No smallest estimate of his character is fair which does not make due allowance for the terrible experiences of his youth and early middle age.  His spirit was as scarred as his face.  He was fifty-three when the pension was given him, and up to then his existence had been spent in one constant struggle for the first necessities of life, for the daily meal and the nightly bed.  He had seen his comrades of letters die of actual privation.  From childhood he had known no happiness.  The half blind gawky youth, with dirty linen and twitching limbs, had always, whether in the streets of Lichfield, the quadrangle of Pembroke, or the coffee-houses of London, been an object of mingled pity and amusement.  With a proud and sensitive soul, every day of his life must have brought some bitter humiliation.  Such an experience must either break a man’s spirit or embitter it, and here, no doubt, was the secret of that roughness, that carelessness for the sensibilities of others, which caused Boswell’s father to christen him “Ursa Major.”  If his nature was in any way warped, it must be admitted that terrific forces had gone to the rending of it.  His good was innate, his evil the result of a dreadful experience.

And he had some great qualities.  Memory was the chief of them.  He had read omnivorously, and all that he had read he remembered, not merely in the vague, general way in which we remember what we read, but with every particular of place and date.  If it were poetry, he could quote it by the page, Latin or English.  Such a memory has its enormous advantage, but it carries with it its corresponding defect.  With the mind so crammed with other people’s goods, how can you have room for any fresh manufactures of your own?  A great memory is, I think, often fatal to originality, in spite of Scott and some other exceptions.  The slate must be clear before you put your own writing upon it.  When did Johnson ever discover an original thought, when did he ever reach forward into the future, or throw any fresh light upon those enigmas with which mankind is faced?  Overloaded with the past, he had space for nothing else.  Modern developments of every sort cast no first herald rays upon his mind.  He journeyed in France a few years before the greatest cataclysm that the world has ever known, and his mind, arrested by much that was trivial, never once responded to the storm-signals which must surely have been visible around him.  We read that an amiable Monsieur Sansterre showed him over his brewery and supplied him with statistics as to his output of beer.  It was the same foul-mouthed Sansterre who struck up the drums to drown Louis’ voice at the scaffold.  The association shows how near the unconscious sage was to the edge of that precipice and how little his learning availed him in discerning it.