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Updated: June 13, 2025
Yes; the poor boy—the friendless Sam—with, whom we began our story, had become the famous Doctor Samuel Johnson! He was universally acknowledged as the wisest man and greatest writer in all England. He had given shape and permanence to his native language, by his Dictionary. Thousands upon thousands of people had read his Idler, his Rambler, and his Rasselas.
Among Johnson's numerous writings the ones best entitled to remembrance are, perhaps, his Dictionary of the English Language, 1755; his moral tale, Rasselas, 1759; the introduction to his edition of Shakspere, 1765, and his Lives of the Poets, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous, cadenced prose, full of big Latin words and balanced clauses.
It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois, bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest parts, of Mr. Gait's novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter Hall; sometimes of the leading articles of the Morning Post.
I call him by his aboriginal name; as for his other appellations, Bacchus himself had not so many! One day, a lady, richly dressed, was ushered by Mr. Birnie into the bureau of Mr. Love, alias Gawtrey. Philip was seated by the window, reading, for the first time, the Candide, that work, next to Rasselas, the most hopeless and gloomy of the sports of genius with mankind.
This cleft is the only entrance to a valley three or four miles long which lies in the very heart of the mountains. It is inhabited by a few woodmen and their families, and, but for the road which passes through, would be as perfect a solitude as the Happy Valley of Rasselas.
Thus passed twenty months of the life of Rasselas. He busied himself so intensely in visionary bustle that he forgot his real solitude; and amidst hourly preparations for the various incidents of human affairs, neglected to consider by what means he should mingle with mankind.
Still eager upon the same inquiry, and resolving to discover whether that felicity which public life could not afford was to be found in solitude, Rasselas determined to visit a hermit who lived near the lowest cataract of the Nile and filled the whole country with the fame of his sanctity, Imlac and the princess agreeing to accompany him.
I have known boys and girls who were forced to read "Rasselas." Now that allegorical production came from the mind of a mature, powerful, most melancholy man, and it is intended to show the barren vanity of human wishes. What an absurd thing to put in the hands of a buoyant youth!
Johnson wrote Rasselas to pay for the funeral of his yet unburied mother, and Johnson was a man of heart if ever one lived; he could not have written the book if he had had a headache. Saints and ascetics without end and of many persuasions have resorted to bodily pain as a means of deadening the imagination and exalting the will or spirit.
And while I fear she thinks, at the bottom of her heart, that my fortunes will never be remade, she has a faint hope, that, as another Rasselas, I may teach a lesson to future publics, from which they may profit, though we die. Owing to the behaviour of my double, or, if you please, to that public pressure which compelled me to employ him, I have plenty of leisure to write this communication.
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