xhibit a just picture of the man, and keep him the
principal figure in the foreground of his own picture. To comply with
that request is the design of this essay, which the writer undertakes
with a trembling hand. He has no discoveries, no secret anecdotes, no
occasional controversy, no sudden flashes of wit and humour, no private
conversation, and no new facts, to embellish his work. Every thing has
been gleaned. Dr. Johnson said of himself, "I am not uncandid, nor
severe: I sometimes say more than I mean, in jest, and people are apt to
think me serious[a]." The exercise of that privilege, which is enjoyed
by every man in society, has not been allowed to him. His fame has given
importance even to trifles; and the zeal of his friends has brought
every thing to light. What should be related, and what should not, has
been published without distinction: "dicenda tacenda locuti!" Every
thing that fell from him has been caught with eagerness by his admirers,
who, as he says in one of his letters, have acted with the diligence of
spies upon his conduct. To some of them the following lines, in Mallet's
poem on verbal criticism, are not inapplicable:

"Such that grave bird in northern seas is found.
Whose name a Dutchman only knows to sound;
Where'er the king of fish moves on before,
This humble friend attends from shore to shore;
With eye still earnest, and with bill inclined,
He picks up what his patron drops behind,
With those choice cates his palate to regale,
And is the careful Tibbald of a whale."

After so many essays and volumes of Johnsoniana, what remains for the
present writer? Perhaps, what has not been attempted; a short, yet full,
a faithful, yet temperate, history of Dr. Johnson.

SAMUEL JOHNSON was born at Lichfield, September 7, 1709, O. S[b]. His
father, Michael Johnson, was a bookseller in that city; a man of large,
athletic make, and violent passions; wrong-headed, positive, and, at
times, afflicted with a degree of melancholy, little short of madness.
His mother was sister to Dr. Ford, a practising physician, and father of
Cornelius Ford, generally known by the name of parson Ford, the same who
is represented near the punch-bowl in Hogarth's Midnight Modern
Conversation. In the life of Fenton, Johnson says, that "his abilities,
instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and
dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and the
wise." Being chaplain to the