Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett | Page 6

friend, whom he had counselled, rebuked,
assisted, loved, and laughed at, and at whose death he was deeply
grieved. In 1775, the publication of his "Tour to the Hebrides" brought
him in collision with the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum, and
especially with James Macpherson, to whom Johnson sent a letter

which crushed him like a catapult. Macpherson, as well as Rob Roy,
was only strong on his native heath, and off it was no match for old
Sam, whose prejudices, passions, and gigantic powers, combined to
make him altogether irresistible in a literary duel. The same year, the
University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws;
and in the close of it, he paid a visit, along with the Thrales, to Paris.
In 1776 nothing remarkable occurred in his history, unless it were the
interview which Boswell so admirably manoeuvred to bring about
between him and Jack Wilkes. Everybody remembers how well the
bear and the monkey for the time agreed, and how both turned round to
snub the spaniel, who had been the medium of their introduction to
each other.
In 1777 he was requested by the London booksellers to prefix prefaces
to the "English Poets," part of which was issued the next year, and the
rest in 1780 and 1781, as the "Lives of English Poets." This work has
generally been regarded as Johnson's masterpiece. It nowhere, indeed,
displays so much of the creative, the inventive, the poetical, as his
"Rasselas," and many of his smaller tales and fictions. Its judgments,
too, have been often and justly controverted. The book is, undoubtedly,
a storehouse of his prejudices, as well as of his wisdom. Its treatment of
Milton, the man, for instance, is insufferably insolent, although ample
justice is done to Milton, the poet of the "Paradise Lost." Some
poetasters he has overpraised, and some true but minor poets he has
thrust down too far in the scale. But the work, as a whole, is full of
inextinguishable life, and has passages verging on the eloquence and
power of genius. A piece of stern, sober, yet broad and animated
composition, rather careless in dates, and rather cursory in many of its
criticisms, it displays unequalled force of thought, and pointed vigour
of style, and when taken in connexion with the age of the author
(seventy), is altogether marvellous. Truly there were "giants in those
days," and this was a Briareus.
For the details of his later life, his conversations, growing weakness,
little journeys, unconquerable love of literature, &c., we must refer our
readers to Boswell's teeming narrative. In 1783, he had a stroke of

palsy, which deprived him for a time of speech. That returned to him,
however, but a complication of complaints, including asthma, sciatica,
and dropsy, began gradually to undermine his powerful frame. He
continued to the last to cherish the prospect of a tour to Italy, but never
accomplished his purpose. Death had all along been his great object of
dread, and its fast approaches were regarded with unmitigated terror.
"Cut deeper," he cried to the physicians who were operating on his
limbs; "cut deeper; I don't care for pain, but I fear death." He fixed all
his dying hope upon the Cross, and recommended Clarke's Sermons as
fullest on the doctrine of a Propitiation. He spoke of the Bible and of
the Sabbath with the warmest feelings of belief and respect. At last, on
the 13th day of December 1784, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, this
great, good man, whose fears had subsided, and who had become as a
little child, fell asleep in Jesus. He was buried in Westminster Abbey,
on Monday, December 20th, and his funeral was attended by the most
distinguished men of the day.
Perhaps no literary man ever exerted, during his lifetime, the same
personal influence as Samuel Johnson. Shelley used to call Byron the
"Byronic Energy," from a sense of his exceeding power. The author of
"Rasselas" was the "Johnsonian Energy;" and the demon within him, if
not so ethereal and terrible as Byron's, was far more massive, equally
strong, and in conversation, at least, much more ready to do his work.
First-rate conversation generally springs from a desire to shine, or from
the effort of a full mind to relieve itself, or from exuberant animal
spirits, or from deep-seated misery. In Johnson it sprang from a
combination of all these causes. He went to conversation as to an
arena--his mind was richly-stored, even to overflowing--in company his
spirits uniformly rose--and yet there was always at his heart a burden of
wretchedness, seeking solace, not in silence, but in speech. Hence, with
the exception of Burke, no one ever matched him in talk; and Burke,
we imagine, although profounder in thought, more varied in learning,
and