Anecdotes of Johnson | Page 5

is surely no dispraise to an oak that it does not bear jessamine; and he
who should plant honeysuckle round Trajan's column would not be
thought to adorn, but to disgrace it.
When I have said that he was more a man of genius than of learning, I
mean not to take from the one part of his character that which I
willingly give to the other. The erudition of Mr. Johnson proved his
genius; for he had not acquired it by long or profound study: nor can I
think those characters the greatest which have most learning driven into
their heads, any more than I can persuade myself to consider the River
Jenisca as superior to the Nile, because the first receives near seventy
tributary streams in the course of its unmarked progress to the sea,
while the great parent of African plenty, flowing from an almost
invisible source, and unenriched by any extraneous waters, except
eleven nameless rivers, pours his majestic torrent into the ocean by
seven celebrated mouths.
But I must conclude my preface, and begin my book, the first I ever
presented before the public; from whose awful appearance in some
measure to defend and conceal myself, I have thought fit to retire
behind the Telamonian shield, and show as little of myself as possible,
well aware of the exceeding difference there is between fencing in the
school and fighting in the field. Studious, however, to avoid offending,
and careless of that offence which can be taken without a cause, I here
not unwillingly submit my slight performance to the decision of that
glorious country, which I have the daily delight to hear applauded in
others, as eminently just, generous, and humane.

ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

Too much intelligence is often as pernicious to biography as too little;
the mind remains perplexed by contradiction of probabilities, and finds
difficulty in separating report from truth. If Johnson then lamented that
so little had ever been said about Butler, I might with more reason be
led to complain that so much has been said about himself; for
numberless informers but distract or cloud information, as glasses

which multiply will for the most part be found also to obscure. Of a life,
too, which for the last twenty years was passed in the very front of
literature, every leader of a literary company, whether officer or
subaltern, naturally becomes either author or critic, so that little less
than the recollection that it was ONCE the request of the deceased, and
TWICE the desire of those whose will I ever delighted to comply with,
should have engaged me to add my little book to the number of those
already written on the subject. I used to urge another reason for
forbearance, and say, that all the readers would, on this singular
occasion, be the writers of his life: like the first representation of the
Masque of Comus, which, by changing their characters from spectators
to performers, was ACTED by the lords and ladies it was WRITTEN to
entertain. This objection is, however, now at an end, as I have found
friends, far remote indeed from literary questions, who may yet be
diverted from melancholy by my description of Johnson's manners,
warmed to virtue even by the distant reflection of his glowing
excellence, and encouraged by the relation of his animated zeal to
persist in the profession as well as practice of Christianity.
Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller at
Lichfield, in Staffordshire; a very pious and worthy man, but
wrong-headed, positive, and afflicted with melancholy, as his son, from
whom alone I had the information, once told me: his business, however,
leading him to be much on horseback, contributed to the preservation
of his bodily health and mental sanity, which, when he stayed long at
home, would sometimes be about to give way; and Mr. Johnson said,
that when his workshop, a detached building, had fallen half down for
want of money to repair it, his father was not less diligent to lock the
door every night, though he saw that anybody might walk in at the back
part, and knew that there was no security obtained by barring the front
door. "THIS," says his son, "was madness, you may see, and would
have been discoverable in other instances of the prevalence of
imagination, but that poverty prevented it from playing such tricks as
riches and leisure encourage." Michael was a man of still larger size
and greater strength than his son, who was reckoned very like him, but
did not delight in talking much of his family: "One has," says he, "SO
little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary." One day, however,
hearing me praise a favourite friend with partial