Immortal Memories | Page 3

pistols at her petticoats, and yelled when he dropped melted
sealing-wax on her bare arms; it is a tragi-comic picture, and one is
glad that Sabrina married some other man than her exacting guardian.
But we would not miss Miss Seward's racy stories for anything, nor
ignore her many letters with their revelation of the glories of old- time
Lichfield, and of those 'lunar meetings' at which the wise ones
foregathered. Now and again these worthies burst into sarcasm at one
another's expense, as when Darwin satirizes the publication of Mr.
Seward's edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Dr. Johnson's edition
of Shakspere
From Lichfield famed two giant critics come, Tremble, ye Poets! hear
them! Fe, Fo, Fum! By Seward's arm the mangled Beaumont bled, And
Johnson grinds poor Shakspere's bones for bread.
But perhaps after all, if we eliminate Dr. Johnson, the lover of letters
gives the second place, not to Miss Seward and her circle, but to David
Garrick. Lichfield contains more than one memento of that great man.
The actor's art is a poor sort of thing as a rule. Johnson, in his tarter
moments, expresses this attitude, as when he talked of Garrick as a man
who exhibited himself for a shilling, when he called him 'a futile
fellow,' and implied that it was very unworthy of Lord Campden to
have made much of the actor and to have ignored so distinguished a
writer as Goldsmith, when thrown into the company of both. Still
undoubtedly Johnson's last word upon Garrick is the best--'his death
has eclipsed the gaiety of nations and diminished the public stock of
harmless pleasure.' We who live more than a hundred years later are
able to recognize that Garrick has been the one great actor from that
age to this. As a rule the mummers are mimics and little more, and
generations go on, giving them their brief but glorious hour of fame,
and then leaving them as mere names in the history of the stage.

Garrick was preserved from this fate, not only by the circumstance that
he had an army of distinguished literary friends, but by his interesting
personality and by his own writings. Many lines of his plays and
prologues have become part of current speech. Moreover his must have
been a great personality, as those of us who have met Sir Henry Irving
in these latter days have realized that his was also a great personality. It
is fitting, therefore, that these two great actors, the most famous of an
interesting, if not always an heroic profession, should lie side by side in
Westminster Abbey.
I now come to my toast "The memory of Dr. Johnson." After all,
Johnson was the greatest of all Lichfieldians, and one of the great men
of his own and of all ages. We may talk about him and praise him
because we shall be the better for so doing, but we shall certainly say
nothing new. One or two points, however, seem to me worthy of
emphasis in this company of Johnsonians. I think we should resent two
popular fallacies which you will not hear from literary students, but
only from one whom it is convenient to call "the man in the street." The
first is, that we should know nothing about Johnson if it were not for
Boswell's famous life, and the second that Johnson the author is dead,
and that our great hero only lives as a brilliant conversationalist in the
pages of Boswell and others. Boswell's Life of Johnson is the greatest
biography in the English language; we all admit that. It is crowded with
incident and anecdote. Neither Walter Scott nor Rousseau, each of
whom has had an equal number of pages devoted to his personality,
lives so distinctly for future ages as does Johnson in the pages of
Boswell. Understanding all this, we are entitled to ask ourselves what
we should have thought of Dr. Johnson had there been no Boswell; and
to this question I do not hesitate to answer that we should have loved
him as much as ever, and that there would still have been a mass of
material with the true Boswellian flavour. He would not have made an
appeal to so large a public, but some ingenious person would have
drawn together all the anecdotes, all the epigrams, all the touches of
that fine humanity, and given us from these various sources an
amalgam of Johnson, that every bookman at least would have desired
to read and study. In Fanny Burney's Letters and Diaries the
presentation of Johnson is delightful. I wonder very much that all the

Johnson fragments that Miss Burney provides have not been published
separately. Then Mrs. Thrale has chatted about Johnson copiously in
her "Anecdotes," and these pleasant stories have