Lord Bolingbroke had said (Works, in. 317): ‘I approve the devotion of a studious man at Christ Church, who was overheard in his oratory entering into a detail with God, and acknowledging the divine goodness in furnishing the world with makers of dictionaries. These men court fame, as well as their betters, by such means as God has given them to acquire it. They deserve encouragement while they continue to compile, and neither affect wit, nor presume to reason.’ Johnson himself in The Adventurer, No. 39, had in 1753 described a class of men who ‘employed their minds in such operations as required neither celerity nor strength, in the low drudgery of collating copies, comparing authorities, digesting dictionaries,’ &c. Lord Monboddo, in his Origin of Language, v. 273, says that ‘J. C. Scaliger called the makers of dictionaries les portefaix de la république des lettres.’
[871] Great though his depression was, yet he could say with truth in his Preface:—‘Despondency has never so far prevailed as to depress me to negligence.’ Works, v. 43.
[872] Ib. p. 51. ‘In the preface the author described the difficulties with which he had been left to struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, Horne Tooke, never could read that passage without tears.’ Macaulay’s Misc. Writings, p. 382. It is in A Letter to John Dunning, Esq. (p. 56) that Horne Tooke, or rather Horne, wrote:—‘I could never read his preface without shedding a tear.’ See post, May 13, 1778. On Oct. 10, 1779, Boswell told Johnson, that he had been ‘agreeably mistaken’ in saying:—‘What would it avail me in this gloom of solitude?’
[873] It appears even by many a passage in the Preface—one of the proudest pieces of writing in our language. ‘The chief glory,’ he writes, ‘of every people arises from its authors: whether I shall add anything by my own writings to the reputation of English literature must be left to time.’ ‘I deliver,’ he says, ‘my book to the world with the spirit of a man that has endeavoured well…. In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.’ Works, v. pp. 49-51. Thomas Warton wrote to his brother:—‘I fear his preface will disgust by the expressions of his consciousness of superiority, and of his contempt of patronage.’ Wooll’s Warton, p. 231.
[874] That praise was slow in coming is shown by his letter to Mr. Burney, written two years and eight months after the publication of the Dictionary. ‘Your praise,’ he wrote, ‘was welcome, not only because I believe it was sincere, but because praise has been very scarce…. Yours is the only letter of good-will that I have received; though, indeed, I am promised something of that sort from Sweden.’ Post, Dec. 24, 1757.
[875] In the Edinburgh Review (No. 1, 1755)—a periodical which only lasted two years—there is a review by Adam Smith of Johnson’s Dictionary. Smith admits the ‘very extraordinary merit’ of the author. ‘The plan,’ however, ‘is not sufficiently grammatical.’ To explain what he intends, he inserts ‘an article or two from Mr. Johnson, and opposes to them the same articles, digested in the manner which we would have wished him to have followed.’ He takes the words but and humour. One part of his definition of humour is curious—‘something which comes upon a man by fits, which he can neither command nor restrain, and which is not perfectly consistent with true politeness.’ This essay has not, I believe, been reprinted.
[876] She died in March 1752; the Dictionary was published in April 1755.
[877] In the Preface he writes (Works, v. 49):—‘Much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me.’ In his fine Latin poem [Greek: Inothi seauton] ‘he has left,’ says Mr. Murphy (Life, p. 82), ‘a picture of himself drawn with as much truth, and as firm a hand, as can be seen in the portraits of Hogarth or Sir Joshua Reynolds.’ He wrote it after revising and enlarging his Dictionary, and he sadly asks himself what is left for him to do.
Me, pensi immunis cum jam mihi reddor, inertis
Desidiae sors dura manet, graviorque labore
Tristis et atra quies, et tardae taedia vitae.
Nascuntur curis curae, vexatque dolorum
Importuna cohors, vacuae mala somnia mentis.
Nunc clamosa juvant nocturnae gaudia mensae,
Nunc loca sola placent; frustra te, somne, recumbens,
Alme voco, impatiens noctis, metuensque diei.
Omnia percurro trepidus, circum omnia lustro,
Si qua usquam pateat melioris semita vitae,
Nec quid agam invenio….
Quid faciam? tenebrisne pigram damnare senectam
Restat? an accingar studiis gravioribus audax?
Aut, hoc si nimium est, tandem nova lexica poscam?
Johnson’s Works, i. 164.
[878] A few weeks before his wife’s death he wrote in The Rambler (No. 196):—‘The miseries of life would be increased beyond all human power of endurance, if we were to enter the world with the same opinions as we carry from it.’ He would, I think, scarcely have expressed himself so strongly towards his end. Though, as Dr. Maxwell records, in his Collectanea (post, 1770), ‘he often used to quote with great pathos those fine lines of Virgil:—
‘Optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi
Prima fugit, &c.’
yet he owned, and the pages of Boswell amply testify, that it was in the latter period of his life that he had his happiest days.
[879] Macbeth, Act ii. sc. 3.
[880] In the third edition, published in 1773, he left out the words perhaps never, and added the following paragraph:—
‘It sometimes begins middle or final syllables in words compounded, as block-head, or derived from the Latin, as comprehended.’ BOSWELL. In the Abridgment, which was published some years earlier, after never is added ‘except in compounded words.’
[881] It was published in the Gent. Mag. for April, 1755 (xxv. 190), just below the advertisement of the Dictionary.
[882] In the original, ‘Milton and Shakespeare.’
[883] The number of the French Academy employed in settling their language. BOSWELL.
[884] The maximum reward offered by a bill passed in 1714 was £20,000 for a method that determined the longitude at sea to half a degree of a great circle, or thirty geographical miles. For less accuracy smaller rewards were offered. Ann. Reg. viii. 114. In 1765 John Harrison received £7,500 for his chronometer; he had previously been paid £2,500; ib. 128. In this Act of Parliament ‘the legislature never contemplated the invention of a method, but only of the means of making existing methods accurate.’ Penny Cyclo. xiv. 139. An old sea-faring man wrote to Swift that he had found out the longitude. The Dean replied ‘that he never knew but two projectors, one of whom ruined himself and his family, and the other hanged himself; and desired him to desist lest one or other might happen to him.’ Swift’s Works (1803), xvii. 157. In She Stoops to Conquer (Act i. sc. 2), when Tony ends his directions to the travellers by telling them,—‘coming to the farmer’s barn you are to turn to the right, and then to the left, and then to the right about again, till you find out the old mill;’ Marlow exclaims: ‘Zounds, man! we could as soon find out the longitude.’
[885]