BOSWELL'S LITTLE MISTAKE.
[To Tim EDITOR OF TIM " SEECTATO1G.1 SIR,—How possible it is for even the best-informed biographer to err is, I think, illustrated by the following passages on Dr. Johnson as a writer. In Boswell's "Life " I read: " In all the numerous writings of Johnson, whether in prose or verse, and even in his tragedy, of which the subject is the distress of an unfortunate Princess, there is not a single passage, that ever drew a tear." In Lord Macaulay I read : " The Dictionary
(Johnson's) came forth without a dedication. In the preface
the author truly declared that he owed nothing to the great, and described the difficulties with which he had been left to struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, Horne Tooke, never
could read that passage without tears."
Boswell and Macaulay cannot both be right, But any one who has read Johnson's celebrated letter to the Earl of Chesterfield will have no difficulty whatever in deciding between them. It is quite refreshing to discover, in Johnson's idolater, an underestimate of Johnson's powers. Alipando bonus dormitat Homerus,—I am, Sir, &c., A. KIPLING COMMON.
Cocoa Tree, St. James's Street, S.W.
[The Preface is, in our opinion, deeply pathetic and deeply moving. The letter to Lord Chesterfield is not pathetic, but stimulating in its pride, independence, and withering scorn.
Here is the passage in the Preface to which Horne Tooke alludes :-
" In this work, when it shall bo found that much is omitted, let it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed and though no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and tho world is little solicitous to know whence proceed the faults of that which it condemns ; yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English Dictionary' was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or ender the shelter of acadernick bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. It may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed, and comprised in a few volumes, bo yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated knowledge, and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians, did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied criticks of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their work, wore obliged to change its economy, and give their second edition another form, I may surely bo con- tented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could obtain,
in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me ? I have pro- tracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds : I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."
—En. Spectator.]
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