’If it be fair to judge of a book by an extract, I do not wonder that you were so little edified by Johnson’s Journal.  It is even more ridiculous than was poor Rutty’s of flatulent memory.  The portion of it given us in this day’s paper contains not one sentiment worth one farthing, except the last, in which he resolves to bind himself with no more unbidden obligations.  Poor man! one would think that to pray for his dead wife and to pinch himself with Church fasts had been almost the whole of his religion.’

 [Footnote A:  Two volumes.  Oxford Clarendon Press, 1897.]

It were hateful to pit one man’s religion against another’s, but it is only fair to Dr. Johnson’s religion to remember that, odd compound as it was, it saw him through the long struggle of life, and enabled him to meet the death he so honestly feared like a man and a Christian.  The Prayers and Meditations may not be an edifying book in Cowper’s sense of the word; there is nothing triumphant about it; it is full of infirmities and even absurdities; but, for all that, it contains more piety than 10,000 religious biographies.  Nor must the evidence it contains of weakness be exaggerated.  Beset with infirmities, a lazy dog, as he often declared himself to be, he yet managed to do a thing or two.  Here, for example, is an entry: 

’29, EASTER EVE (1777).

’I rose and again prayed with reference to my departed wife.  I neither read nor went to church, yet can scarcely tell how I have been hindered.  I treated with booksellers on a bargain, but the time was not long.’

Too long, perhaps, for Johnson’s piety, but short enough to enable the booksellers to make an uncommon good bargain for the Lives of the Poets.  ‘As to the terms,’ writes Mr. Dilly, ’it was left entirely to the doctor to name his own; he mentioned 200 guineas; it was immediately agreed to.’  The business-like Malone makes the following observation on the transaction:  ’Had he asked 1,000, or even 1,500, guineas the booksellers, who knew the value of his name, would doubtless have readily given it.’  Dr. Johnson, though the son of a bookseller, was the least tradesman-like of authors.  The bargain was bad, but the book was good.

A year later we find this record: 

’MONDAY, April 20 (1778).

’After a good night, as I am forced to reckon, I rose seasonably and prayed, using the collect for yesterday.  In reviewing my time from Easter, 1777, I find a very melancholy and shameful blank.  So little has been done that days and months are without any trace.  My health has, indeed, been very much interrupted.  My nights have been commonly not only restless but painful and fatiguing....  I have written a little of the Lives of the Poets, I think, with all my usual vigour.  I have made sermons, perhaps, as readily as formerly.  My memory is less faithful in retaining names, and, I am afraid, in