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PREFACE TO MR. CROKER'S EDITION.

T were superfluous to expatiate on the merits, at least as a source of amusement, of Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON. Whatever doubts may have existed as to the prudence or the propriety of the original publication—however naturally private confidence was alarmed, or individual vanity offended, the voices of criticism and complaint were soon drowned in the general applause. And no wonder the work combines within itself the four most entertaining classes of writing-biography, memoirs, familiar letters, and that assemblage of literary anecdotes which the French have taught us to distinguish by the termination Ana.

It was originally received with an eagerness and relished with a zest which undoubtedly were sharpened by the curiosity which the unexpected publication of the words and deeds of so many persons still living could not but excite. But this motive has gradually become weaker, and may now be said to be extinct; yet we do not find that the popularity of the work, though somewhat changed in quality, is really diminished; and as the interval which separates us from the actual time and scene increases, so appear to increase the interest and delight which we feel at being introduced as it were, into that distinguished society of which Dr. Johnson formed the centre, and of which his biographer is the historian.

But though every year thus adds to the interest and instruction which this work affords, something is, on the other hand, deducted from the amusement which it gives, by the gradual obscurity that time throws over the persons and incidents of private life many circumstances known to all the world when Mr. Boswell wrote are already obscure to the best informed, and wholly forgotten by the rest of mankind.

For instance, when he relates [vol. i., p. 166] that a

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personage" called the English Divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" Giants," we conclude that George III. was the great personage; but all my inquiries (and some of His Majesty's illustrious family have condescended to permit these inquiries to extend even to them) have failed to ascertain to what person or on what occasion that happy expression was used.

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Again: When Mr. Boswell's capricious delicacy induced him to suppress names and to substitute such descriptions as an eminent friend," " a young gentleman,” a distinguished orator," these were well understood by the society of the day; but it is become necessary to apprise the reader of our times, that Mr. Burke, Mr. Sheridan, and Mr. Fox were respectively meant. Nor is it always easy to appropriate Mr. Boswell's circumlocutory designations. It will be seen in the course of this work, that several of them have become so obscure that even the surviving members of the Johnsonian society were unable to recollect who were meant, and it was on one of these occasions that Sir James Mackintosh told me that "my work had, at least, not come too soon."

Mr. Boswell's delicacy is termed capricious, because he is on some occasions candid even to indiscretion, and on others unaccountably mysterious. In the report of a conversation he will clearly designate half the interlocutors, while the other half, without any apparent reason, he casts into studied obscurity.

Considering himself to be (as he certainly has been to a greater degree than he could have contemplated) one of the distributors of fame, he has sometimes indulged his partialities or prejudices by throwing more or less light, and lights more or less favourable, on the different persons of his scene; some of whom he obtrudes into broad day, while others he only "adumbrates" by imperfect allusions. But many, even of those the most clearly designated and spoken of as familiar to every eye and ear, have already lived their day, and are hardly to be heard of except in this work. Yet this work must be read with imperfect pleasure, without some knowledge of the history of those more than half-forgotten persons.

Facts, too, fade from memory as well as names; and fashions and follies are still more transient. But, in a book mainly composed of familiar conversation, how large a portion most bear on the facts, the follies, and the fashions of the time !

To clear up these obscurities-to supply these deficiencies-to

retrieve obsolete and to collect scattered circumstances and so to restore to the work as much as possible of its original clearness and freshness, were the main objects of the present Editor. I am but too well aware how unequal I am to the task, and how imperfectly I have accomplished it. But as the time was rapidly passing away in which any aid could be expected from the contemporaries of Johnson, or even of Boswell, I determined to undertake the work-believing that, however ill I might perform it, I should still do it better than, twenty years later, it could be done by any diligence of research or any felicity of conjecture.

But there were also deficiencies to be supplied. Notwith standing the diligence and minuteness with which Mr. Boswell detailed what he saw of Dr. Johnson's life, his book left large chasms. It must be recollected that they never resided in the same neighbourhood, and that the detailed account of Johnson's domestic life and conversation is limited to the opportunities afforded by Mr. Boswell's occasional visits to London-by the Scottish Tour-and by one meeting at Dr. Taylor's in Derbyshire. Of above twenty years, therefore, that their acquaintance lasted, periods equivalent in the whole to about three-quarters of a year only fell under the personal notice of Boswell-and thus has been left many a long hiatus-valde deflendus, and now, alas, quite irreparable!

Mr. Boswell endeavoured, indeed, to fill up these chasms as well as he could with letters, memoranda, notes, and anecdotes collected from every quarter; but the appearance of his work was so long delayed, that Sir John Hawkins, Mrs. Piozzi, Dr. Strahan, Mr. Tyers, Mr. Nichols, and many others, had anticipated much of what he would have been glad to tell. Some squabbles about copyright had warned him that he must not avail himself of their publications; and he was on such bad terms with his rival biographers that he could not expect any assistance or countenance from them. He nevertheless went as far as he thought the law would allow in making frequent quotations from the preceding publications; but as to all the rest, which he did not venture to appropriate to his own use, the grapes were sour-and he took every opportunity of representing the anecdotes of his rivals as extremely inaccurate and generally undeserving of credit.

It is certain that none of them have attained-indeed they do not pretend to—that extreme verbal accuracy with which Mr. Boswell had, by great zeal and diligence, learned to record con

versations; nor in the details of facts are they so precise as Mr. Boswell, with good reason, claims to be. After all, however, Mr. Boswell himself is not exempt from those errors

and an attentive examination and collation of the authorities (and particularly of Mr. Boswell's own) produced the final conviction that the minor biographers are entitled not merely to more credit than Mr. Boswell allows them, but to as much as any person writing from recollection, and not from notes made at the moment, can be.

But much the largest, and, for the purpose of filling up the intervals of his private history, the most valuable part of Dr. Johnson's correspondence was out of Boswell's reach, namely, that which he for twenty years maintained with Mrs. Thrale, and which she published in 1788, in two volumes octavo. For the copyright of these, Mr. Boswell says, in a tone of admiring envy, "she received five hundred pounds." The publication, however, was not very successful—it never reached a second edition, and is now almost forgotten. But through these letters are scattered almost the only information we have relative to Johnson during the long intervals between Mr. Boswell's visits; and from them he has occasionally but cautiously (having the fear of the copyright law before his eyes) made interesting extracts.

These letters being now public property, I have been at liberty to follow up Mr. Boswell's imperfect example, and have therefore made numerous and copious selections from them, less as specimens of Johnson's talents for letter-writing, than as notices of his domestic and social life during the intervals of Mr. Boswell's narrative. Indeed, as letters, few of Johnson's can have any great charm for the common reader; they are full of good sense and good-nature, but in forms too didactic and ponderous to be very amusing. In the extracts which I have made from Mrs. Thrale's correspondence, I have been guided entirely by the object of completing the history of Johnson's life.

The most important addition, however, which I have made is one that needs no apology—the incorporation with the "Life" of the whole of the "Tour to the Hebrides," which Boswell published in one volume in 1785, and which, no doubt, if he could legally have done so, he would himself have incorporated in the

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"Life -of which indeed he expressly tells us, he looks on the "Tour" but as a portion. It is only wonderful, that since the copyright has expired, any edition of his "Life of Johnson" should have been published without the addition of this, the most original, curious, and amusing portion of the whole biography.

The "Prayers and Meditations," published by Dr. Strahan too hastily after Johnson's death, and I think in other respects also, indiscreetly, have likewise been made use of to an extent which was forbidden to Mr. Boswell. What Dr. Strahan calls meditations are, in fact, nothing but diaries of the author's moral and religious state of mind, intermixed with some notices of his bodily health and of the interior circumstances of his domestic life. Mr. Boswell had ventured to quote some of these: the present edition contains all that appear to offer any thing of interest.

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I have also incorporated a diary which Johnson had kept during "Tour through North Wales," made, in 1775, in company with Mr. Thrale and his family. Mr. Boswell had, it appears, inquired in vain for this diary: if he could have obtained it, he would, no doubt, have inserted it, as he did the similar notes of the "Tour in France" in the succeeding year. By the liberality of Mr. Duppa, who published it in 1806, with copious explanatory notes, I was enabled to add it to my edition. I have likewise given in the Appendix an Account of Dr. Johnson's early life, written by himself," published in 1802, but now become scarce; and I have thrown into the notes or the Appendix a few extracts from other published lives and anecdotes of Dr. Johnson which seemed necessary to complete Boswell's picture.

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But besides these printed materials, I have been favoured with many papers connected with Dr. Johnson, his life, and society, hitherto unpublished. Of course, my first inquiries were directed towards the original manuscript of Mr. Boswell's Journal, which would no doubt have enabled me to fill up all the blanks and clear away much of the obscurity that exist in the printed "Life." It was to be hoped that the " archives of Auchinleck," which Mr. Boswell frequently and pompously mentions, would contain the original materials of these works, which he himself, as well as the world at large, considered as his best claims to distinction. And I thought that I was only fulfilling the duties of courtesy in requesting from Mr. Boswell's representative any information which he might be disposed to afford on the subject. To that request I never received any answer: though the same inquiry was after