stowing additional value on one mass or parcel of a nation's capital, it gives additional value to the whole of its property, and gives it that quality of security without which all other value would be worthless. So they who deny the importance of mere scientific contemplation, and exclude from the uses of science the pure and real pleasure of discovering, and of learning, and of surveying its truths, forget how many of the enjoyments derived from what are called the practical applications of the sciences, resolve themselves into gratifications of a merely contemplative kind. Thus, the steam engine is confessed to be the most useful application of machinery and of chemistry to the arts. Would it not be so if steam navigation were its only result, and if no one used a steam boat but for excursions of curiosity or of amusement? Would it not be so if steam engines had never been used but in the fine arts? So a microscope is a useful practical application of optical science as well as a telescope and a telescope would be so, although it were only used in examining distant views for our amusement, or in showing us the real figures of the planets, and were of no use in navigation or in war. The mere pleasure, then, of tracing relations, and of contemplating general laws in the material, the moral, and the political world, is the direct and legitimate value of science; and all scientific truths are important for this reason, whether they ever lend any aid to the common arts of life or no. In like manner the mental gratification afforded by the scientific contemplations of Natural Religion are of great value, independent of their much higher virtue in mending the heart and improving the life, towards which important object, indeed, all the contemplations of science more or less directly tend, and in this higher sense all the pleasures of science are justly considered as Practical Uses.

JOHNSON.

THE materials for writing the Life of Dr. Johnson are certainly more abundant than for the biography of any other distinguished person: not even excepting him whose Confessions reveal all that he himself could recollect, and chose to record of his own history; or him whose incessant activity and multiplicity of connections, left fourscore volumes of his published works, and twenty of his private correspondence. We owe the great riches of the English Author's remains to the curiosity excited by his lively and pointed conversation, and the happy accident of his living for the latter part of his life in the society of a person eminently qualified, both by his tastes and his habits, to afford that curiosity an almost unlimited gratification. In the grateful remembrance of all who relish the pleasures of refined social intercourse, with the name of Johnson is associated that of Boswell, as indissolubly as are those of Plato and Xenophon with the more remarkable name of Socrates in the minds of all who love philosophy; and there is perhaps added a zest to the collections of the English writer which the Athenian records possess not; we see the amiable and lively historian figuring always in the group with his more stern idol, affording relief, by contrast, to the picture of the sage, and amusing by his own harmless foibles, which he takes a pleasure in revealing, as if he shared the gratification he was preparing for his unknown reader. His cleverness, his tact, his skill in drawing forth those he was studying, his admirable good humour, his strict love of truth, his high and generous principle, his kindness

towards his friends, his unvarying but generally rational piety, have scarcely been sufficiently praised by those who nevertheless have been always ready, as needs they must be, to acknowledge the debt of gratitude due for perhaps the book, of all that were ever written, the most difficult to lay down once it has been taken up. To the great work of Mr. Boswell, may be added some portions of Sir John Hawkins's far inferior, and much less accurate biography; the amusing but also somewhat careless anecdotes of Mrs. Piozzi, formerly Mrs. Thrale, and above all, the two interesting works of Madame D'Arblay, the celebrated Miss Burney, her own autobiography, and the life of her father. These works, but the two last especially, abound in important additions to that of Mr. Boswell; and what relates to Dr. Johnson certainly forms the principal value of them both.*

In estimating the merits of Johnson, prejudices of a very powerful nature have too generally operated unfavourably to the cause of truth. The strongly marked features of his mind were discernible in the vehemence of his opinions both on political and religious subjects; he was a high tory, and a high churchman in all controversies respecting the state; he was under the habitual influence of his religious impressions, and leant decidedly in favour of the system established and tected by law. He treated those whose opinions had

pro

* We must, however, not pass over the light, somewhat lurid it must be owned, which the autobiography sheds on the habits and effects of a court life; the dreadful prostration of the understanding which may be seen to arise among at least the subordinate figures of the courtly group. I own that I cannot conceive this to be the universally resembling picture. My own experience and observation of many years, some of them passed in near connexion with our court, leads me to this conclusion. It must be added in extenuation of the absurdities so often laughed at in Boswell, that this amiable author furnishes quite her fair proportion of the matter of ridicule. Such weakness as marks many of her sentiments, such deeply seated vanity as pervades the whole, not only of her own, but of her father's memoirs, which are in truth an autobiography as much as a life of him, cannot certainly be surpassed, if they can be matched, in the less deliberate effusions of Mr. Boswell's avowed self-esteem.

X

an opposite inclination, with little tolerance and no courtesy; and hence while these undervalued his talents and his acquirements, those with whom he so cordially agreed were apt to overrate both. To this must be added, two accidental circumstances, from which were derived exaggerated opinions, both of his merits and his defects; the extravagant admiration of the little circle in which he lived producing a reaction among all beyond it; and the vehement national prejudices under which he laboured, if indeed he did not cherish and indulge them, prejudices that made his own countrymen prone to exalt, and strangers as prone to decry both his understanding and his knowledge. On one point, however, there is never likely to be any difference of opinion. While the exercise of his judgment will by all be allowed to have been disturbed by his prejudices, the strength of his faculties will be admitted by all; and no one is likely to deny that he may justly be ranked among the most remarkable men of his age, even if we regard the works which he has left, but much more if we consider the resources of his conversation. This must be the result of a calm and candid review of his history, after all due allowance shall be made for the undoubted effects of manner and singularity in exalting the impression of both his writings and his talk.

Samuel Johnson was born 18th of September, 1709, at Lichfield, where his father, originally from Derbyshire, was a bookseller and stationer in a small way of business. His mother was of a yeoman's family named Ford, for many generations settled in Warwickshire. He inherited from his father a large and robust bodily frame, with a disposition towards melancholy and hypochondriacism, which proved the source of wretchedness to him through life. From his nurse he is supposed (though probably it was hereditary too,) to have caught a scrofulous disorder, of whose ravages he always bore the scars, which deprived him of the sight

of one eye, and which, under the influence of the vulgar supposition so long prevalent, made his parents bring him to London that he might be touched by Queen Anne. His father was a man of respectable character and good abilities; and while he devoted himself to his trade, frequenting various parts of the country to sell his books, he seems to have had much pleasure in the diffusion of knowledge, and to have been himself knowing in several branches of ordinary learning. His mother was uneducated, but had a strong natural understanding, and a deep sense of religion, which she early instilled into her son. There was only one other child, a younger brother, who followed the father's business, and died at the age of fiveand-twenty. The family were of strong high church principles, and continued through all fortunes attached to the House of Stuart.

Johnson at a very early age showed abilities far above those of his comrades. His quickness of apprehension made learning exceedingly easy to him, and he had an extraordinary power of memory, which stood by him through life. His school companions well remembered in after life his great superiority over them all; they would relate how when only six or seven years old, he used to help them in their tasks as well as to amuse them by his jokes and his narratives, and how they were wont to carry him of a morning to school, attending him in a kind of triumph. The seminary in which he was educated for several years after, was Mr. Hunter's, and although he always considered the severity of that teacher as excessive, he yet candidly admitted that but for the strict discipline maintained, he should never have learnt much; for his nature was extremely indolent owing to his feeble spirits and broken health, and his habits of application were then, as ever after, very desultory and irregular. The school was, moreover, famous for a succession of ushers and schoolmasters hardly equalled in any other;