Immortal Memories | Page 6

England--I will not say of Scotland or of Ireland--has done honour to a literary son in the same substantial measure that Lichfield has done honour to Samuel Johnson. The peculiar glory of the deed is that it was done to the living Johnson, not coming, as so many honours do, too late for a man to find pleasure in the recognition. We know that--
Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead, Through which the living Homer begged his bread.
But I doubt whether in the whole history of literature in England it can be found that any other purely literary man has received in his lifetime so substantial a mark of esteem from the city which gave him birth, as Johnson did when your Corporation, in 1767, "at a common-hall of the bailiffs and citizens, without any solicitation," presented him with the ninety-nine years' lease of the house in which he was born. Your citizens not only did that for Johnson, but they gave him other marks of their esteem. He writes from Lichfield to Sir Joshua Reynolds to express his pleasure that his portrait has been "much visited and much admired." "Every man," he adds, "has a lurking desire to appear considerable in his native place." Then we all remember Boswell's naive confession that his pleasure at finding his hero so much beloved led him, when the pair arrived at this very hostelry, to imbibe too much of the famous Lichfield ale. If Boswell wished, as he says, to offer incense to the spirit of the place, how much more may we desire to do so to-night, when exactly 125 years have passed, and his hero is now more than ever recognized as a king of men.
I do not suggest that we should honour Johnson in quite the same way that Boswell did. This is a more abstemious age. But we must drink to his memory all the same. Think of it. A century and a quarter have passed since that memorable evening at the Three Crowns, when Johnson and Boswell thus foregathered in this very room. You recall the journey from Birmingham of the two companions. "We are getting out of a state of death," the Doctor said with relief, as he approached his native city, feeling all the magic and invigoration that is said to come to those who in later years return to "calf-land." Then how good he was to an old schoolfellow who called upon him here. The fact that this man had failed in the battle of life while Johnson had succeeded, only made the Doctor the kinder. I know of no more human picture than that--"A Mr. Jackson," as he is called by Boswell, "in his coarse grey coat," obviously very poor, and as Boswell suggests, "dull and untaught." The "great Cham of Literature" listens patiently as the worthy Jackson tells his troubles, so much more patiently than he would have listened to one of the famous men of his Club in London, and the hero-worshipping Boswell drinks his deep potations, but never neglects to take notes the while. Of Boswell one remembers further that Johnson had told Wilkes that he had brought him to Lichfield, "my native city," "that he might see for once real Civility--for you know he lives among savages in Scotland, and among rakes in London." All good stories are worth hearing again and again, and so I offer an apology for recalling the picture to your mind at this time and in this place.
Alas! I have not the gift of the worldfamed Lord Verulam, who, as Francis Bacon, sat in the House of Commons. The members, we are told, so delighted in his oratory that when he rose to speak they "were fearful lest he should make an end." I am making an end. Johnson then was not only a great writer, a conversationalist so unique that his sayings have passed more into current speech than those of any other Englishman, but he was also a great moralist--a superb inspiration to a better life. We should not love Johnson so much were he not presented to us as a man of many weaknesses and faults akin to our own, not a saint by any means, and therefore not so far removed from us as some more ethereal characters of whom we may read. Johnson striving to methodize his life, to fight against sloth and all the minor vices to which he was prone, is the Johnson whom some of us prefer to keep ever in mind. "Here was," I quote Carlyle, "a strong and noble man, one of our great English souls." I love him best in his book called Prayers and Meditations, where we know him as we know scarcely any other Englishman, for the good, upright fighter in