342 Humorous definitions. [A.D. 1755. capricious and humorous indulgence'. Talking to me upon this subject when we were at Ashbourne in 1777, he mentioned a still stronger instance of the predominance of his private feelings in the composition of this work, than any now to be found in it. You know, Sir, Lord Gower forsook the old Jacobite interest. When I came to the word persons to whom he alludes were Mr. John Oldmixon and George Ducket, Esq. BOSWELL. Mr. Croker obtained a copy of the case. 'Case for the opinion of Mr. Attorney-General. · Mr. Samuel Johnson has lately published “ A Dictionary of the English Language," in which are the following words : 4.44 "EXCISE, n. s. A hateful tax levied upon commodities and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid." 'The author's definition being observed by the Commissioners of Excise, they desire the favour of your opinion. “Qu. Whether it will not be considered as a libel, and if so, whether it is not proper to proceed against the author, printers, and publishers thereof, or any and which of them, by information, or how otherwise?" 'I am of opinion that it is a libel. But under all the circumstances, I should think it better to give him an opportunity of altering his definition; and, in case he do not, to threaten him with an information. '29th Nov. 1755. W. Murray. In one of the Parl. Debates of 1742 Johnson makes Pitt say that ‘it is probable that we shall detect bribery descending through a long subordination of wretches combined against the public happiness, from the prime minister surrounded by peers and officers of state to the exciseman dictating politics amidst a company of mechanics whom he debauches at the public expense, and lists in the service of his master with the taxes which he gathers.' Parl. Hist. xii. 570. See ante, p. 43, note I. He defined Favourite as 'One chosen as a companion by a superiour; a mean wretch, whose whole business is by any means to please' and Revolution as 'change in the state of a government or country. It is used among us κar' ¿§oxy for the change produced by the admission of King William and Queen Mary.' For these definitions Wilkes attacked him in The North Briton, No. xii. In the fourth edition Johnson gives a second definition of patriot-It is sometimes used for a factious disturber of the government.' Premier and prime minister are not defined. Post, April 14, 1775. See also ante, p. 307. note 2, for the definition of patron; and post, April 28, 1783 for that of alias. Renegado, Aetat. 46.] Humorous definitions. 343 Renegado, after telling that it meant "one who deserts to the enemy, a revolter," I added, Sometimes we say a GOWER'. Thus it went to the press; but the printer had more wit than I, and struck it out.' Let it, however, be remembered, that this indulgence does not display itself only in sarcasm towards others, but sometimes in playful allusion to the notions commonly entertained of his own laborious task. Thus: Grub-street, the name of a street in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called Grub-street'.-Lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge'. 1 There have been great contests in the Privy Council about the trial of the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford [on a charge of Jacobitism]: Lord Gower pressed it extremely. He asked the Attorney-General his opinion, who told him the evidence did not appear strong enough. Lord Gower said :-" Mr. Attorney, you seem to be very lukewarm for your party." He replied:- My Lord, I never was lukewarm for my party, nor ever was but of one party." Walpole's Letters, ii. 140. Mr. Croker assumes that Johnson here 'attempted a pun, and wrote the name (as pronounced) Go'er.' Johnson was very little likely to pun, for he had a great contempt for that species of wit.' Post, April 30, 1773. • Boswell omits the salutation which follows this definition: Χαίρ' Ιθάκη μετ ̓ ἄεθλα, μετ ̓ ἄλγεα πικρὰ Ασπασίως τέον οἶδας ἱκάνομαι. 'Dr. Johnson,' says Miss Burney, 'inquired if I had ever yet visited Grub-street, but was obliged to restrain his anger when I answered "No;" because he had never paid his respects to it himself. "However," says he, "you and I, Burney, will go together; we have a very good right to go, so we'll visit the mansions of our progenitors, and take up our own freedom together."' Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 415. 'Lord Bolingbroke had said (Works, iii. 317):-' I approve the devotion of a studious man at Christ Church, who was overheard in his oratory entering into a detail with God, and acknowledging the divine goodness in furnishing the world with makers of dictionaries. These men court fame, as well as their betters, by such means as God has given them to acquire it. They deserve encouragement while they continue to compile, and neither affect wit, nor presume to reason.' Johnson himself in The Adventurer, No. 39, had in 1753 described a At 344 The gloom of solitude. [A.D. 1755. At the time when he was concluding his very eloquent Preface, Johnson's mind appears to have been in such a state of depression', that we cannot contemplate without wonder the vigorous and splendid thoughts which so highly distinguish that performance. 'I (says he) may surely be contented without the praise of perfection, which if I could obtain in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave; and success and miscarriage are empty sounds. I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise'.' That this indifference was rather a temporary than an habitual feeling, appears, I think, from his letters to Mr. Warton'; and however he may have been affected for class of men who 'employed their minds in such operations as required neither celerity nor strength, in the low drudgery of collating copies, comparing authorities, digesting dictionaries,' &c. Lord Monboddo, in his Origin of Language, v. 273, says that 'J. C. Scaliger called the makers of dictionaries les portefaix de la république des lettres.' 'Great though his depression was, yet he could say with truth in his Preface: Despondency has never so far prevailed as to depress me to negligence.' Works, v. 43. 2 Ib. p. 51. In the preface the author described the difficulties with which he had been left to struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, Horne Tooke, never could read that passage without tears.' Macaulay's Misc. Writings, p. 382. It is in A Letter to John Dunning, Esq. (p. 56) that Horne Tooke, or rather Horne, wrote :—' -'I could never read his preface without shedding a tear.' See post, May 13, 1778. On Oct. 10, 1779, Boswell told Johnson, that he had been agreeably mistaken' in saying:-'What would it avail me in this gloom of solitude?' 'It appears even by many a passage in the Preface-one of the proudest pieces of writing in our language. The chief glory,' he writes, of every people arises from its authors: whether I shall add anything by my own writings to the reputation of English literature must be left to time.' 'I deliver,' he says, 'my book to the world with the spirit of a man that has endeavoured well. . . . In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no book was ever spared the Aetat. 46.] The gloom of solitude. 345 the moment, certain it is that the honours which his great work procured him, both at home and abroad, were very grateful to him'. His friend the Earl of Corke and Orrery, being at Florence, presented it to the Academia della Crusca. That Academy sent Johnson their Vocabulario, and the French Academy sent him their Dictionnaire, which Mr. Langton had the pleasure to convey to him'. It must undoubtedly seem strange, that the conclusion of his Preface should be expressed in terms so desponding, when it is considered that the authour was then only in his forty-sixth year. But we must ascribe its gloom to that miserable dejection of spirits to which he was constitutionally subject, and which was aggravated by the death of his out of tenderness to the author, and the world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it condemns; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow.' Works, v. pp. 49–51. Thomas Warton wrote to his brother:-'I fear his preface will disgust by the expressions of his consciousness of superiority, and of his contempt of patronage.' Wooll's Warton, p. 231. 1 That praise was slow in coming is shown by his letter to Mr. Burney, written two years and eight months after the publication of the Dictionary. Your praise,' he wrote, 'was welcome, not only because I believe it was sincere, but because praise has been very scarce. . . . Yours is the only letter of good-will that I have received; though, indeed, I am promised something of that sort from Sweden.' Post, Dec. 24, 1757. In the Edinburgh Review (No. 1, 1755)· —a periodical which only lasted two years-there is a review by Adam Smith of Johnson's Dictionary. Smith admits the 'very extraordinary merit' of the author. The plan,' however, ‘is not sufficiently grammatical.' To explain what he intends, he inserts 'an article or two from Mr. Johnson, and opposes to them the same articles, digested in the manner which we would have wished him to have followed.' He takes the words but and humour. One part of his definition of humour is curious'something which comes upon a man by fits, which he can neither command nor restrain, and which is not perfectly consistent with true politeness.' This essay has not, I believe, been reprinted. 346 His melancholy at its meridian. (A.D. 1755. wife two years before'. I have heard it ingeniously observed by a lady of rank and elegance, that 'his melancholy was then at its meridian'.' It pleased GOD to grant him almost thirty years of life after this time; and once, when he was in a placid frame of mind, he was obliged to own to me that he had enjoyed happier days, and had many more friends, since that gloomy hour than before'. 'She died in March 1752; the Dictionary was published in April 1755. In the Preface he writes (Works, v. 49) :— Much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing over me.' In his fine Latin poem Ινώθι σεαυτόν ' he has left, says Mr. Murphy (Life, p. 82), 'a picture of himself drawn with as much truth, and as firm a hand, as can be seen in the portraits of Hogarth or Sir Joshua Reynolds.' He wrote it after revising and enlarging his Dictionary, and he sadly asks himself what is left for him to do. Me, pensi immunis cum jam mihi reddor, inertis Desidiæ sors dura manet, graviorque labore Nec quid agam invenio.... Quid faciam? tenebrisne pigram damnare senectam Aut, hoc si nimium est, tandem nova lexica poscam? Johnson's Works, i. 164. 3 A few weeks before his wife's death he wrote in The Rambler (No. 196):-'The miseries of life would be increased beyond all human power of endurance, if we were to enter the world with the same opinions as we carry from it.' He would, I think, scarcely have expressed himself so strongly towards his end. Though, as Dr. Maxwell records, in his Collectanea (post, 1770), he often used to quote with great pathos those fine lines of Virgil: “Optima quæque dies miseris mortalibus ævi Prima fugit, &c.”' |