The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes | Page 3

find delineated in its diversified pages the manners and
characters of the day in amusing variety and contrast.
Written professedly for a paper of miscellaneous intelligence, the Idler
dwells on the passing incidents of the day, whether serious or light[5],
and abounds with party and political allusion. Johnson ever surveyed
mankind with the eye of a philosopher; but his own easier
circumstances would now present the world's aspect to him in brighter,
fairer colours. Besides, he could, with more propriety and less risk of
misapprehension, venture to trifle now, than when first he addressed
the public.
The World[6] had diffused its precepts, and corrected the fluctuating
manners of fashion, in the tone of fashionable raillery; and the
Connoisseur[7], by its gay and sparkling effusions, had forwarded the
advance of the public mind to that last stage of intellectual refinement,
in which alone a relish exists for delicate and half latent irony. The
plain and literal citizens of an earlier period, who conned over what
was "so nominated in the bend," would have misapprehended that
graceful playfulness of satire, elegant and fanciful as ever charmed the
leisure of the literary loungers of Athens. For, in the writings of Bonnel
Thornton and Colman, the philosophy of Aristippus may indeed be said
to be revived[8]. We would not, however, be supposed, by these
allusions, to imply that all the papers of the Idler are light and sportive;
or that Johnson for a moment lost sight of a grand moral end in all his
discussions. His mind only accommodated itself to the circumstances in
which it was placed, and diligently sought to avail itself of each
varying opportunity to admonish and to benefit, whether from the chair
of philosophic reproof or in the cheerful, social circle. Whatever faults
have been charged upon the Idler may be traced, we conceive, to this
source. Nobody at times, said Johnson, talks more laxly than I do[9].
And this acknowledged propensity may well be presumed to have
affected the humorous and almost conversational tone of the work
before us. In the conscious pride of mental might and in the easier
moments of conversations, that illuminated the minds of Reynolds[10]

and of Burke, Johnson delighted to indulge in a lively sophistry which
might sometimes deceive himself, when at first he merely wished to
sport in elegant raillery or ludicrous paradox. When these sallies were
recorded and brought to bear against him on future occasions, irritated
at their misconstruction and conscious to himself of an upright
intention, or at most of only a wish to promote innocent cheerfulness,
he was too stubborn in retracting what he had thus advanced. Hence,
when menaced with a prosecution for his definition of Excise in his
Dictionary, so far from offering apology or promising alteration, he
called, in his Idler, a Commissioner of Excise the lowest of human
beings, and classes him with the scribbler for a party[11]. So strange a
definition and still less pardonable adherence to it can only be justified
on the ground of Johnson's warm feelings for the comfort of the middle
class of society. He knew that the execution of the excise laws involved
an intrusion into the privacies of domestic life, and often violated the
fireside of the unoffending and quiet tradesman. He, therefore, disliked
those laws altogether, and his warm-hearted disposition would not
allow him to calculate on their abstract advantages with modern
political economists, who, in their generalizing doctrines, too
frequently overlook individual comfort and interests. His remarks, in
the same paper, on the edition of the Pleas of the Crown cannot be thus
vindicated, and we must here lament an error in an otherwise honest
and well-intentioned mind[12]. Every impartial reader of his works
may thus easily trace to their origin Johnson's chief political errors, and
his research must terminate in admiration of a writer, who never
prostituted his pen to fear or favour; and who, though erroneous often
in his estimate of men and measures, still, in his support of a party,
firmly believed himself to be the advocate of morality and right. His
tenderness of spirit, his firm principles and his deep sense of the
emptiness of human pursuits are visible amidst the lighter papers of the
Idler, and his serious reflections are, perhaps, more strikingly affecting
as contrasted with mirthfulness and pleasantry.
His concluding paper and the one[13] on the death of his mother have,
perhaps, never been surpassed. Here is no affectation of sentimentality,
no morbid and puling complaints, but the dignified and chastened
expression of sorrow, which a mind, constituted as Johnson's, must
have experienced on the departure of a mother. A heart, tender and

susceptible of pathetic emotion, as his was, must have deeply felt, how
dreary it is to walk downward to the grave unregarded by her "who has
looked