The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750)

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Title: The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers
(1750)
Author: Samuel Johnson
Release Date: September 2, 2004 [EBook #13350]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
0. START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VANITY
OF HUMAN WISHES ***
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SAMUEL JOHNSON
The Vanity of Human Wishes
(1749)
and
Two Rambler papers
(1750)
With an Introduction by
Bertrand H. Bronson
Publication Number 22
(Series VI, No. 2)

Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University
of California
1950
GENERAL EDITORS
H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial Library
RICHARD C.
BOYS, University of Michigan
EDWARD NILES HOOKER,
University of California, Los Angeles H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR.,
University of California, Los Angeles
ASSISTANT EDITORS
W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan
JOHN LOFTIS,
University of California, Los Angeles
ADVISORY EDITORS
EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington
BENJAMIN
BOYCE, University of Nebraska
LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, University
of Michigan
CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University
JAMES L.
CLIFFORD, Columbia University
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN,
University of Chicago
SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota

ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas
JAMES
SUTHERLAND, Queen Mary College, London
INTRODUCTION
The pieces reproduced in this little volume are now beginning to bid for
notice from their third century of readers. At the time they were written,
although Johnson had already done enough miscellaneous literary work
to fill several substantial volumes, his name, far from identifying an
"Age", was virtually unknown to the general public. The Vanity of
Human Wishes was the first of his writings to bear his name on its face.
There were some who knew him to be the author of the vigorous satire,
London, and of the still more remarkable biographical study, _An
Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage_; and a few interested
persons were aware that he was engaged in compiling an English

Dictionary, and intended to edit Shakespeare. He was also, at the
moment, attracting brief but not over-favorable attention as the author
of one of the season's new crop of tragedies at Drury Lane. But The
Vanity of Human Wishes_ and The Rambler_ were a potent force in
establishing Johnson's claim to a permanent place in English letters.
The Vanity appeared early in January, 1749; The Rambler ran from
March 20, 1749/50 to March 14, 1752. With the exception of five
numbers and two quoted letters, the periodical was written entirely by
Johnson.
As moral essays, the Ramblers deeply stirred some readers and bored
others. Young Boswell, not unduly saturnine in temperament, was
profoundly impressed by them and determined on their account to seek
out the author. Taine, a century later, discovered that he already knew
by heart all they had to teach and warned his readers away from them.
Generally speaking, they were valued as they deserved by the
eighteenth century and undervalued by the nineteenth. The first half of
the twentieth has shown a marked impulse to restore them, as a series,
to a place of honor second only to the work of Addison and Steele in
the same form. Raleigh, in 1907, paid discriminating tribute to their
humanity. If read, he observed, against a knowledge of their author's
life, "the pages of The Rambler are aglow with the earnestness of
dear-bought conviction, and rich in conclusions gathered not from
books but from life and suffering." And later: "We come to closer
quarters with Johnson in the best pages of _The Rambler_ than in the
most brilliant of the conversations recalled by Boswell. The hero of a
hundred fights puts off his armour, and becomes a wise and tender
confessor." Latterly, the style of Johnson's essays has been subjected to
a closer scrutiny than ever before. What Taine found as inflexible and
inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life and
movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly,
Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of
_The Rambler_ with Johnson's reading for the Dictionary, and how,
having mastered the words of the experimental scientists of the
previous century, Johnson proceeded to put them to original uses,
generating with them new stylistic overtones in contexts now
humorously precise, now philosophically metaphorical, employing

them now for purposes of irony and satire, and again for striking
directly home to the roots of morality and religion. In a playful mood,
he is never more characteristic than when he is his own mimic,
propounding with mock seriousness some preposterous theory like that
of the intellectual advantages of living in a garret:
I have discovered