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SAMUEL JOHNSON

(1709-1784)

T IS as unpardonable not to know Samuel Johnson in his various moods as an essayist as it would be to pretend to love his prose style as we may love that of Addison or Irving, Earle or Fuller. He was a great man, and in the eighteenth century a great writer. He will always remain a great man-virile, full of virtus, daring to be himself at any cost, including the actual experience of misery verging close on starvation; fierce in the assertion of his right to count for a unit in creation and not to be overborne by any one, gentle or common, noble or ignoble; yet under this fierceness so tender that from the depths of his sympathy for the suffering of others we may judge how deeply he himself must have suffered under

"The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes.”

We can see his sensibility still more plainly when he writes Lord Chesterfield: "The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind." That rebuke, the proudest which struggling merit ever administered to the vanity of fashionable culture, we could not wish to have been other than it was. From the time Homer learned to describe the insolence of the suitors of Penelope at meals, by his own experience in living on scraps from lordly tables, to the Augustan Age when Horace and Virgil were obliged to buy permission to become immortal at the price of the meanest sycophancy to power;- from the very beginning of literature until Teutonic individuality met the pride of aristocratic power in the Teutoburgerwald and with naked breast bore it backward,there was never the match of that reply from this plebeian "son of John" to his lord. When in the time of Tacitus, the German ancestors of the remote and unknown English "John," who begot the original "Johnson," waded the Rhine bare-legged through broken ice, making their way towards Rome, they were preparing the world for the coming of this heroic soul, fitted by the anguish of deep and long-continued humiliation for the pride of this answer. To be "humble with the humble and haughty with the proud" is the highest of the merely human virtues, but it is truly assumed in the mythology of the race which produced the "Johnsons" that human virtues belong to "Midgard," - the "middle yard," — a condition of

DR. JOHNSON IN CHESTERFIELD'S ANTEROOM.

W

ARD never had a better subject than this and few painters have ever handled a subject better than he has handled this in contrasting Johnson's suffering dignity with the demeanor of the courtiers and dependants around him.