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Boswell hopes, "for the felicity of human nature," that many experience this mood; though Johnson judiciously suggested that he should not trust too much to impressions. In some matters Boswell showed a touch of independence by outvying the Johnsonian prejudices. He was a warm admirer of feudal principles, and especially held to the propriety of entailing property upon heirs male.
He would astonish us by sallies, witty, innocent and inhumane; and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, demolish honest sentiment.
A part of education and culture is the extension of one's narrow range of living to include wider possibilities or actualities, such as may be gathered from other fields of thought, other times, other men; in short, to use a Johnsonian phrase, it is 'multiplicity of consciousness. There is no book more effective through long familiarity to such extension and such multiplication than Boswell's Life of Johnson.
But when he goes on as they did to Temple Bar, he will find that ancient monument retired into the country and certainly nothing whatever to remind him of the Jacobite heads still mouldering on it, which gave occasion to Goldsmith's witty turning of his Tory friend's quotation "Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur ISTIS." But on that holy ground the Johnsonian will hardly miss even Temple Bar.
The shaggy eyebrows unbent a little as he rolled the steps toward the shelf where the Johnsonian literature was placed. Jo skipped up, and sitting on the top step, affected to be searching for her book, but was really wondering how best to introduce the dangerous object of her visit. Mr.
The great forces in the literature of the next seventy or eighty years were: in poetry, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats; in prose, Scott, and then later on, Carlyle and Ruskin; every single one of them providing a wine by no means to be put into Johnsonian bottles.
If it cannot be found it is often invented. A few years ago, a lover of Johnson walking along a London street passed by the side of a cabmen's shelter. Two cabmen were getting their dinner ready, and the Johnsonian was amused and pleased to hear one say to the other: "After all, as Doctor Johnson says, a man may travel all over the world without seeing anything better than his dinner."
I shall present my readers with a series of what I gathered this evening from the Johnsonian garden. 'Did we not hear so much said of Jack Wilkes, we should think more highly of his conversation. Jack has great variety of talk, Jack is a scholar, and Jack has the manners of a gentleman.
On Saturday, May 2, I dined with him at Sir Joshua Reynolds's, where there was a very large company, and a great deal of conversation; but owing to some circumstance which I cannot now recollect, I have no record of any part of it, except that there were several people there by no means of the Johnsonian school; so that less attention was paid to him than usual, which put him out of humour; and upon some imaginary offence from me, he attacked me with such rudeness, that I was vexed and angry, because it gave those persons an opportunity of enlarging upon his supposed ferocity, and ill treatment of his best friends.
I shall present my readers with a series of what I gathered this evening from the Johnsonian garden. 'My friend, the late Earl of Corke, had a great desire to maintain the literary character of his family : he was a genteel man, but did not keep up the dignity of his rank. He was so generally civil, that nobody thanked him for it.
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