ertainment and instruction which genius and diligence have
provided for the world, men of refined and sensible tempers are ready to
pay their tribute of praise, and even to form a posthumous friendship
with the author.

In reviewing the life of such a writer, there is, besides, a rule of
justice to which the public have an undoubted claim. Fond admiration and
partial friendship should not be suffered to represent his virtues with
exaggeration; nor should malignity be allowed, under a specious
disguise, to magnify mere defects, the usual failings of human nature,
into vice or gross deformity. The lights and shades of the character
should be given; and if this be done with a strict regard to truth, a
just estimate of Dr. Johnson will afford a lesson, perhaps, as valuable
as the moral doctrine that speaks with energy in every page of his
works.

The present writer enjoyed the conversation and friendship of that
excellent man more than thirty years. He thought it an honour to be so
connected, and to this hour he reflects on his loss with regret; but
regret, he knows, has secret bribes, by which the judgment may be
influenced, and partial affection may be carried beyond the bounds of
truth. In the present case, however, nothing needs to be disguised, and
exaggerated praise is unnecessary. It is an observation of the younger
Pliny, in his epistle to his friend Tacitus, that history ought never to
magnify matters of fact, because worthy actions require nothing but the
truth: "nam nec historia debet egredi veritatem, et honeste factis
veritas sufficit." This rule, the present biographer promises, shall
guide his pen throughout the following narrative.

It may be said, the death of Dr. Johnson kept the public mind in
agitation beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited
so much attention; and, when the press has teemed with anecdotes,
apophthegms, essays, and publications of every kind, what occasion now
for a new tract on the same thread-bare subject? The plain truth shall
be the answer. The proprietors of Johnson's works thought the life,
which they prefixed to their former edition, too unwieldy for
republication. The prodigious variety of foreign matter, introduced into
that performance, seemed to overload the memory of Dr. Johnson, and, in
the account of his own life, to leave him hardly visible. They wished to
have a more concise, and, for that reason, perhaps, a more satisfactory
account, such as may e