The Sun.
London, England, 1859-02-17 00:00:00

THE QUARTERLIES.

Don't we all of us remember—we who know Bos-
well (as he deserves to be known) by heart—how
the Doctor would go Out himself to buy oysters for
his cat Hodge, " lest, if he put his servants to the
trouble, they might take a dislike to the animal
and use it ill r Here follows this impressive tes-
timony of

DR. JOIINSON'S EXQUISITE SENSIBILITY.
" He was thrown into an agony at the sight of an omelet
shortly after the death of 'Dr. Nugent, because it was the
dish they had had for supper the last time they met. He
cried when he read the letter which described the death of
Mr. Elphinston's mother. Tears were a tribute he often
paid. Miss Reynolds related to him some mournful story
of maternal affection, and she was interrupted by his sobs.
He wept as he told that Dr. Hodges, the physician who
remained in London during the plague when most of his
brother practitioners fled, died soon afterwards a prisoner
for debt. He burst into tears in repeating the Latin hymn
' Dies irve; and again when he recited the description of
the English from Goldsmith's ' Traveller.' He read
Beattie's Hermit' with similar emotion. There is a pathos
in these pieces which cannot be fully apprehended except
by minds refined by literary culture. Their power pro-
ceeds from an art which is lost upon untutored perceptions,
and their effect upon Johnson is at once a proof of the
acuteness of his feeling for poetry and the strength of his
human sensibilities."

[fere, on the other hand, are equally impressive
,okens of

DR. JOHNSON'S BULL-DOG COURAGE.
He was accustomed to maintain that the man who was
afraid of anything was a scoundrel. He feared death,' says
Boswell, but he feared nothing else—not even what might
occasion death.' Though his convulsive movements would
not enable him to guide a horse, and though he-was so
short-sighted as hardly to be able to see a yard before him,
he would follow the hounds in a chase of fifty miles with
desperate daring, while the sportsmen shouted to him not
to ride over the dogs. He despised the occupation, and his
sole motive for engaging in it was his determination to
show himself as good a man as his neighbours. He laughed
at the notion of caring for horses running away with a
carriage. The event occurred when he was travelling in
France with the Thrales, at a spot where the road was
bounded by a precipice. They narrowly escaped with their
lives ; but he continued to ridicule the apprehensions of
his companions, and exultingly exclaimed that nothing
came of it except that Thrale leaped from the vehicle into
a chalk-pit, and then walked out looking as white.' Hav-
ing heard it asserted that if a gun was loaded with two
or three balls, there was a risk of its bursting, he put in
six or seven, and fired them off against a wall. The same
spirit of defiance led him, when he was bathing near
Oxford, toirvim straight into a pool because he was cau-
tioned against it by Langton as particularly dangerous. He
protested that he was afraid of no dog in the world ; and as
two fierce pointers were fighting at the house of his friend
Beauclerk, he cuffed their heads with his fists till they ran
howling away. He cared as little for men as for dogs.
Having left for a few minutes a chair which was placed for
him between the side-scenes of the theatre at Lichfield, a
gentleman took the seat, and refused to resign it, upon
which Johnson lifted up chair and gentleman together, and
flung them both into the pit. Foote had resolved to per-
sonate him on the stage, and expected to derive large pro-
fits
from the performance. Johnson purchased a stout
oaken cudgel, and declared that he would break the bones
of the satirist in the presence of the audience. The threat
was enough for Foote, who only .ventured to ridicule the
unresisting. Johnson, it must be confessed, was no ordi-
nary antagonist. A. gang of four persons once attacked
him at night in the street, and he kept all four at bay till
the arrival of the watch. He united skill to muscular
power, for he had learned to box from his uncle Andrew,
who was a professional prize-fighter.. If not to be afraid of
anything is not to be a scoundrel, Johnson was certainly a
very honest fellow."
As for his genius—read this::—
" Wit, in the estimation of his friends, was his most
shining quality. 'Rabelais and all the rest,' said Garrick,
are nothing compared to him. You may be diverted by
them, but Johnson gives you a forcible hug, and shakes
laughter out of you whether you will or not."
As to the doctor's enlightenment the reviewer
justly observes—

n many respects he was in advance of his age, or at
[east must be ranked amongst the foremost men in it. Years
before Wilberforce had opened his lips against the slave-
trade or .slavery, Johnson in a company of ' potent, grave,
and reverend signiors' at Oxford gave for a toast, To the
next insurrection of the negroes in the West Indies."

sere is the eloquent estimate given by the
Quarterly of the grand lesson taught to the World
by the Life and Works of this Great and Good
- -

" The history of Johnson teaches a lesson of resignation
to those who are straitened in their circumstances when a
man so good and gifted languished for considerably more
IL:tlf his lifb iII ,jbject penmy; a 10.0]-, perserenmoe
to those who 'are desponding, when a toilsome and deselato
road, which it took more than thirty years to traverse and
which seemed to have no other goal than the grave, led him
at last to competence and ease; a lesson of contentinent
to those who do not possess his mental pre-eminence,
when Providence had coupled With it a disorder which

The Quarterly Review. No. CCIX.
There is one masterly article in this new number
of the 'Quarterly . And that is the paper on the
" Life and Writings of Johnson." It is worthy of
the pen of Mr. John Forster. At first we really
believed it to be Mr. Forster's ; but the footnote at
page 225 effectually dissipates that impression.
For the words of that footnote are these :—Speaking
of Doctor Johnson, " The noble traits of his cha-
racter are brought out with great force and vivid-
ness by Mr. Forster in his Life of Goldsmith.'
No one, it seems to us, has shewn such a fine per-
ception of the grand qualities of Johnson, or has
described them with such genial sympathy." No
one, that is to say, of course, saving and excepting
the Great 'Biographer ! The footnote just quoted,
however, shows this—that if the paper upon John-
son, in this new number of the Quarterly, is not
from the hand of Mr. Forster, it is from the hand
of one who fully appreciates and sympathises
with him. It is written by one, whomsoever this
unrecognised reviewer may be, who appreciates
John Forster as cordially even as the young poet
of " The Wanderer." To every one without ex-
ception we would earnestly commend the perusal
of this most charming contribution. Those who
are already familiar with the pages of Boswell will
gladly have their recollections of the great Doctor
thus delightfully revived. Those who have not as
yet read a line of the world's greatest biography
will, from an examination of this fascinating sketch,
be incited irresistibly to its perusal. Referring
to Dr. Johnson's use of apollysyllabic phraseology,the
reviewer, while observing " There were people who
said jocosely that his learned language was assumed
to make his Dictionary indispensable," remarks
most truthfully—
" The extent to which he carried the habit has been
enormously exaggerated. The ordinary method of exhibit-
ing his practice has been to gather into half-a-dozen sen-
tences •as many grandiloquent phrases as are scattered
through the whole of the Rambler,' until all resemblance
is lost in the extravagance of the caricature."
Adding further on—
" His maturer writings are masterpieces of composition.
He became more familiar in his language, pruned his
redundance, and varied his cadence. As his style grew less
cumbrous it increased in vigour till it reached its climax in
the 'Lives of the Poets.' "
Later in the article the reviewer says, in refer-
ence to that great masterpiece of style, of criticism,
and of biography—
" The style of Johnson, in the Lives of the Poeti,' re-
tains his dignity and classical polish, with hardly a trace of
his cumbrous march. His periods, which from his mode of
punctuation look long to the eye, are frequently a compound
of short and pithy sentences, as animated as they are ener-
getic. His metaphors, in which he was always happy, are
apt and concise, and illustrate while they embellish. His
wit is abundant, and of a kind peculiar to himself—a
species of concentrated sarcasm, by which he exposes faults,
whether of men or their writings.

"This deep- penetration and the sagacious reflections
which everywhere abound make the human interest of his
Lives' equal, if not superior, to their literary criticism. In
the latter particular, indeed, to hear the language which is
sometimes used, it might be supposed that they were an
ignominious failure—a collection of blind prejudices and
false decrees, which only exhibit his defective taste and dic-
tatorial insolence. The sole ground of this absurd idea is
that he did not admire sufficiently the minor poems of Mil-
ton, the Castle of Indolence' of Thomson, and the Odes of
Collins and Gray. There have always been two schools of
poetry—one which addresses itself to the imagination, the
other to the reason. Few persons are possessed of the
catholic taste which relishes both. Johnson belonged to
the school of reason and had little appreciation of rural
images and the flights of fancy. Those who have
attacked him for his insensibility did not perceive that
their own was greater that if they applauded what he con-
demned, they likewise condemned what he applauded, and
that he did not depreciate a few of.their favourite pieces so
much below their real level as they themselves underrated
the works of Dryden and Pope."
Speaking of the reputed roughness of Dr. John-
son, the Quarterly quotes Mrs. Thrale's testimony
that that roughness was confined to his words, and
that all his actions were good and gentle : the
' reviewer adding—
" His vehemence of language has sometimes been con-
founded with censoriousness of disposition, from which he
was wholly free. His friends considered thal both intel-
lectually and morally he was inclined to think better of his
acquaintances than they deserved."
It is well observed that " a few rude speeches sink
into insignificance when compared with a charity
which was only,bounded by his means." Here is an
affecting epitome of
DR. JOiENSON'S EVERYDAY BENEVOLENCE.
"'He frequently bestowed all the silver in his pocket
upon the miserable beings who waylaid him on his passage
from his house to the tavern where he dined. Even in his
early London days he would go up at night to the destitute
children who were sleeping upon the projecting stalls of
shops or on the sills of doors, and slip a penny into their
hands to buy them a breakfast, and this,' adds Mr. Croker,
when he himself was living on pennies.' Sixpence, he
once remarked, was then a great sum to him. When it
was objected that it was useless to bestow halfpence upon
beggars, because they only laid it out upon gin or tobacco,
he energetically exclaimed, 'And why should they be
denied such sweeteners of existence.? Life is a pill which
none of us can bear to swallow without gilding. Yet for
the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, are not
ashamed to show even visible displeasure if ever the bitter
taste is taken from their mouths.' He one night found a
woman of abandoned character lying exhausted in the
street, and lifting her up, he conveyed her on his back to
his own house, had her nursed till she recovered her
health, and then obtained her a situation. A heartless man '
would have passed her by, a humane man might have given
her money ; but was there any second person in the whole
of the vast population of London that would have taken up
the forlorn, diseased, and dirty sufferer in his arms and car-
ried her to his home ? There are charities which from their
very lowliness become sublime."

saddened his days, and conjoined 'with the brightness
of the flame the smart of the burn ; a lesson of intel;
lectual humility to those who are his inferiors In mill'
and knowledge, when he always spoke of his own attain'
limits as slight, and a lemon of moral humility to those
who are not possessed of his worth, when in spite of
' his exemplary conduct and marvellous benevolence, he
almost enraged if anybody spoke of him as good; a lessen
of the supreme importance of religion to those whose piety
is less fervent than his when his repentance was so bitter
at the close, and present fame and future renown
were
quite forgotten in the contemplation of eternity; a lesson
to all of what can bo effected in situations which appear to,
afford no scope for the exertion of abilities or the practice of
virtues, when we see the learning he amassed in his youth
with scanty aid from books or instructors, the works he
wrote without ease or encouragement, the charities 11e
exercised without gold or silver wen he was living himself
upon fourpence-halfpenny a day, and the honesty and Inds'pendence he maintained when not to lower his opinions or
sully his conscience was to condemn himself to fare no,
coarse as that which was allotted for the punishment el
crime. Whether. we desire an example to stimulate us to
the acquisition of knowledge under difficulites or the re'
tention of uprightness under temptation, there is no more
memorable instance of either than is presented by the life
and character of this illustrious man. And whatever be
the condition of him who seeks to profit by the story, non°
can be so low but he is in a position as advantageous 10
Johnson, and none can be so high. but that with all /115
helps ho will have enough to do to emulate his model."
In a foot note, at page 229, the reviewer suggests
the issue of a popular edition of Boswell's Johnson
in parts, and lo ! at once, in answer to this, there
are already coming forth, simultaneously from the
-press, in shilling instalments—Croker s edition,
published by Mr. Murray, and the illustrated
edition published by the Messrs.' Routledge.
Besides this admirable paper on Johnson,
the Quarterly csntains eight other contributions.
These we have left ourselves scarcely room to
enumerate :—An anecdotal review of the " Corres-
pondence of Lord Cornwallis." An eulogistic
criticism on "Dyce's Shakspeare." A paper On
the " Consular Servibe." A second and concluding
notice of Cardinal Wiseman's Four last Popes--;
having reference peculiarly to Pius VIII. and
Gregory XVI. A treatise on "Patents." AA
essay on " Soldiers' Lodging, Food, and Dress."
remark or two—anything but appetising—upon
the manufacture of " Bread." And finally that
astounding old-world-tory diatribe against " Be'
form," to which we have already drawn attention in
our leading columns. Such is the new number of
the Quarterly.