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Updated: May 16, 2025
'Where honour or where conscience does not bind, No other law shall shackle me; Slave to myself I ne'er will be; Nor shall my future actions be confined By my own present mind. See ante, ii. 21. Juvenal, Sat. iii. 78. Imitated by Johnson in London. See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 16, and Johnson's Tour into Wales, Aug. 1, 1774.
It is not to his books, but rather to the picture of the man himself, as given by Boswell, that Johnson owes his great place in our literature. All his life long Boswell's one ambition seems to have been to shine in the reflected glory of great men, and his chief task to record their sayings and doings.
Waller, in his Divine Poesie, canto first, has the same thought finely expressed: 'The Church triumphant, and the Church below, In songs of praise their present union show; Their joys are full; our expectation long, In life we differ, but we join in song; Angels and we assisted by this art, May sing together, though we dwell apart. See Boswell's Hebrides, post, v. 45. In the original, flee.
In spite of sundry little sparrings, Johnson fully appreciated Goldsmith's genius. Possibly his authority hastened the spread of public appreciation, as he seemed to claim, whilst repudiating Boswell's too flattering theory that it had materially raised Goldsmith's position.
But it may be worth while to point out that other and more rational explanations of Boswell's success are also insufficient. His book is acknowledged to have originated a new type of biography.
There was then in England no other man with so much influence in the world of literature. Boswell's Life of Johnson. We must go to Boswell's Life of Johnson, the greatest of all biographies, to read of Johnson as he lived and talked; in short, to learn those facts which render him far more famous than his written works.
It is rare, so rare that Boswell's latest biographer speaks of it as the 'forlorn hope of the book-hunter, though he doubts not that copies of it are lurking in some private collection. One copy at least is lurking in the Bibliotaph's library. He bought it, not for a song to be sure, but very reasonably.
Wilkes's name was sent up as Lord Mayor at the top of the list in 1772 and 1773, but he was in each case passed over by the Court of Aldermen. It was not till 1774 that he was elected by a kind of 'Hobson's choice. The Aldermen had to choose between him and the retiring Lord Mayor, Bull. See Boswell's Hebrides, post, v. 339.
We lose all the quaint semiconscious touches of character which make the original so fascinating; and Boswell's absurdities become less amusing when we are able to forget for an instant that the perpetrator is also the narrator. The effort, however, must be made; and it will be best to premise a brief statement of the external conditions of the life.
There was, perhaps, a good deal of truth in Boswell's supposition, for in 1779 Johnson had told her that he saw 'with indignation her despicable dread of living in the Borough. Piozzi Letters, ii.92. Johnson had a room in the new house.
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