DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

(1709–1784).

PORTRAITS OF DR. JOHNSON.

BESIDES the dozen or more original portraits of Dr. Johnson, there is the first cast of a bust by Nollekens and a statue by Bacon in St. Paul's. Of the portraits, five are the work of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The first, painted in 1756, represents Johnson in an arm-chair seated at a table, on which are materials for writing; he holds a pen in his hand, and seems lost in meditation; this is the portrait which has been most often engraved. It was of the second portrait by Reynolds, painted before 1770, in which he is sitting with closed eyes and moving his hands up and down before him, as was his custom when unemployed, that Johnson said, "It is not friendly to hand down to posterity the imperfections of any man." In 1783 Miss Reynolds painted a miniature, which the Doctor called "Johnson's grimly ghost." There are also impressions of his head on several seals, and at Birmingham copper coins are issued bearing his likeness.

PERSONAL APPEARANCE.

Methinks I view his full, plain suit of brown,
The large, gray, bushy wig that graced his crown;
Black worsted stockings, little silver buckles,
And shirt that had no ruffles for his knuckles.

I mark the brown great-coat of cloth he wore,
That two huge Patagonian pockets bore,
Which Patagonians (wondrous to unfold !)

Would fairly both his dictionaries hold.-PETEr Pindar.

His person was large, robust-I may say approaching to

the gigantic and grown unwieldy from corpulency. His countenance was naturally of the cast of an ancient statue, but somewhat disfigured by the scars of that evil which, it was formerly imagined, the royal touch could cure. He was now in his sixty-fourth year, and was become a little dull of hearing. His sight had always been somewhat weak; yet so much does mind govern and even supply the deficiency of organs, that his perceptions were uncommonly quick and accurate. His head, and sometimes also his body, shook with a kind of motion like the effect of a palsy; he appeared to be frequently disturbed by cramps, or convulsive contractions of the nature of that distemper called St. Vitus's dance. He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair- buttons of the same color, a large, bushy, grayish whig, a plain shirt, black worsted stockings, and silver buckles. Upon this tour [to the Hebrides], when journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide, brown cloth great-coat, with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his folio dictionary, and he carried in his hand a large, English oak stick.-BOSWELL.

Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his frame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him-his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fishsauce and veal-pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates-old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank-all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood.—MACAULAY.

COMMENTS.

Here lies Sam Johnson. Reader, have a care,
Tread lightly, lest you wake a sleeping bear.
Religious, moral, generous, and humane
He was, but self-sufficient, proud, and vain;
Fond of, and overbearing in, dispute;

A Christian and a scholar—but a brute.-SOAME JENYNS. Strong sense, ungraced by sweetness or decorum. — AARON HILL.

Envy was the bosom serpent of this literary despot.—Miss SEWARD.

That man is not contented with believing the Bible, but he fairly resolves, I think, to believe nothing but the Bible. Johnson, though so wise a fellow, is more like King David than King Solomon, for he says, in his haste, that all men are liars.— HOGARTH.

Rabelais and all other wits are nothing compared to him. You may be diverted by them, but Johnson gives you a forcible hug and squeezes laughter out of you whether you will or no.-DAVID GARRICK.

The great charm of literature.—SMOLLETT.

Ursa Major.-LORD AUCHINLECH.

With a lumber of learning and some strong parts, Johnson was an odious and mean character. By principle a Jacobite, arrogant, self-sufficient, and overbearing by nature, ungrateful through pride, and of genuine bigotry. . . . His manners were sordid, supercilious, and brutal; his style ridiculously bombastic and vicious; and, in one word, with all the pedantry he had all the gigantic littleness of a country school-master. - SIR HORACE WALPOLE.

The colossus of English Philology.-DIBDIN.

I admire him, but I cannot bear his style.-WARBURTON. His notions rose up like the dragon's teeth sown by Cadmus, all ready clothed and in bright armor, ready for battle.-Piozzi. He's a brute.-ADAM SMITH.

A superstitious and brutish bigot. With the exception of the English Dictionary, he has done more injury to the English language than even Gibbon himself.-CURRAN.

Johnson, to be sure, has a rough manner, but no man alive has

a better heart. He has nothing of the bear but the skin.-OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

If it be asked who first, in England, at this period, breasted the waves and stemmed the tide of infidelity—who, enlisting wit and eloquence, together with argument and learning, on the side of revealed religion, first turned the literary current in its favor and mainly prepared the reaction which succeeded—that praise seems most justly to belong to Dr. Samuel Johnson.-LORD MAHON: History of England.

A mass of genuine manhood.-THOMAS CARLYLE.

A sage by all allowed,

Whom to have bred may well make England proud;
Whose prose was eloquence by wisdom taught,
The graceful vehicle of virtuous thought;

Whose verse may claim, grave, masculine, and strong,
Superior praise to the mere poet's song.

WILLIAM Cowper.

TOPICAL STUDY OF JOHNSON'S LIFE.

Birth and Parentage. - Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield (1709). His father was a well-to-do bookseller, a stanch High-Churchman and Tory, a town magistrate, and at one time county sheriff. From him his son inherited those hypochondriacal tendencies which harassed him through life. His mother, a woman of remarkable character, is called by Johnson, in his "Vanity of Human Wishes," "The general favorite as the general friend." He was early afflicted with the scrofula, and was taken to London by his mother to be touched by Queen Anne, according to the popular superstition of the time which regarded the royal touch as a cure for that disease. In this case it was ineffectual, and Johnson was subject to the disease during his entire life. It disfigured his face, injured his eyes, and was probably the cause of those strange convulsions, gesticulations, and queer performances which rendered him an oddity to beholders.

Education. Having learned to read under Dame Oliver, who kept a primary school in Lichfield, and through the