��Essay on
��The lights and shades of the character should be given ; and, if this be done with a strict regard to truth, a just estimate of Dr. Johnson will afford a lesson perhaps as valuable as the moral
v doctrine that speaks with energy in every page of his works.
The present writer enjoyed the conversation and friendship of that excellent man more than thirty years. He thought it an honour to be so connected, and to this hour he reflects on his loss with regret : but regret, he knows, has secret bribes, by which the judgement may be influenced, and partial affection may be carried beyond the bounds of truth. In the present case, however, nothing needs to be disguised, and exaggerated praise is unnecessary. It is an observation of the younger Pliny, in his Epistle to his Friend of Tacitus [sic], that history ought never to magnify matters of fact, because worthy actions require nothing but the truth. Nam nee historia debet egredi veritatem, et hones te factis veritas stifficit z . This rule the present bio grapher promises shall guide his pen throughout the following narrative.
��It may be said, the death of Dr. Johnson kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example 2 . No literary character ever excited so much attention ; and, when the press has teemed with anecdotes, apophthegms, essays, and publications of every kind, what occasion now for a new tract on the same threadbare subject 3 ? The plain truth shall be the answer. The
��1 Efiistolae^ vii. 33. 10.
2 ' His death,' writes Hannah More, ' made a kind of era in literature.' Memoirs, i. 394.
Miss Martineau (Autobiography ', i. 438) records that Miss Berry, who died in 1852, used to tell 'how the world of literature was perplexed and distressed as a swarm of bees that have lost their queen when Dr. Johnson died.'
3 The Rev. Dr. W. Barrow, <a coarse north-countryman but a very good scholar,' as Boswell described
��him, to whose academy in Soho Square he sent his son James (Letters to Temple, p. 315), wrote on Jan. 26, 1786 :' The reviews and papers will tell you better than I can that the booksellers are engaged in a contest who shall publish the first and best edition of Johnson's Dictionary, and that his friends are running a race who shall be foremost in giving, or rather selling, to the world some scrap or fragment of our literary Leviathan an anecdote, a letter, or a character, a sermon, a prayer, or proprietors
�� �
