London is a poem written in imitation of the third satire of Juvenal. It appeared in 1738 and attracted the attention of Pope, who praised it. Goldsmith in 1767 wrote that "This poem of Mr. Johnson's is the best imitation of the original that has appeared in our language, being possessed of all the force and satirical resentment of Juvenal.” This is higher praise than the poem deserves. Johnson was too immature at that time to know his London as Juvenal knew his Rome. The sentiments of the poem are the conventional belief that the government is venal and the great are weakened by luxury; the simple life of the country is contrasted with the enervating profligacy of the city. In this poem occur these lines – "Of all the griefs that harass the distress'd, Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest; Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart, The satire was published anonymously by Dodsley and brought the author ten guineas and some honor. The English Dictionary.-In 1747, upon the urgent request of a syndicate of booksellers, Johnson began the stupendous task of making a complete English dictionary. For this work he was to receive £1575; it may be added that by the time the work was finished he had received in scattered payments £100 in excess of the original agreement. At first he expected to finish his task in three years, but it was not until April 15, 1755, that the two large folio volumes were issued for general circulation. The price was £4 4s. It was popular from the first and ran through many editions. While modern dictionary-making, demanding the employment of hundreds of specialists in science and art, in literature and philology, and the expenditure of a million of dollar, results in a fulness and accuracy of information unknown in the eighteenth century, yet Johnson's accomplishment is not to be minimized. Johnson was no etymologist, although he had the usual equipment of one educated in the classics. But of Teutonic philology he was ignorant; so it is not surprising that in 1807 Noah Webster wrote, "I can assure the American public that the errors in Johnson's Dictionary are ten times as numerous as they suppose; and that the confidence now reposed in its accuracy is the greatest injury to philology that now exists." It is also true that he permitted his prejudices to color his definitions, as when he defined oats as "a grain which in England is given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." A definition which led to the bright retort of Lord Elibank, who on hearing of Johnson's definition said, "Yes; and where else will you see such horses and such men.' It is also true that some of his definitions have a Johnsonian ponderosity, as that of Network, "anything reticulated or decussated at equal interstices between the intersections." These are but minor defects that but add piquancy to the work which involved an enormous amount of drudgery. At times he had as many as six amanuenses to assist him, but the responsibility and the credit of completing the task were his alone. To a man naturally indolent, as was Johnson, the patient application, the labor of correction, and the vexatious delays must have been intensely distasteful. There is both humor and pathos in his definition of the word Lexicographer, “a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words." Perhaps the finest quality in the Dictionary is the fulness of the quotations illustrating the meanings of the words. On the whole, the making of the Dictionary was a great achievement and we may say of it, in the words of Carlyle, "There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true builder did it.” When planning the Dictionary he had addressed Lord Chesterfield, probably with the expectation that the distinguished nobleman would act as generous patron. Chesterfield, neglecting to assist while Johnson was struggling with his task, publicly praised him when the work was finished, possibly with the hope that the Dictionary would appear with his name as the patron. "He had," said Johnson, “for many years taken no notice of me, but when my Dictionary was coming out, he fell a-scribbling in The World about it. Upon which I wrote him a letter. . . In this celebrated letter, which Professor Gummere aptly calls a kind of declaration of independence in English authorship," occurs this paragraph: "Seven years, my lord, have now passed, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before. . . . Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help?" The Rambler and the Idler.-The first number of the Rambler was published on March 20, 1750, and thereafter on each Tuesday and Saturday during the next two years this periodical appeared. With four or five exceptions, Johnson was the author of all the numbers. As he was at work on the Dictionary during these years, one must conclude that Johnson must have attained mastery over his natural disposition to indolence. The essays, lacking the humor and pathos of Lamb's and without the genial social atmosphere of Addison's, are tiresome. But this was not the opinion of his famous contemporary, Samuel Richardson, who wrote, "I am inexpressibly pleased with them." Coleridge in his Table Talk expresses the modern estimate, "It would not be easy to name a book more tiresome, indeed, more difficult to read, or one which gives moral lessons, in a more frigid tone . . . in a language more heavy and monotonous.” The Idler consisted of a series of essays contributed to a weekly paper from 1758-1760. The essays are lighter in tone than those of the Rambler, but the quality is such that they have added but little to the reputation of the author. In the fortyfirst number he gives an account of the death of his mother, who died in her ninetieth year. Rasselas. This oriental story was written, as is well known, to defray the funeral expenses of his mother. It was published on April 19, 1759. Composed on the evenings of a single week, it is nevertheless the most popular of all his writings. For the first edition he received £100, for a second £25. Rasselas has often been compared to Voltaire's Candide, which appeared about the same time, but the resemblances are superficial. In Candide Voltaire attacks religion, and ridicules the most sacred affections; in Rasselas we are impressed by the universality of death and bereavement. "Johnson meant," writes Boswell, "by showing the unsatisfactory nature of things temporal, to direct the hopes of man to things eternal." Lives of the Poets. - Although Elizabeth Barrett Browning wittily said that Johnson "wrote the lives of the poets and left out the poets," this work is the best of all his literary productions. Before discussing this work, four volumes of which were published in 1779, and six more in 1781, we must merely mention the Vanity of Human Wishes, a poem published in 1749; an edition of Shakspere, 1765; Taxation No Tyranny, 1775, a weak defence of England's policy. towards the American colonies; Journey to the Western Islands, 1775; and Political Tracts, 1776. The Lives of the Poets contains both criticism and biography, with a preponderance of criticism. The majority of Johnson's poets have, like the lovers in St. Agnes Eve, disappeared, "ay, ages long ago," and only the specialist in literature knows anything of poets like Pomfret, Stepney, Duke, Sprat, Fenton, Yalden, Mallett, and Tickell. Among the fifty-two lives the only men who today rank high are Milton, Dryden, Addison, Swift, Pope, and Gray. Shakspere is probably omitted because he had been discussed in the preface to Johnson's edition of Shakspere. The following passages from the life of Milton are illustrations of his independence of judgment as well as of his lack of appreciation of what we now consider the high-water mark of poetic excellence. Of Lycidas he writes: "In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral; easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are long ago . exhausted; and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind." Of Paradise Lost he writes at times very sympathetically: "Whatever be the faults of his diction, he can not want the praise of copiousness and variety: he was master of his language in its full extent; and has selected the melodious words with such diligence, that from his book alone the art of English poetry might be learned. . . . I can not wish his work to be other than it is. . . . But of all the borrowers from Homer, Milton is perhaps the least indebted. He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities, and disdainful of help or hinderance." W. E. Channing thought that Johnson could not appreciate Milton because the natures of the two were different. "It was customary," he writes, "in the day of Johnson's glory, to call him a giant, to class him with a mighty but still an earth-born race. Milton we should rank among seraphs." In his criticism of Dryden and Pope, men with whose intellectual natures his own was in sympathy, he is at his best. On the whole, the Lives of the Poets, in spite of many defects due to lack of careful investigation and to the more serious inability to appreciate the finer qualities of poetry, is a worthy contribution to the history of English literature. His Pension.-In discussing his writings we have passed by some of the important events of his life. In 1762 a pension of £300 a year was granted to Johnson by Lord Bute, the minister under George III. "It is not given to you for what you are to do, but for what you have done," was the comforting remark of the royal minister to the lexicographer who had defined a pension as "An allowance made to any one without an equivalent. In England it is generally understood to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country"; and pensioner as “A slave of state hired by a stipend to obey his master." In his letter of acceptance he wrote to Lord Bute: You have conferred your favors on a man who has neither alliance nor interest, who has not merited them by services, nor courted them by |