as sufficient to justify any writer who may follow him, in relating a single anecdote, or in assigning a date to a single event. happy term to express the paternal and kindly authority of the head of the clan?"* The composition of this eminent Latinist, short as it is, contains several words that are just as much Coptic as Latin, to say nothing of the incorrect structure of the sentence. The word Philarchus, even if it were a happy term expressing a paternal and kindly authority, would prove nothing for the minister's Latin, whatever it might prove for his Greek. But it is clear that the word Philarchus means, not a man who rules by love, but a man who loves rule. The Attic writers of the best age use the it. Would Mr. Croker translate mops, a man who acquires wisdom by means of love; or picadas, a man who makes money by means of love? In fact it requires no Bentley or Casaubon to perceive that Philarchus is merely a false spelling for Phylarchus, the chief of a tribe. Mr. Croker has favoured us with some Greek of his own. "At the altar," says Dr. Johnson, "I recommend my . ." These letters," says the editor, "(which Dr. Strahan seems not to have understood,) probably mean vrai piños, departed friends."† Johnson was not a first-rate Greek scholar; but he knew more Greek than most boys when they leave school; and no schoolboy could venture to use the word re in the sense which Mr. Croker ascribes to it without imminent danger of a flogging. Mr. Croker shows almost as much ignorance and heedlessness in his criticisms as in his statements concerning facts. Dr. Johnson said, very reasonably as it appears to us, that some of the satires of Juvenal are too gross for imitation. Mr. Croker, who, by the way, is angry with Johnson for defending Prior's tales against the charge of indecency, resents this aspersion on Juvenal, and indeed refuses to believe that the doctor can have said any thing so absurd. "He probably said—some passages of them-word pages in the sense which we assign to for there are none of Juvenal's satires to which the same objection may be made as to one of Horace's, that it is altogether gross and licentious."* Surely Mr. Croker can never have read the second and ninth satires of Juvenal. Indeed, the decisions of this editor on points of classical learning, though pronounced in a very authoritative tone, are generally such, that if a schoolboy under our care were to utter | them, our soul assuredly should not spare for his crying. It is no disgrace to a gentleman, who has been engaged during nearly thirty years in political life, that he has forgotten his Greek and Latin. But he becomes justly ridiculous, if, when no longer able to construe a plain sentence, he affects to sit in judgment on the most delicate questions of style and metre. From one blunder, a blunder which no good scholar would have made, Mr. Croker was saved, as he informs us, by Sir Robert Peel, who quoted a passage exactly in point from Horace. We heartily wish that Sir Robert, whose classical attainments are well known, had been more frequently consulted. Unhappily he was not always at his friend's elbow, and we have therefore a rich abundance of the strangest errors. Boswell has preserved a poor epigram by Johnson, inscribed "Ad Lauram parituram." Mr. Croker censures the poet for applying the word puella to a lady in Laura's situation, and for talking of the beauty of Lucina. "Lucina," he says, was never famed for her beauty." If Sir Robert Peel had seen this note, he probably would have again refuted Mr. Croker's criticisms by an appeal to Horace. In the secular ode, Lucina is used as one of the names of Diana, and the beauty of Diana is extolled by all the most orthodox doctors of the ancient mythology, from Homer, in his Odyssey, to Claudian, in his Rape of Proserpine. In another ode, Horace describes Diana as the goddess who assists the "laborantes utero puellas." But we are ashamed to detain our readers with this fourth-form learning. Boswell found, in his tour to the Hebrides, an inscription written by a Scotch minister. It runs tnus: "Joannes Macleod, &c., gentis suæ Philarchus, &c., Flora Macdonald matrimoniali vinculo conjugatus turrem hanc Beganodunensem proævorum habitaculum longe vetustissimum, diu penitus labefactatam, anno æræ vulgaris MDCLXXXVI., instauravit.". "The minister," says Mr. Croker, "seems to have been no contemptible Latinist. Is not Philarchus a very Mr. Croker has also given us a specimen of his skill in translating Latin. Johnson wrote a note in which he consulted his friend, Dr. Lawrence, on the propriety of losing some blood. The note contains these words :-" Si per te licet, imperatur nuncio Holderum ad me deducere." Johnson should rather have written "imperatum est." But the meaning of the words is perfectly clear. "If you say yes, the messenger has orders to bring Holder to me." Mr. Croker translates the words as follows: "If you consent, pray tell the messenger to bring Holder to me." If Mr. Croker is resolved to write on points of classical learning, we would advise him to begin by giving an hour every morning to our old friend Corderius. Indeed, we cannot open any volume of this work in any place, and turn it over for two minutes in any direction, without lighting on a blunder. Johnson, in his Life of Tickell, stated that the poem entitled "The Royal Progress," which appears in the last volume of the Spectator, was written on the accession of George I. The word "arrival" was afterwards substituted for "accession." "The reader will observe," says Mr. Croker, "that the Whig term accession, which might imply legality, was altered into a statement of the simple fact of King George's arrival."§ Now Johnson, though a bigoted Tory, was not quite such a fool as Mr. Croker here represents him to be. In the Life of Granville, Lord Lansdowne, which stands next to the Life of Tickell, mention is made of the accession of Anne, and of the accession of George I. The TV. 425. * II. 458. + IV. 951. + V. 17. word arrival was used in the Life of Tickell of the old physiologists. Dryden made a simifor the simplest of all reasons. It was used lar allusion to the dogma before Johnson was because the subject of the "Royal Progress' "born. Mr. Croker, however, is unable to underwas the arrival of the king, and not his acces- stand it. "The expression," he says, "seems sion, which took place nearly two months be- not quite clear." And he proceeds to talk føre his arrival. about the generation of insects, about bursting into gaudier life, and Heaven knows what.* The editor's want of perspicacity is indeed very amusing. He is perpetually telling us that he cannot understand something in the text which is as plain as language can make it. "Mattaire," said Dr. Johnson, "wrote Latin verses from time to time, and published a set in his old age, which he called Senilia, in which he shows so little learning or taste in writing, as to make Carteret a dactyl." Hereupon we have this note: "The editor does not understand this objection, nor the following observation." The following observation which Mr. Croker cannot understand is simply this: "In matters of genealogy," says Johnson, "it is necessary to give the bare names as they are. But in poetry, and in prose of any elegance in the writing, they require to have inflection given to them." If Mr. Croker had told Johnson that this was unintelligible, the doctor would probably have replied, as he replied on another occasion, "I have found you a reason, sir; I am not bound to find you an understanding." Everybody who knows any thing of Latinity knows that, in genealogical tables, Joannes Baro de Carteret, or Vicecomes de Carteret, may be tolerated, but that in compositions which pretend to elegance, Carteretus, or some other form which admits of inflection, ought to be used. All our readers have doubtless seen the two distichs of Sir William Jones, respecting the division of the time of a lawyer. One of the distichs is translated from some old Latin lines, the other is original. The former runs thus: "Six hours to sleep, to law's grave study six, Four spend in prayer, the rest on nature fix." "Rather," says Sir William Jones, "Six hours to law, to soothing slumbers seven, Ten to the world allot, and all to heaven." There is a still stranger instance of the editor's talent for finding out difficulty in what is perfectly plain. "No man," said Johnson, "can now be made a bishop for his learning and piety." "From this too just observation,' says Boswell, "there are some eminent exceptions." Mr. Croker is puzzled by Boswell's very natural and simple language. "That a general observation should be pronounced too just, by the very person who admits that it is not universally just, is not a little odd."† A very large portion of the two thousand five hundred notes which the editor boasts of having added to those of Boswell and Malone, consists of the flattest and poorest reflectionsreflections such as the least intelligent reader is quite competent to make for himself, and such as no intelligent reader would think it worth while to utter aloud. They remind us of nothing so much as of those profound and interesting annotations which are pencilled by sempstresses and apothecaries' boys on the dog-eared margins of novels borrowed from circulating libraries-"How beautiful !”— "cursed prosy"-"I don't like Sir Reginald Malcolm at all."-"I think Pelham is a sad dandy." Mr. Croker is perpetually stopping us in our progress through the most delightful narrative in the language, to observe, that really Dr. Johnson was very rude; that he talked more for victory than for truth; that his taste for port-wine with capillaire in it was very odd; that Boswell was impertinent; that it was foolish in Mrs. Thrale to marry the music-master; and other "merderies" of the same kind, to borrow the energetic word of Rabelais. We cannot speak more favourably of the manner in which the notes are written, than of the matter of which they consist. We find in The second couplet puzzles Mr. Croker every page words used in wrong senses, and strangely. "Sir William," says he, "has constructions which violate the plainest rules shortened his day to twenty-three hours, and of grammar. We have the low vulgarism of the general advice of all to heaven,' destroys "mutual friend," for "common friend." We the peculiar appropriation of a certain period have "fallacy" used as synonymous with to religious exercise." Now, we did not "falsehood," or "misstatement." We have think that it was in human dulness to miss the many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns meaning of the lines so completely. Sir Wil- as that which follows: "Lord Erskine was liam distributes twenty-three hours among va- fond of this anecdote; he told it to the editor rious employments. One hour is thus left for the first time that he had the honour of being devotion. The reader expects that the verse in his company." Lastly, we have a plentiful will end with- and one to heaven." The supply of sentences resembling those which whole point of the lines consist in the unex- we subjoin. Markland, who, with Jartin and pected substitution of "all" for "one." The Thirlby, Johnson calls three contemporaries conceit is wretched enough; but it is perfectly of great eminence." "Warburton himself did intelligible, and never, we will venture to say, not feel, as Mr. Boswell was disposed to think perplexed man, woman, or child before. he did, kindly or gratefully of Johnson?" "It was him that Horace Walpole called a man who never made a bad figure but as an author."! We must add that the printer has done his best to fill both the text and notes with all sorts of blunders; and he and the Poor Tom Davies, after failing in business, tried to live by his pen. Johnson called him "an author generated by the corruption of a bookseller." This is a very obvious, and even a commonplace allusion to the famous dogma + V. 233. ⚫ IV. 335. 66 editor have between them made the book so bad, that we do not well see how it could have been worse. crease would have been discernible. The This is not the case with Mr. Croker's insertions. They are not chosen as Boswell would have chosen them. They are not introduced as Boswell would have introduced them. They differ from the quotations scattered through the original Life of Johnson, as a withered bough stuck in the ground differs from a tree skilfully transplanted, with all its life about it. When we turn from the commentary of Mr. Croker to the work of our old friend Boswell, we find it not only worse printed than in any other edition with which we are acquainted, but mangled in the most wanton manner. Much that Boswell inserted in his narrative is, without the shadow of a reason, degraded to the appendix. The editor has also taken upon himself to alter or omit passages which he considers as indecorous. This prudery is quite unintelligible to us. There is nothing immoral in Boswell's book-nothing which tends to inflame the passions. He sometimes uses plain words. But if this be a taint which requires expurgation, it would be desirable to begin by expurgating the morning and evening lessons. Mr. Croker has performed the delicate office which he has undertaken in the most capricious manner. A strong, old-fashioned, English word, familiar to all who read their Bibles, is exchanged for a softer synonyme in some passages, and suffered to stand unaltered in others. In one place, a faint allusion made by Johnson to an indelicate subject-an allusion so faint that, till Mr. Croker's note pointed it out to us, we had never noticed it, and of which we are quite sure that the meaning would never be discovered by any of those for whose sake books are expurgated-is alto- The course which Mr. Croker ought to have gether omitted. In another place, a coarse taken is quite clear. He should have reprinted and stupid jest of Doctor Taylor, on the same Boswell's narrative precisely as Boswell wrote subject, expressed in the broadest language-it; and in the notes or the appendix he should almost the only passage, as far as we remember, in all Boswell's book, which we should have been inclined to leave out-is suffered to remain. Not only do these anecdotes disfigure Boswell's book; they are themselves disfigured by being inserted in his book. The charm of Mrs. Thrale's little volume is utterly destroyed. The feminine quickness of observation, the feminine softness of heart, the colloquial incorrectness and vivacity of style, the little amusing airs of a half-learned lady, the delightful garrulity, the "dear Doctor Johnson," the "it was so comical,” all disappear in Mr. Croker's quotations. The lady ceases to speak in the first person; and her anecdotes, in the process of transfusion, become as flat as champagne in decanters, or Herodotus in Beloe's version. Sir John Hawkins, it is true, loses nothing; and for the best of reasons. Sir John had nothing to lose. have placed any anecdotes which he might have thought it advisable to quote from other writers. This would have been a much more convenient course for the reader, who has now constantly to keep his eye on the margin in order to see whether he is perusing Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Murphy, Hawkins, Tyers, Cradock, or Mr. Croker. We greatly doubt whether even the Tour to the Hebrides ought to have been inserted in the midst of the Life. There is one marked distinction between the two works. Most of the Tour was seen by Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of the Life. We complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions. We have half of Mrs. Thrale's book, scraps of Mr. Tyers, scraps of Mr. Murphy, scraps of Mr. Cradock, long prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and connecting observations by Mr. Croker himself, inserted into the midst of Boswell's text. To this practice we most decidedly object. An editor might as well publish Thucydides with extracts from Diodorus interspersed, or incorporate the Lives of Suetonius with We love, we own, to read the great producthe History and Annals of Tacitus. Mr. Croker tions of the human mind as they were written. tells us, indeed, that he has done only what We have this feeling even about scientific Boswell wished to do, and was prevented from treatises; though we know that the sciences doing by the law of copyright. We doubt this are always in a state of progression, and that greatly. Boswell has studiously abstained the alterations made by a modern editor in an from availing himself of the information con- old book on any branch of natural or political tained in the works of his rivals, on many oc-philosophy are likely to be improvements. casions on which he might have done so without subjecting himself to the charge of piracy. Mr. Croker has himself, on one occasion, remarked very justly that Boswell was very reluctant to owe any obligations to Hawkins. But be this as it may, if Boswell had quoted from Sir John and from Mrs. Thrale, he would have been guided by his own taste and judgment in selecting his quotations. On what he quoted, he would have commented with perfect freedom, and the borrowed passages, so setected, and accompanied by such comments, would have become original. They would bave dovetailed into the work: no hitch, no Yet Many errors have been detected by writers of reads a stage-copy of a play, when he can pro- "Should God create another Eve, and I No substitute, however exquisitely formed, intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality, by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," -not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself at the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stafford-on-Avon, with a placard around his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world, that at Edinburgh The reasons which Mr. Croker has given he was known by the appellation of Paoli Bosfor incorporating passages from Sir John well. Servile and impertinent-shallow and Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale with the narrative pedantic-a bigot and a sot-bloated with faof Boswell, would vindicate the adulteration mily pride, and eternally blustering about the of half the classical works in the language. dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be If Pepys's Diary and Mrs. Hutchinson's Me a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt moirs had been published a hundred years ago, in the taverns of London-so curious to know! no human being can doubt that Mr. Hume everybody who was talked about, that, Tory and would have made great use of those books in High Churchman as he was, he manœuvred, his History of England. But would it, on that we have been told, for an introduction to account, be judicious in a writer of our times Tom Paine-so vain of the most childish disto publish an edition of Hume's History of tinctions, that, when he had been to court, he England, in which large additions from Pepys drove to the office where his book was being and Mrs. Hutchinson should be incorporated printed without changing his clothes, and sumwith the original text? Surely not. Hume's moned all the printer's devils to admire his history, be its faults what they may, is now new ruffles and sword;-such was this man: one great entire work-the production of one and such he was content and proud to be. vigorous mind, working on such materials Every thing which another man would have as were within its reach. Additions made by hidden-every thing, the publication of which another hand may supply a particular defi- would have made another man hang himself, ciency, but would grievously injure the gene- was matter of gay and clamorous exultation ral effect. With Boswell's book the case is to his weak and diseased mind. What silly ✔ stronger. There is scarcely, in the whole things he said-what bitter retorts he provoked compass of literature, a book which bears in-how at one place he was troubled with evil terpolation so ill. We know no production presentiments which came to nothing-how at of the human mind which has so much of another place, on waking from a drunken doze, what may be called the race, so much of the he read the Prayer-book, and took a hair of the peculiar flavour of the soil from which it dog that had bitten him-how he went to see sprang. The work could never have been men hanged, and came away maudlin-how written, if the writer had not been precisely he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of what he was. His character is displayed in one of his babies, because she was not frightevery page, and this display of character gives ened at Johnson's ugly face-how he was a delightful interest to many passages which frightened out of his wits at sea-and how the have no other interest. sailors quieted him as they would have quieted The life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a a child-how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one very great work. Homer is not more decided-evening, and how much his merriment annoyed ly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not the ladies-how impertinent he was to the Duchmore decidedly the first of dramatists, Demos- ess of Argyle, and with what stately contempt thenes is not more decidedly the first of ora- she put down his impertinence-how Colonel tors, than Boswell is the first of biographers. Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obHe has no second. He has distanced all his trusiveness-how his father and the very wife competitors so decidedly, that it is not worth of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere. We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived; and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account, or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his tem per, all the illusions of his vanity, all the hypo chondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill, but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself. most candid. Other men who have pretended to lay open their own hearts-Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron-have evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be then most distrusted when they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely any man who would not rather accuse himself of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous passions, than proclaim all his little vanities, and all his wild fancies. It would be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those of Cæsar Borgia or Danton, than one who would publish a day-dream like those of Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most secret places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of love, were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell paraded before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirit prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous. His book resembles nothing so much as the conversation of the inmates of the Palace of Truth. That such a man should have written one of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is the of the best books in the world, is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have written valuable books. Goldsmith was very just ly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being, "Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he Lived-without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude; a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues; an unsafe companion, who never scru- His fame is great, and it will, we have no pled to repay the most liberal hospitality by doubt, be lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar the basest violation of confidence; a man kind, and indeed marvellously resembles infawithout delicacy, without shame, without sense my. We remember no other case in which the enough to know when he was hurting the feel-world has made so great a distinction between ings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson. Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, he had absolutely none. There is not, in all his books, a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical, would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, as he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal. a book and its author. In general, the book and the author are considered as one. To admire the book is to admire the author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the only exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be interesting, instructive, eminently original; yet it has brought him nothing but contempt. All the world reads it, all the world delights in it; yet we do not remember ever to have read or even to have heard any expression of respect and admiration for the man to whom we owe so much instruction and amusement. While edition after edition of his book was coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of it, and hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural and reasonable. Sir Alexander saw, that in proportion to the celebrity of the work was the degradation of the author. The very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's books have forgotten their allegiance, and, like those Puritan casuists who took arms by the authority of the king against his person, have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings. Mr. Croker, for example, has published two thousand five hundred notes on the Life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever mentions the biographer, whose performance he has taken such pains to illustrate, without some expression of contempt. An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the malignity of the most malignant satirist could scarcely cut deeper than his Those parts of his book which, considered thoughtless loquacity. Having himself na abstractedly, are most utterly worthless, are sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it delightful when we read them as illustrations for granted that all others were equally callous of the character of the writer. Bad in them- He was not ashamed to exhibit himself to the selves, they are good dramatically, like the whole world as a common spy, a common tatnonsense of Justice Shallow, the clipped Eng-tler, a humble companion without the excuse lish of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced consonants of poverty, to tell a hundred stories of his own |