James Boswell - THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON - All 6 Volumes in One Edition

[1000] He now and then repeats himself. Thus, in The Idler , No. 37, he moralises on the story, how Socrates, passing through the fair at Athens, cried out:—‘How many things are here which I do not need!’ though he had already moralised on it in the Adventurer , Nos. 67, 119.

[1001] No. 34.

[1002] Poems on Several Occasions , by Thomas Blacklock, p. 179. See post , Aug. 5, 1763, and Boswell’s Hebrides , Aug. 17, 1773.

[1003] ‘Among the papers of Newbery, in the possession of Mr. Murray, is the account rendered on the collection of The Idler into two small volumes, when the arrangement seems to have been that Johnson should receive two-thirds of the profits.

The Idler .

‘DR. £. s. d.

Paid for Advertising.. 20 0 6

Printing two vols., 1,500 41 13 0

Paper… … . 52 3 0

*

£113 16 6

Profit on the edition . 126 3 6

*

£240 0 0

*

‘CR. £. s. d.

1,500 Sets at 16£ per 100 240 0 0

*

Dr. Johnson two-thirds 84 2 4

Mr. Newbery one-third. 42 1 2

*

£126 3 6

*

Forster’s Goldsmith , i. 204.

If this account is correctly printed, the sale must have been slow. The first edition (2 vols. 5s.) was published in Oct. 1761, ( Gent. Mag . xxxi. 479). Johnson is called Dr. in the account; but he was not made an LL.D. till July 1765. Prior, in his Life of Goldsmith (i. 459), publishes an account between Goldsmith and Newbery in which the first entry is:—

‘1761. Oct. 14, 1 set of

The Idler … . . £0 50 0.’

Johnson, as Newbery’s papers show, a year later bought a copy of

Goldsmith’s Life of Nash ; ib . p. 405.

[1004] See ante , p. 306.

[1005] This paper may be found in Stockdale’s supplemental volume of Johnson’s Miscellaneous Pieces . BOSWELL. Stockdale’s supplemental volumes—for there are two—are vols. xii. and xiii. of what is known as ‘Hawkins’s edition.’ In this paper ( Works , iv. 450) he represents in a fable two vultures speculating on that mischievous being, man, ‘who is the only beast who kills that which he does not devour,’ who at times is seen to move in herds, while ‘there is in every herd one that gives directions to the rest, and seems to be more eminently delighted with a wide carnage.’

[1006] ‘Receipts for Shakespeare .’ WARTON.—BOSWELL.

[1007] ‘Then of Lincoln College. Now Sir Robert Chambers, one of the Judges in India.’ WARTON.—BOSWELL.

[1008] Old Mr. Langton’s niece. See post, July 14, 1763.

[1009] ‘Mr. Langton.’ WARTON.—BOSWELL.

[1010] Boswell records:—‘Lady Di Beauclerk told me that Langton had never been to see her since she came to Richmond, his head was so full of the militia and Greek. “Why,” said I, “Madam, he is of such a length he is awkward and not easily moved.” “But,” said she, “if he had lain himself at his length, his feet had been in London, and his head might have been here eodem die .”’ Boswelliana , p. 297.

[1011] ‘Part of the impression of the Shakespeare , which Dr. Johnson conducted alone, and published by subscription. This edition came out in 1765.’ WARTON.—BOSWELL.

[1012] Stockdale records ( Memoirs , ii. 191), that after he had entered on his charge as domestic tutor to Lord Craven’s son, he called on Johnson, who asked him how he liked his place. On his hesitating to answer, he said: ‘You must expect insolence.’ He added that in his youth he had entertained great expectations from a powerful family. “At length,” he said, “I found that their promises, and consequently my expectations, vanished into air…. But, Sir, they would have treated me much worse, if they had known that motives from which I paid my court to them were purely selfish, and what opinion I had formed of them.” He added, that since he knew mankind, he had not, on any occasion, been the sport of such delusion and that he had never been disappointed by anyone but himself.’

[1013] This, and some of the other letters to Langton, were not received by Boswell till the first volume of the second edition had been carried through the press. He gave them as a supplement to the second volume. The date of this letter was there wrongly given as June 27, 1758. In the third edition it was corrected. Nevertheless the letter was misplaced as if the wrong date were the right one. Langton, as I have shewn ( ante , p. 247), subscribed the articles at Oxford on July 7, 1757. He must have come into residence, as Johnson did ( ante , p. 58), some little while before this subscription.

[1014] Major-General Alexander Dury, of the first regiment of foot-guards, who fell in the gallant discharge of his duty, near St. Cas, in the well-known unfortunate expedition against France, in 1758. His lady and Mr. Langton’s mother was sisters. He left an only son, Lieutenant-Colonel Dury, who has a company in the same regiment. BOSWELL. The expedition had been sent against St. Malo early in September. Failing in the attempt, the land forces retreated to St. Cas, where, while embarking, they were attacked by the French. About 400 of our soldiers were made prisoners, and 600 killed and wounded. Ann. Reg .i.68.

[1015] See post , 1770, in Dr. Maxwell’s Collectanea .

[1016] Hawkins’s Life of Johnson , p. 365. BOSWELL. ‘In the beginning of the year 1759 an event happened for which it might be imagined he was well prepared, the death of his mother, who had attained the age of ninety; but he, whose mind had acquired no firmness by the contemplation of mortality, was as little able to sustain the shock, as he would have been had this loss befallen him in his nonage.’

[1017] We may apply to Johnson in his behaviour to his mother what he said of Pope in his behaviour to his parents:—‘Whatever was his pride, to them he was obedient; and whatever was his irritability, to them he was gentle. Life has among its soothing and quiet comforts few things better to give than such a son.’ Johnson’s Works , viii. 281. In The Idler of January 27, 1759 (No. 41), Johnson shews his grief for his loss. ‘The last year, the last day must come. It has come, and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects…. Such is the condition of our present existence that life must one time lose its associations, and every inhabitant of the earth must walk downward to the grave alone and unregarded, without any partner of his joy or grief, without any interested witness of his misfortunes or success. Misfortune, indeed, he may yet feel; for where is the bottom of the misery of man? But what is success to him that has none to enjoy it? Happiness is not found in self-contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.’ In Rasselas (ch. xlv.) he makes a sage say with a sigh:—‘Praise is to have an old man an empty sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband.’ He here says once more what he had already said in his Letter to Lord Chesterfield ( ante , p. 261), and in the Preface to the Dictionary ( ante , p. 297).

[1018] Writing to his Birmingham friend, Mr. Hector, on Oct. 7, 1756, he said:—‘I have been thinking every month of coming down into the country, but every month has brought its hinderances. From that kind of melancholy indisposition which I had when we lived together at Birmingham I have never been free, but have always had it operating against my health and my life with more or less violence. I hope however to see all my friends, all that are remaining, in no very long time.’ Notes and Queries , 6th S. iii. 301. No doubt his constant poverty and the need that he was under of making ‘provision for the day that was passing over him’ had had much to do in keeping him from a journey to Lichfield. A passage in one of his letters shews that fourteen years later the stage-coach took twenty-six hours in going from London to Lichfield. ( Piozzi Letters , i. 55.) The return journey was very uncertain; for ‘our carriages,’ he wrote, ‘are only such as pass through the place sometimes full and sometimes vacant.’ A traveller had to watch for a place ( ib . p. 51). As measured by time London was, in 1772, one hour farther from Lichfield than it now is from Marseilles. It is strange, when we consider the long separation between Johnson and his mother, that in Rasselas , written just after her death, he makes Imlac say:-‘There is such communication [in Europe] between distant places, that one friend can hardly be said to be absent from another.’ Rasselas , chap, xi. His step-daughter, Miss Porter, though for many years she was well off, had never been to London. Post , March 23, 1776. Nay, according to Horace Walpole ( Memoirs of the Reign of George III , iv. 327), ‘George III. had never seen the sea, nor ever been thirty miles from London at the age of thirty-four.’