably been remedied by Mr. Todd's enlargement of the Dictionary. [8] Wooll's Life of Joseph Warton, p. 230. [9] The writers, besides Smart, were Richard Holt, Garrick, and Dr. Percy. Their papers are signed with the initials of their surnames. Johnson's are marked by two asterisks.—See Hawkins's Life of Johnson, p.351. [10] Miss Seward's letters, vol. i. p. 117. [11] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ii. [12] Vol. xix. p. 71. Ed. 1815. [13] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. ii. p. 532. [14] Wooll's Memoirs of Dr. Joseph Warton. [15] Plato de Republica, 1. v. 476.
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John Armstrong, the son of a Scotch minister, was born in the parish of Castleton, in Roxburghshire. The date of his birth has not been ascertained, nor is there any thing known concerning the earlier part of his education. The first we hear of it is, that he took a degree in medicine at Edinburgh, on the fourth of February, 1732; on which occasion he published his Thesis, as usual, and chose De Tabe Purulenta for the subject of it. A copy of a Latin letter, which he sent to Sir Hans Sloane with this essay, is said to be in the British Museum. In an advertisement prefixed to some verses which he calls Imitations of Shakspeare, he informs the reader that the first of them was just finished when Thomson's Winter made its appearance. This was in 1726, when he was, he himself says, very young. Thomson having heard of this production by a youth, who was of the same country with himself, desired to see it, and was so much pleased with the attempt, that he put it into the hands of Aaron Hill, Mallet, and Young. With Thomson, further than in the subject, there is no coincidence. The manner is a caricature of Shakspeare's.
In 1735, we find him in London, publishing a humorous pamphlet, entitled An Essay for abridging the Study of Physic, which, though he did not profess himself the writer, Mr. Nichols says [1], he can, on the best authority, assert to be his. In two years after he published a Medical Essay. This was soon followed by a licentious poem, which I have not seen, and the title of which I do not think it necessary to record.— While thus employed, it was not to be expected that he should rise to much eminence in his profession. The dying man does not willingly see by his couch one who has recently disgraced himself by an open act of profligacy. In January 1741, he solicited Dr. Birch to use his influence with Mead in recommending him to the appointment of Physician to the Forces which were then going to the West Indies. It does not appear that this application was successful; but in five years more, (February 1746,) he was nominated one of the Physicians to the Hospital for Invalid Soldiers behind Buckingham House; and in 1760, Physician to the Army in Germany. Meantime (in 1744) he had published his Art of Preserving Health, a didactic poem, that soon made its way to notice, and which, by the judiciousness of the precepts, might have tended to raise some opinion of his medical skill. At the beginning he addresses Mead:—
—Beloved by all the graceful arts,And long the favourite of the healing powers.
He had now become intimate with Thomson, to whose Castle of Indolence he contributed the three stanzas which conclude the first canto. One of the alterations made in them by Thomson is not for the better. He had written—
And here the gout, half tyger, half a snake,Raged with a hundred teeth, a hundred stings;
which was changed to—
The sleepless gout here counts the crowing cocks,A wolf now gnaws him, now a serpent stings.
When Thomson was seized with the illness of which he died, Armstrong was one of those who were sent for to attend him.
In 1751, he published Benevolence, an Epistle to Eumenes; and in 1753, Taste, an Epistle to a Young Critic. In the next year, he wrote the Forced Marriage, a tragedy, which Garrick did not think fitted for the stage. It was printed in 1770, with such of his other writings as he considered worthy of being collected. In this book, which he entitled Miscellanies, in two volumes, first appeared the second part of Sketches or Essays on Various Subjects, by Launcelot Temple, Esq.; the former had been published in 1758. Wilkes was supposed to have contributed something to these lively trifles, which, under an air of impertinent levity, are sometimes marked by originality and discernment. His poem called Day, an epistle which he had addressed to Wilkes in 1761, was not admitted by the author to take its place among the rest. For the dispute which gave rise to this omission he was afterwards sorry; and in his last illness declared, that what he had got in the army he owed to the kindness of Wilkes; and that although he had been rash and hasty, he still retained a due sense of gratitude. In attacking Wilkes, he contrived to exasperate Churchill also, who was not to be provoked with impunity, and who revenged himself in the Journey. In 1771, he published a Short Ramble through some parts of France and Italy. In the neighbourhood of Leghorn he passed a fortnight with Smollett, to whom he was always tenderly attached. Of his book I regret the more that I cannot speak from my own knowledge, because the journey which it narrates is said to have been made in the society of Mr. Fuseli, with whom it is not easy to suppose that any one could have travelled without profiting by the elegance and learning of his companion. I have no better means of bringing my reader acquainted with some Medical Essays which he published in 1773; but from the manner in which they are spoken of in the Biographical Dictionary [2], it is to be feared that they did not conduce to his reputation or advancement. He died in September, 1779, in consequence, as it is said, of a contusion which he received when he was getting into a carriage. His friends were surprised to find he had laid by three thousand pounds, which had been saved chiefly out of his half-pay.
Armstrong appears to have been good-natured and indolent, little versed in what is called the way of the world, and, with an eagerness of ostentation which looks like the result of mortified vanity, a despiser of the vulgar, whether found among the little or the great.
His Art of Preserving Health is the only production by which he is likely to be remembered. The theme which he has chosen is one, in which no man who lives long does not at some time or other feel an interest; and he has handled it with considerable skill. In the first Book, on Air, he has interwoven very pleasing descriptions both of particular places and of situations in general, with reference to the effects they may be supposed to have on health. The second, which treats of Diet, is necessarily less attractive, as the topic is less susceptible of ornament; yet in speaking of water, he has contrived to embellish it by some lines, which are, perhaps, the finest in the poem.
Now come, ye Naiads, to the fountains lead;Now let me wander through your gelid reign.I burn to view th' enthusiastic wildsBy mortals else untrod. I hear the dinOf waters thund'ring o'er the ruin'd cliffs.With holy reverence I approach the rocksWhence glide the streams renown'd in ancient song.Here from the desart, down the rumbling steep,First springs the Nile: here bursts the sounding PoIn angry waves: Euphrates hence devolvesA mighty flood to water half the East:And there, in Gothic solitude reclin'd,The cheerless Tanais pours his hoary urn.What solemn twilight! What stupendous shadesEnwrap these infant floods! Through every nerveA sacred horror thrills, a pleasing fearGlides o'er my frame. The forest deepens round;And more gigantic still th' impending treesStretch their extravagant arms athwart the gloom.Are these the confines of another world?A land of Genii? Say, beyond these wildsWhat unknown regions? If indeed beyondAught habitable lies.
This has more majesty, and more to fill the imagination, than the corresponding paragraph in Thomson's Autumn.
Say then where lurk the vast eternal springs, &c.—771.
Yet it is inferior in beauty to some verses in a Latin poem by a writer who is now living.
Quippe sub immensis terrae penetralibus altaeHiscunt in vastum tenebrae: magnarum ibi princepslabitur undarum Oceanus, quo patre liquorisOmnigeni latices et mollis lentor aquaiProfluxere, nova nantes aestate superneAerii rores nebularum, et liquidus imber.Fama est perpetuos illinc se erumpere fontes,Florigerum Ladona, et lubrica vitra Selemni,Crathidaque, imbriferamque Lycaeis vallibus Hagno,Et gelidam Panopin et Peirenen lacrymosam,Illinc et rapido amnes fluere et mare magnum.
In the third book, he once more breathes freely, and in recounting the various kinds of exercise by which the human frame may be invigorated, his poetic faculty again finds room to play. Joseph Warton, in his Essay on Pope, has justly commended the Episode on the Sweating Sickness, with which it concludes. In the fourth and last, on the Passions, he seems to have grown weary of his task; for he has here less compression and less dignity.
His verse is much more compact than Thomson's, whom he resembles most in the turn of the expression; although he has aimed now and then, but with an ill-assured and timid hand, at a Miltonic boldness in the numbers or the phrase. When he takes occasion to speak of the river with which his remembrances in early life were associated, he has, contrary to his usual custom, indulged himself with enlarging on his prototype.
Thomson had mentioned incidentally the Tweed and the Jed:
—The Tweed, pure parent stream,Whose pastoral banks first heard my Doric reed,With sylvan Jed! thy tributary brook.—Autumn, 889.
He has thus expanded it:—
—Such the stream,On whose Arcadian banks I first drew air,Liddal; till now, except in Doric laysTun'd to her murmurs by her love-sick swains,Unknown in song: though not a purer stream,Through meads more flowery, or more romantic groves,Rolls towards the western main. Hail, sacred flood!May still thy hospitable swains be blestIn rural innocence; thy mountains stillTeem with the fleecy race; thy tuneful woodsFor ever flourish; and thy vales look gayWith painted meadows, and the golden grain!Oft with thy blooming sons, when life was new,Sportive and petulant, and charm'd with toys,In thy transparent eddies have I lav'd;Oft trac'd with patient steps thy fairy banks,With the well-imitated fly to hookThe eager trout, and with the slender lineAnd yielding rod, solicit to the shoreThe struggling panting prey; while vernal cloudsAnd tepid gales obscur'd the ruffled pool,And from the deeps call'd forth the wanton swarms.
B. iii. v. 96.
What he has here added of his love of fishing is from another passage in the Seasons [3].
But his imitations of other writers, however frequent, have no semblance of study or labour. They seem to have been self-suggested, and to have glided tacitly and insensibly into the current of his thoughts. This is evinced by the little pains he took to work upon and heighten such resemblances. As he did not labour the details injudiciously, so he had a clear conception of his matter as a whole. The consequence is, that the poem has that unity and just subordination of parts which renders it easy to be comprehended at one view, and, on that account, more agreeable than the didactic poems of his contemporaries, which having detached passages of much more splendour, are yet wanting in those recommendations. One objection to his subject is, that it is least pleasing at that period of life when poetry is most so; for it is not till the glow of youth is gone by, and we begin to feel the infirmities and the coldness of age, that we are disposed to bestow much attention on the Art of Preserving Health.
His tragedy is worth but little. It appears from his Essays, that he had formed a contracted notion of nature, as an object of imitation for the tragic poet; and he has failed to give a faithful representation of nature, even according to his own imperfect theory.
The two short epistles on Benevolence and Taste, have ease and vigour enough to shew that he could, with a little practice, have written as well in the couplet measure as he did in blank verse. If Armstrong cannot be styled a man of genius, he is at least one of the most ingenious of our minor poets.
FOOTNOTES [1] Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, Vol. ii. p. 307, &c. [2] Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 486. [3] Footnote: Spring, v. 376, &c.
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Richard, the third son of Richard Jago, Rector of Beaudesert, in Warwickshire, was born on the 1st of October, 1715. His mother was Margaret, daughter of Wm. Parker, a gentleman of Henley in Arden, a neighbouring town in the same county. He received the earlier part of his education at Solihull, under Mr. Crumpton, whom Johnson, in his life of Shenstone, calls an eminent schoolmaster. Here Shenstone, who was scarcely one year older, and who, according to Johnson, distinguished himself by the quickness of his progress, imparted to Jago his love of letters. As the one, in his Schoolmistress, has delivered to posterity the old dame who taught him to read; the other has done the same for their common preceptor, but with less ability and less kindness, in his Edgehill, where he terms him "Pedagogue morose."
At the usual time he was admitted a servitor of University College, Oxford. His humble station in the University, though it did not break off his intimacy with Shenstone, must have hindered them from associating openly together.
In 1738, he took the degree of Master of Arts, having been first ordained to the curacy of Snitterfield, a village near the benefice of his father, who died two years after. Soon after that event, he married Dorothea Susannah, daughter of John Fancourt, Rector of Kimcote, in Leicestershire. In 1746, he was instituted to Harbury, where he resided; and about the same time was presented, by Lord Willoughby de Broke, to Chesterton, which lay at a short distance; both livings together amounting to about 100_l._ a year. In 1754, Lord Clare, afterwards Earl Nugent, obtained for him, from Dr. Madox, Bishop of Worcester, the vicarage of Snitterfield, worth about 140_l._ After having inserted some small poems in Dodsley's Collection, he published (in 1767) Edgehill, for which he obtained a large subscription; and in the following year, the fable of Labour and Genius. In 1771, his kind patron, Lord Willoughby de Broke, added to his other preferment the rectory of Kimcote, worth nearly 300_l._ in consequence of which he resigned Harbury.