equally graphic description of Mrs. Thrale-short, plump, brisk-prepares us to understand the lady, whose character seems to have been marred by a flippancy which recurs too often in her pages. But all this notwithstanding, her active kindnesses to Johnson, continued for nearly twenty years of his life, should be remembered to her credit by all who love and respect Johnson. Her "Anecdotes," with all abatements made, must ever take high rank among the books which help us to understand him. Readers will, therefore, find them occupying the first place in the volume entitled "Johnsoniana."

Dr. Joseph Towers followed (1786) in “An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson." Born March, 1737, he was the son of a second-hand bookseller in Southwark. His access to books, which he enjoyed from an early age, seems to have been his chief education. He appears to have been essentially a self-educated man, and acquired his very considerable stock of knowledge by diligent study in the leisure hours after business. He carried on the business of bookseller for nine years in Fore Street,' but with no great success. In 1774 he gave up business, and was ordained a preacher in the Unitarian body, and became forenoon preacher at Newington Green, where the celebrated Dr. Price preached in the afternoon. He stepped forth boldly, but with the respect which was due to Johnson's reputation, to reply to Johnson's political pamphlets, in "A Letter to Samuel Johnson, occasioned by his late political publications." This letter, together with a paragraph in a letter from Temple to Boswell, were laid before Johnson by Boswell himself, who notifies that these two instances of animadversion appeared, from the effects they had on Johnson, evinced by his silence and his looks, to impress him much. "I am willing to do justice," Boswell remarks, "to the merits of Dr. Towers, of 2 Ubi supra, p. 191.

1

3

Biograph. Dict., vol. xxix.

whom I will say, that though I abhor his whiggish democratical notions and propensities, I esteem him as an ingenious, knowing, and very convivial man." Boswell's testimony to Towers' social and convivial talents may be more implicitly received than his testimony to Towers' political principles. His "Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson" will, however, reward study. We miss, indeed, the charm of original anecdotes and conversations. Of these Towers has none, except those which he had derived from the recently published sources described in the preceding remarks.

Appointed an executor under the will, Sir John Hawkins now pressed forward to be the biographer of Johnson, and the editor of the first collected edition of his works. He had been appointed, not only the executor of his will, but also, as he tells us in his advertisement to his Life, the "guardian of his fame ;" and in this capacity of guardian of Johnson's fame, Sir John at once proceeded to prepare the first formal Life, and the first collected edition of his works. He could hardly have completed his arrangements with the trade before some months of 1785 had elapsed; and in little more, therefore, than two years, the eleven octavo volumes containing "The Life and Works" appeared in 1787. The four volumes which afterwards appeared as supplements to the "Works" show that not conscientious care, but greedy haste, had been the motive power, alike of the biographer and the publishers, in the work which they had produced. The Life, indeed, has its merits. In spite of the extraneous matter, which belonged as well to the biography of any of Johnson's contemporaries as to that of Johnson, there is much in Hawkins's Life which has not been superseded. His account of the manner in which the debates in Parliament were drawn up by Guthrie and Johnson for the "Gentleman's Magazine," still repay reading; and the same may be said of the accounts of the Ivy Lane Club

and its members, and of the more celebrated Turk's Head Club, Gerard Street, Soho, which became the Club. But it is singular how few examples are given of the conversational power of Johnson; a want which confirms and justifies Boswell's assertion that he had never seen Hawkins in Johnson's company, he thinks, but once, and he is sure not above twice. Yet, when he wrote his book, the sayings of Johnson were in the minds and on the lips of hundreds; and his 800 pages proved the best foil that could be imagined to the biography soon to appear by him whom, with a native boorishness, he describes as "Mr. James Boswell, a native of Scotland." 2

92

Yet that "native of Scotland" had given to the world a volume of the most singularly interesting and fascinating character: "The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson, LL.D.," which at once eclipsed all preceding sources of information. By no author, before or since, has Boswell been surpassed in his admirable art of recording conversation. It is one of extreme difficulty. If any one be inclined to question this, let him try, when perchance he meets an eminent man, to record specimens of his conversation, and not merely with accuracy, but with something of the dramatic force and propriety which we invariably find in Boswell's handiwork. The attempt will convince him of the delicacy and difficulty of the task, and that Boswell was a master of the art. The "Journal of the Tour" was first published in the autumn of 1785, just thirteen years after the tour itself. During this long period, the manuscript of it had lain in his possession. From time to time, even while they went from place to place, and from island to island, Johnson had seen and read portions of it as they were successively written. "He came to my room this morning, Sept. 19, before breakfast, to read my Journal, which Life, vol. i., p. 2. 2 Life, p. 472.

1

he has done all along. He often before said, 'I take great delight in reading it.' To-day he said, 'You improve, it grows better and better.' I observed there was a danger of my getting a habit of writing in a slovenly manner. 'Sir,' said he, it is not written in a slovenly manner. It might be printed, were the subject fit for printing."" The manuscript of the " Tour" was occasionally lent. Thus it was lent to Mrs. Thrale. "I am glad," wrote Johnson to that lady, "you read Boswell's Journal: you are now sufficiently informed of the whole transaction, and need not regret that you did not make the tour to the Hebrides.' "1 We know that Malone, and we infer that Reynolds had this privilege.

The success of the "Journal of the Tour" was immediate. Three large editions of it were printed and sold in less than a year, in spite of the malignity and vulgarity with which it was assailed by such satirists as Peter Pindar, and a crowd of nameless scoffers. But Boswell was not to be put down. No man knew better than he what he had intended, and what he had done. It is a ridiculous conception that he was unconscious of his purpose, and that a work such as his arose under his hands like an unhealthy growth on a man's body. In the advertisement prefixed to the third edition, he shows that he is proudly conscious of the work he had already achieved, even in the "Journal of the Tour." "I will venture to predict, that this specimen of the colloquial talents and extemporaneous effusions of my fellow traveller will become still more valuable, when, by the lapse of time, he shall have become an antient: when all those who can now bear testimony to the transcendent powers of his mind shall have passed away; and no other memorial of this great and good man shall remain, but the following Journal and his own admirable works..... which will be read and admired as long as the English language shall be spoken or understood." This, be it remarked, 1 Letters to and from Dr. Samuel Johnson, vol. i., p. 284.

is not the language of unconsciousness, of a man who succeeded because he was a fool, and not in virtue of admirable literary abilities, exercised for a great and good end.

But the greater work, which had occupied his heart and soul and mind for many a long year, was being actively prepared. On the fly-sheet of the third edition of the "Journal of the Tour" which was the last he edited, there was an announcement full of enduring interest to all lovers of good books. "Preparing for the Press, in one volume, quarto. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by James Boswell, Esq." In one quarto volume Boswell had hoped and intended to comprise the work, for which he had been collecting materials " for more than twenty years, during which he was honoured with the intimate friendship of Dr. Johnson, to whose memory he is ambitious to erect a literary monument, worthy of so great an author and so excellent a man." We rejoice to think that one quarto did not suffice; two quartos were needed to embody the result of his long labour of love-quartos which contained matter which have delighted and instructed and cheered the English-speaking race for nearly a century; and which we believe are destined to live for centuries of time yet to come. To the "Life," published by Dilly in 1791, a dedication was, with great propriety, prefixed to Sir Joshua Reynolds, a dedication which shows the fond affection he had for his unfailing friend the President of the Royal Academy, and betrays, though in a very dignified fashion, the wounded feelings of a man who had been misunderstood and misinterpreted in the almost unbounded openness of his communications in "The Journal of the Tour to the Hebrides."

:

It is almost needless to note what everyone is familiar with the book was successful; it was eagerly read by all classes from the very first, and it became and remains a favourite book of the English nation. Boswell taught the world what a true biography of a great man should be.