The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [86]
None of his letters during those years are extant, so far as I can discover. This is much to be regretted. It might afford some entertainment to see how he then expressed himself to his private friends, concerning State affairs. Dr. Adams informs me, that ‘at this time a favourite object which he had in contemplation was The Life of Alfred; in which, from the warmth with which he spoke about it, he would, I believe, had he been master of his own will, have engaged himself, rather than on any other subject.’
1747: yETAT. 38.] – In 1747 it is supposed that the Gentleman’s Magazine for May was enriched by him with five short poetical pieces, distinguished by three asterisks. The first is a translation, or rather a paraphrase, of a Latin Epitaph on Sir Thomas Hanmer. Whether the Latin was his, or not, I have never heard, though I should think it probably was, if it be certain that he wrote the English; as to which my only cause of doubt is, that his slighting character of Hanmer as an editor, in his Observations on Macbeth, is very different from that in the ‘Epitaph.’ It may be said, that there is the same contrariety between the character in the Observations, and that in his own Preface to Shakspeare; but a considerable time elapsed between the one publication and the other, whereas the Observations and the ‘Epitaph’ came close together. The others are ‘To Miss —, on her giving the Authour a gold and silk net-work Purse of her own weaving;’ ‘Stella in Mourning;’ ‘The Winter’s Walk;’ ‘An Ode;’ and, ‘To Lyce, an elderly Lady.’ I am not positive that all these were his productions;a but as ‘The Winter’s Walk’ has never been controverted to be his, and all of them have the same mark, it is reasonable to conclude that they are all written by the same hand. Yet to the Ode, in which we find a passage very characteristick of him, being a learned description of the gout,
‘Unhappy, whom to beds of pain
Arthritick tyranny consigns;’
there is the following note: ‘The authour being ill of the gout:’ but Johnson was not attacked with that distemper till at a very late period of his life. May not this, however, be a poetical fiction? Why may not a poet suppose himself to have the gout, as well as suppose himself to be in love, of which we have innumerable instances, and which has been admirably ridiculed by Johnson in his Life of Cowley? I have also some difficulty to believe that he could produce such a group of conceits as appear in the verses to Lyce, in which he claims for this ancient personage as good a right to be assimilated to heaven, as nymphs whom other poets have flattered; he therefore ironically ascribes to her the attributes of the sky, in such stanzas as this:
‘Her teeth the night with darkness dies,
She’s starr’d with pimples o’er;
Her tongue like nimble lightning plies,
And can with thunder roar.’
But as at a very advanced age he could condescend to trifle in namby-pamby rhymes, to please Mrs. Thrale and her daughter, he may have, in his earlier years, composed such a piece as this.
It is remarkable, that in this first edition of The Winter’s Walk, the concluding line is much more Johnsonian than it was afterwards printed; for in subsequent editions, after praying Stella to ‘snatch himto her arms,’ he says,
‘And shield me from the ills of life.’
Whereas in the first edition it is
‘And hide me from the sight of life.’
A horrour at life in general is more consonant with Johnson’s habitual gloomy cast of thought.
I have heard him repeat with great energy the following verses, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for April this year; but I have no authority to say they were his own. Indeed one of the best criticks of our age72 suggests to me, that