Samuel Johnson eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 213 pages of information about Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 213 pages of information about Samuel Johnson.
roused Taylor “to a pitch of bellowing.”  Johnson roared out that if the people of England were fairly polled (this was in 1777) the present king would be sent away to-night, and his adherents hanged to-morrow.  Johnson, however, rendered Taylor the substantial service of writing sermons for him, two volumes of which were published after they were both dead; and Taylor must have been a bold man, if it be true, as has been said, that he refused to preach a sermon written by Johnson upon Mrs. Johnson’s death, on the ground that it spoke too favourably of the character of the deceased.

Johnson paid frequent visits to Lichfield, to keep up his old friends.  One of them was Lucy Porter, his wife’s daughter, with whom, according to Miss Seward, he had been in love before he married her mother.  He was at least tenderly attached to her through life.  And, for the most part, the good people of Lichfield seem to have been proud of their fellow-townsman, and gave him a substantial proof of their sympathy by continuing to him, on favourable terms, the lease of a house originally granted to his father.  There was, indeed, one remarkable exception in Miss Seward, who belonged to a genus specially contemptible to the old doctor.  She was one of the fine ladies who dabbled in poetry, and aimed at being the centre of a small literary circle at Lichfield.  Her letters are amongst the most amusing illustrations of the petty affectations and squabbles characteristic of such a provincial clique.  She evidently hated Johnson at the bottom of her small soul; and, indeed, though Johnson once paid her a preposterous compliment—­a weakness of which this stern moralist was apt to be guilty in the company of ladies—­he no doubt trod pretty roughly upon some of her pet vanities.

By far the most celebrated of Johnson’s Lichfield friends was David Garrick, in regard to whom his relations were somewhat peculiar.  Reynolds said that Johnson considered Garrick to be his own property, and would never allow him to be praised or blamed by any one else without contradiction.  Reynolds composed a pair of imaginary dialogues to illustrate the proposition, in one of which Johnson attacks Garrick in answer to Reynolds, and in the other defends him in answer to Gibbon.  The dialogues seem to be very good reproductions of the Johnsonian manner, though perhaps the courteous Reynolds was a little too much impressed by its roughness; and they probably include many genuine remarks of Johnson’s.  It is remarkable that the praise is far more pointed and elaborate than the blame, which turns chiefly upon the general inferiority of an actor’s position.  And, in fact, this seems to have corresponded to Johnson’s opinion about Garrick as gathered from Boswell.

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