Samuel Johnson

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A WEEK: The world is a strange place for a playhouse to stand PEOPLE OF within it. Old Drayton thought that a man that lived here, and A WEEK would be a poet, for instance, should have in him certain “brave, translunary things,” and a “fine madness” should possess his brain. Certainly it were as well, that he might be up to the occasion. That is a superfluous wonder, which Dr. Johnson expresses at the assertion of Sir Thomas Browne that “his life has been a miracle of thirty years, which to relate, were not history but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.” The wonder is, rather, that all men do not assert as much. That would be a rare praise, if it were true, which was addressed to Francis Beaumont, — “Spectators sate part in your tragedies.” Think what a mean and wretched place this world is; that half the time we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it. This is half our life. Who would undertake the enterprise if it were all? And, pray, what more has day to offer? A lamp that burns more clear, a purer oil, say winter-strained, that so we may pursue our idleness with less obstruction. Bribed with a little sunlight and a few prismatic tints, we bless our Maker, and stave off his wrath with hymns.

MICHAEL DRAYTON DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY by Thomas Carlyle:

I. The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology. II. The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam. III. The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare. IV. The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism. V. The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns. VI. The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism.

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Samuel Johnson HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1709

September 18, Sunday (Old Style): Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, England. He was a first child, and Michael Johnson (bookseller, age 52) and Sarah Ford Johnson (age 40) were a pair of proud primiparas.

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

Samuel Johnson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1712

October: Samuel Johnson was two years of age when his brother Nathaniel was born. He had been put out to a wetnurse whose breast milk had turned out to be tubercular, had contracted scrofula, and would be deaf in one ear and almost blind in his left eye, with his right eye also affected. His infant face had been scarred. It would have been at about this time that his parents arranged for him to be touched by Queen Anne while she was on one of her King’s-Evil expeditions. Dr. Johnson would retain, in later life, “a confused, but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds, and a long black hood.”

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

Samuel Johnson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1725

At age 15, Samuel Johnson was living with the Reverend Cornelius Ford, an older 1st cousin, in London. According to Pat Rogers, “the worldly Ford first opened the young man’s eyes to a world of sophistication which he had never seen as a boy in Lichfield. It is probable that he acquired his first knowledge of the London literary scene from his cousin during a prolonged stay in 1725-1726.” This was an era of “anything goes” in London, however, an era in which gin drinking, drunkenness, and crime were virtually out of control.

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

Samuel Johnson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1726

At age 16, Samuel Johnson returned from London to his family home in Lichfield, and began a program of reading. He encountered Petrarch and the classics.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Samuel Johnson “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1728

At age 18, Samuel Johnson entered the Pembroke College of Oxford University. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1729

At age 19, Samuel Johnson experienced a deep depression, which would be described by Boswell as “overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria ... dejection, gloom, and despair.” Due to lack of funds, he was forced to leave Oxford without having obtained a degree.

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Samuel Johnson HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1731

December: While Samuel Johnson was 21, his father Michael Johnson the bookseller died. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1732

At age 22, Samuel Johnson was working as an usher in a school at Market-Bosworth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1733

At age 23, Samuel Johnson lived for some time in Birmingham. There he contributed a few essays to a local publisher and met a number of people, including the older woman with whom he would eventually marry, Elizabeth “Tetty” Porter, the wife of a Birmingham mercer. With the assistance of Edmund Hector, a schoolfellow and lifelong friend, he worked on his translation of LOBO’S VOYAGE TO ABYSSINIA.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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1734

At age 24, Samuel Johnson returned from Birmingham to Lichfield.

November: Samuel Johnson wrote to Edward Cave, the publisher of Gentleman’s Magazine in London, offering the services of someone he knows well, uh, er, now that you mention it, probably he himself, who would be eager to make sundry contributions to his publication. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1735

At age 25, Samuel Johnson’s translation of LOBO’S VOYAGE TO ABYSSINIA was published.

July: Samuel Johnson, age 25, got married with Elizabeth “Tetty” Porter, age 46, widow of a mercer he had met in Birmingham in 1733. He made an attempt, as it would prove unsuccessfully, to be a schoolmaster in Edial. David Garrick was one of his pupils. “From Mr. Garrick’s account he did not appear to have been profoundly reverenced by his pupils,” says Boswell. “His oddities of manner, and uncouth gesticulations, could not but be the subject of merriment to them.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1736

During this year and the following one, while Samuel Johnson was 26 and 27 years of age, while employed as a schoolmaster, he worked on his play Irene. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1737

While Samuel Johnson was at the age of 27, his brother Nathaniel died, perhaps as a suicide. He went to London with David Garrick, leaving his wife in Lichfield for the time being. He made further proposals to Edward Cave, the publisher of Gentleman’s Magazine in London.

Summer: Samuel Johnson returned from London to Lichfield and his wife Elizabeth “Tetty” Porter Johnson, to finish his play Irene. Later in the year they would both move to London. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1738

At age 28, Samuel Johnson produced an impression of Parliamentary affairs, DEBATES IN THE SENATE OF LILLIPUT. His LIFE OF SARPI also appeared. He received ten guineas from publisher Robert Dodsley for his LONDON (on reading this, Alexander Pope would be impressed).

Dr Johnson became associated with Edward Cave’s The Gentleman’s Magazine, for which William Guthrie had been reporting on debates in the Parliament. Guthrie’s reportorial technique had been that of Thucydides — he would insert into the mouths of various statesmen, personages whom he was always careful never to identify, such conceits as he supposed they might have been deploying, had they had their wits about them. Guthrie had been submitting these compositions by way of Edward Cave, for whatever oratorical coloring and embellishment. Art had been improving on life up one side and down the other. From this year forward, it would be Dr Johnson who would be inserting his wit into this process, and the honorable orators of the Parliament would be waxing more and more profound.

Guthrie would find ways to intimate, to the powers that be of London, that he was a wit who could do damage, or could be their first line of defense, that therefore they might seek ways to be especially nice to him. The Pelham administration grasped that here was a journalist who was ready and willing to sell his soul, and granted a “pension” of £200 per year (nearly two decades later, after the fall of Pelham, we will find Guthrie approaching the new Bute administration, seeking to lengthen this series of hush money transactions). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1739

At age 29, Samuel Johnson produced his COMPLETE VINDICATION OF THE LICENSERS OF THE STAGE, his MARMOR NORFOLCIENSE, and his LIFE OF BOERHAAVE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1740

At age 30, Samuel Johnson produced his LIFE OF ADMIRAL DRAKE, his LIFE OF ADMIRAL BLAKE, and his LIFE OF BARRETIER. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1744

At age 34, Samuel Johnson produced his LIFE OF SAVAGE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1745

At age 35, Samuel Johnson produced his MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS ON THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, part of a planned edition of William Shakespeare’s plays. The project was aborted because a publisher of another edition threatened to sue for copyright infringement. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1746

At age 36, Samuel Johnson was approached by a consortium of booksellers, and began work on his 1 DICTIONARY.

1. For lexicography before Johnson, check DeWitt T. Starnes and Gertrude E. Noyes, with Gabriele Stein, THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY FROM CAWDREY TO JOHNSON), 2nd. ed. (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamin, 1991). For Johnson’s dictionary, start with J. E. Congleton, JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY: BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SURVEY, 1746-1984, WITH EXCERPTS FOR ALL ENTRIES (Terre Haute: Dictionary Society of North America, 1984) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1747

At age 37, Samuel Johnson produced his PLAN FOR A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

The 2d edition of the Reverend Daniel Neal’s 1720 THE HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. REVEREND DANIEL NEAL HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1748

Lord Chesterfield resigned as Secretary of State and turned in the official seals. King George II offered a dukedom, which he declined. He continued his presence in the House of Lords.

Samuel Johnson dedicated his PLAN FOR A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE to Lord Chesterfield — whereupon the beneficent lord posted to him the magnificent pittance of £10.

It was said that Johnson was kept cooling his heels in the anteroom when he called upon Lord Chesterfield, while the actor Colley Cibber was admitted. In any case the doctor had expected more help than this, from a professed patron of literature, and when his project was completed and the earl was grandly accepting credit for it, he would write to the earl a now-famous letter in defence of men of letters.

The notice you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it, till I am solitary and cannot impart it, till I am known and do not want it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1749

During the years 1749, 1750, and 1751, a Dr. Samuel Johnson who was busily compiling a dictionary of the English language would put out 208 issues of a periodical he titled the Rambler:

“…It was partly my fault, but it’s all right now. So let’s forget it, and talk about the RAMBLER or something pleasant.”

“Hang the RAMBLER! Come down and give me your word that this harum- scarum boy of mine hasn’t done anything ungrateful or impertinent. If he has, after all your kindness to him, I’ll thrash him with my own hands.”

In this year, at 39 years of age, he created THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES, and his Irene opened. He founded the “Ivy Lane Club” (not to be confused with “The Club,” which would be founded in 1764).

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

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1750

The beginning of Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler series of essays. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1751

Samuel Johnson had reached the age of 41. He published his life of Cheynel. His “The Voyage of Life” essay, a fantastical spatialization-of-time elaboration of a metaphor from PILGRIM’S PROGRESS, life as if it were a journey through space, and an effort at moral manipulation which would for obvious reasons be reprinted continuously in American schoolbooks of the 1820s and 1830s, saw its original publication in The Rambler. The metaphor began with a quote from Seneca the Younger:

Life is a voyage, in the process of which, we are perpetually changing our scenes; we first leave childhood behind us, then youth, then the THOMAS COLE years of ripened manhood, then the more pleasing MILTON BRADLEY part of old age.

The final volume of William Guthrie’s A GENERAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND, FROM THE INVASION OF THE ROMANS UNDER JULIUS CÆSAR, TO THE REVOLUTION IN MDCLXXXVIII; INCLUDING THE HISTORIES OF THE NEIGHBOURING PEOPLE AND STATES, SO FAR AS THEY ARE CONNECTED WITH THAT OF ENGLAND (the initial volume of which had been issued in 1744). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1752

The completion of Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler series of essays. Death of his wife Tetty (although they had no children, she had a daughter from her previous marriage).

William Guthrie’s CICERO’S EPISTLES TO ATTICUS; WITH NOTES, HISTORICAL, EXPLANATORY, AND CRITICAL (Printed for T. Waller). EPISTLES TO ATTICUS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1753

James Boswell began to study arts at the University of Glasgow. He would switch to the study of the law.

Samuel Johnson contributed essays to The Adventurer series. For a brief period he considered remarrying, presumably with Claire Hill Boothby (1708-1756).

April 3, Tuesday: Kurt Vonnegut, the immortal author of FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, has designated this to have been the first, the original, “Writer’s Day.” We celebrate the anniversary of this April 3d because Samuel Johnson, who was working up his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, recorded a prayer in his diary on this day: O God who has hitherto supported me, enable me to proceed in this labor & in the whole task of my present state that when I shall render up at the last day an account of the talent committed to me I may receive pardon for the sake of Jesus Christ. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1754

Samuel Johnson’s project for an English dictionary being now almost complete, Lord Chesterfield began to take public credit. He began taking considerably more public credit than should have been due to a man who had merely posted to the struggling Dr. Johnson the magnificent pittance of £10 some years before. It was almost like our Richard “I am your President” Nixon posturing at a moon landing! Dr. Johnson’s response would be a public letter which has become famous, which commented in part:

A Concord author would, for humorous effect, have recourse to this famous Brit-putdown idiom:

“An old maid, that’s what I’m to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps, when, like poor Johnson, I’m old and can’t enjoy it, solitary, and can’t share it, independent, and don’t need it. Well, I needn’t be a sour saint nor a selfish sinner, and, I dare say, old maids are very comfortable when they get used to it, but—” And there Jo sighed, as if the prospect was not inviting. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1755

In his famous dictionary, Samuel Johnson conjugated the English word “box.” As a noun it meant a blow on the head given with the hand, while as a verb it meant to fight or strike with the fist. A boxer, meanwhile, was “a man who fights with the fist.”

William Guthrie’s CICERO’S THREE DIALOGUES UPON THE CHARACTER AND QUALIFICATIONS OF AN ORATOR; WITH NOTES, HISTORICAL AND EXPLANATORY. Also, his MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO HIS OFFICES, OR HIS TREATISE CONCERNING THE MORAL DUTIES OF MANKIND; HIS CATO MAJOR, CONCERNING THE MEANS OF MAKING OLD AGE HAPPY; HIS LÆLIUS, CONCERNING FRIENDSHIP; HIS MORAL PARADOXES; THE VISION OF SCIPIO, CONCERNING A FUTURE STATE; HIS LETTERS, CONCERNING THE DUTIES OF A MAGISTRATE. WITH NOTES, HISTORICAL AND EXPLANATORY. TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Samuel Johnson received an honorary degree, a MA, from Oxford University. His new degree would appear on the title page of his A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, published during this year.

He posted his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield.

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Dr. Johnson defined a cod as “any case or husk in which seeds are lodged” on the basis of the Middle English etymology in which a cod is a sack or pouch. cod Pronunciation: ’k‰d Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural cod also cods Etymology: Middle English Date: 14th century 1 : any of various bottom-dwelling fishes (family Gadidae, the cod family) that usually occur in cold marine waters and often have barbels and three dorsal fins: as a : one (Gadus morhua) of the No. Atlantic that is an important food fish b : one (Gadus macrocephalus) of the Pacific Ocean 2 : any of various bony fishes resembling the true cods

Words are the daughters of earth, and things are the sons of heaven. — Samuel Johnson (paraphrasing Samuel Madden), A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, 1755, as quoted on page 8 of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth (a deep map) [Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1991].

Henry Thoreau would hypothesize on the basis of such etymology (perhaps in Johnson’s dictionary if not in his shelf edition of Nathan Bailey’s AN UNIVERSAL ETYMOLOGICAL ENGLISH DICTIONARY) that the cod might have received its name on account of the female containing such a large quantity of eggs:

CAPE COD: I suppose that the word Cape is from the French cap; which is from the Latin caput, a head; which is, perhaps, from the verb capere, to take, –that being the part by which we take hold of a thing:–Take Time by the forelock. It is also the safest part to take a serpent by. And as for Cod, that was derived directly from that “great store of codfish” which Captain Bartholomew Gosnold caught there in 1602; which fish appears to have been so called from the Saxon word codde, “a case in which seeds are lodged,” either from the form of the fish, or the quantity of spawn it contains; whence also, perhaps, codling (“pomum coctile”?) and coddle, –to cook green like peas. (V. Dic.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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After the passage of the Transportation Act in 1718, some 50,000 convicts had been sentenced to involuntary transportation to the American colonies. The bulk of these convicts had been transported to Maryland and Virginia and sold there as servants. By this year, in four of Maryland’s most populous counties, one out of every ten adult white males was such a convict, occupying a position below indentured servants but above black slaves. Although colonists agonized about the presence of such persons in their midst, they were neither working to cease “transportation” nor returning such transportees to England unpurchased.

Nowadays, we seldom think of ourselves as in the same category as Australia, in the sense of having a beginning as a mere penal colony for Britain. However, that tradition is definitely what Samuel Johnson was referring to when –in his utter contempt for the American slavemasters’ “demand for liberty”– he penned the following derogation: “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American. They are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.” — Samuel Johnson HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1756

A 2d edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary.

William Guthrie’s MARCUS FABIUS QUINTILLIANUS HIS INSTITUTES OF ELOQUENCE; OR, THE ART OF SPEAKING IN PUBLIC, IN EVERY CHARACTER AND CAPACITY. TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH, AFTER THE BEST LATIN EDITION. WITH NOTES, CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY.

Oliver Goldsmith settled in London and briefly attempted various low-status jobs such as apothecary’s assistant and school usher. Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, he would make his way by producing for the publishers of London a massive amount of hack writing. A few of these works, however, would be admired by Samuel Johnson, and in 1764 he and Johnson would found “The Club.” Horace Walpole would describe him during this period as an “inspired idiot.”

A new edition of Sir Thomas Browne’s CHRISTIAN MORALS, with prefixed to it Samuel Johnson’s “The Life of Browne” (probably, Dr. Johnson provided the annotations for this new edition):

THOUGH the writer of the following essays seems to have had the fortune, common among men of letters, of raising little curiosity after his private life, and has, therefore, few memorials preserved of his felicities and misfortunes; yet, because an edition of a posthumous work appears imperfect and neglected, without some account of the author, it was thought necessary to attempt the gratify cation of that curiosity which naturally inquires by what peculiarities of nature or fortune eminent men have been distinguished, how uncommon attainments have been gained, and what influence learning had on its possessours, or virtue on its teachers. Sir Thomas Browne was born at London, in the parish of St. Michael in Cheapside, on the 19th of October, 1605. His father was a merchant, of an ancient family at Upton, in Cheshire. Of the name or family of his mother I find no account. Of his childhood or youth there is little known, except that he lost his father very early; that he was, according to the common HDT WHAT? INDEX

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fate of orphans, defrauded by one of his guardians; and that he was placed, for his education, at the school of Winchester. His mother, having taken three thousand pounds, as the third part of her husband’s property, left her son, by consequence, six thousand, a large fortune for a man destined to learning, at that time, when commerce had not yet filled the nation with nominal riches. But it happened to him, as to many others, to be made poorer by opulence; for his mother soon married sir Thomas Dutton, probably by the inducement of her fortune; and he was left to the rapacity of his guardian, deprived now of both his parents, and, therefore, helpless, and unprotected. He was removed in the beginning of the year 1623, from Winchester to Oxford, and entered a gentleman-commoner of Broadgate hall, which was soon afterwards endowed, and took the name of Pembroke college, from the earl of Pembroke, then chancellor of the university. He was admitted to the degree of bachelor of arts, January 31, 1626-7; being, as Wood remarks, the first man of eminence graduated from the new college, to which the zeal or gratitude of those that love it most, can wish little better than that it may long proceed as it began. Having afterwards taken his degree of master of arts, he turned his studies to physick, and practised it for some time in Oxfordshire; but soon afterwards, either induced by curiosity, or invited by promises, he quitted his settlement, and accompanied his father-in-law, who had some employment in Ireland, in a visitation of the forts and castles, which the state of Ireland then made necessary. He that has once prevailed on himself to break his connexions of acquaintance, and begin a wandering life, very easily continues it. Ireland had, at that time, very little to offer to the observation of a man of letters; he, therefore, passed into France and Italy; made some stay at Montpellier and Padua, which were then the celebrated schools of physick; and, returning home through Holland, procured himself to be created doctor of physick at Leyden. When he began his travels, or when he concluded them, there is no certain account; nor do there remain any observations made by him in his passage through those countries which he visited. To consider, therefore, what pleasure or instruction might have been received from the remarks of a man so curious and diligent, would be voluntarily to indulge a painful reflection, and load the imagination with a wish, which, while it is formed, is known to be vain. It is, however, to be lamented, that those who are most capable of improving mankind, very frequently neglect to communicate their knowledge; either because it is more pleasing to gather ideas than to impart them, or because, to minds naturally great, few things appear of so much importance as to deserve the notice of the publick. About the year 1634, he is supposed to have returned to London; and the next year to have written his celebrated treatise, called Religio Medici, “the religion of a physician,” which he declares himself never to have intended for the press, having composed it only for his own exercise and entertainment. It, indeed, contains many passages, which, relating merely to his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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own person, can be of no great importance to the publick; but when it was written, it happened to him as to others, he was too much pleased with his performance, not to think that it might please others as much; he, therefore, communicated it to his friends, and receiving, I suppose, that exuberant applause with which every man repays the grant of perusing a manuscript, he was not very diligent to obstruct his own praise by recalling his papers, but suffered them to wander from hand to hand, till, at last, without his own consent, they were, in 1642, given to a printer. This has, perhaps, sometimes befallen others; and this, I am willing to believe, did really happen to Dr. Browne: but there is, surely, some reason to doubt the truth of the complaint so frequently made of surreptitious editions. A song, or an epigram, may be easily printed without the author’s knowledge; because it may be learned when it is repeated, or may be written out with very little trouble; but a long treatise, however elegant, is not often copied by mere zeal or curiosity, but may be worn out in passing from hand to hand, before it is multiplied by a transcript. It is easy to convey an imperfect book, by a distant hand, to the press, and plead the circulation of a false copy, as an excuse for publishing the true, or to correct what is found faulty or offensive, and change the errours on the transcriber’s depravations. This is a stratagem, by which an author, panting for fame, and yet afraid of seeming to challenge it, may at once gratify his vanity, and preserve the appearance of modesty; may enter the lists, and secure a retreat; and this candour might suffer to pass undetected, as an innocent fraud, but that, indeed, no fraud is innocent; for the confidence which makes the happiness of society is, in some degree, diminished by every man whose practice is at variance with his words. The Religio Medici was no sooner published than it excited the attention of the publick, by the novelty of paradoxes, the dignity of sentiment, the quick succession of images, the multitude of abstruse allusions, the subtilty of disquisition, and the strength of language. What is much read will be much criticised. The earl of Dorset recommended this book to the perusal of sir Kenelm Digby, who returned his judgment upon it, not in a letter, but a book; in which, though mingled with some positions fabulous and uncertain, there are acute remarks, just censures, and profound speculations; yet its principal claim to admiration is, that it was written in twenty-four hours, of which part was spent in procuring Browne’s book, and part in reading it. Of these animadversions, when they were yet not all printed, either officiousness or malice informed Dr. Browne; who wrote to sir Kenelm, with much softness and ceremony, declaring the unworthiness of his work to engage such notice, the intended privacy of the composition, and the corruptions of the impression; and received an answer equally genteel and respectful, containing high commendations of the piece, pompous professions of reverence, meek acknowledgments of inability, and anxious apologies for the hastiness of his remarks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life. Who would not have thought, that these two luminaries of their age had ceased to endeavour to grow bright by the obscuration of each other? yet the animadversions thus weak, thus precipitate, upon a book thus injured in the transcription, quickly passed the press; and Religio Medici was more accurately published, with an admonition prefixed, “to those who have or shall peruse the observations upon a former corrupt copy;” in which there is a severe censure, not upon Digby, who was to be used with ceremony, but upon the observator who had usurped his name; nor was this invective written by Dr. Browne, who was supposed to be satisfied with his opponent’s apology; but by some officious friend, zealous for his honour, without his consent. Browne has, indeed, in his own preface, endeavoured to secure himself from rigorous examination, by alleging, that “many things are delivered rhetorically, many expressions merely tropical, and, therefore, many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.” The first glance upon his book will, indeed, discover examples of this liberty of thought and expression: “I could be content,” says he, “to be nothing almost to eternity, if I might enjoy my Saviour at the last.” He has little acquaintance with the acuteness of Browne, who suspects him of a serious opinion, that any thing can be “almost eternal,” or that any time beginning and ending is not infinitely less than infinite duration. In this book he speaks much, and, in the opinion of Digby, too much of himself; but with such generality and conciseness, as affords very little light to his biographer: he declares, that, besides the dialects of different provinces, he understood six languages; that he was no stranger to astronomy; and that he had seen several countries; but what most awakens curiosity is, his solemn assertion, that “his life has been a miracle of thirty years; which to relate were not history, but a piece of poetry, and would sound like a fable.” There is, undoubtedly, a sense in which all life is miraculous; as it is an union of powers of which we can image no connexion, a succession of motions, of which the first cause must be supernatural; but life, thus explained, whatever it may have of miracle, will have nothing of fable; and, therefore, the author undoubtedly had regard to something, by which he imagined himself distinguished from the rest of mankind. Of these wonders, however, the view that can be now taken of his life offers no appearance. The course of his education was like that of others, such as put him little in the way of extraordinary casualties. A scholastick and academical life is very uniform; and has, indeed, more safety than pleasure. A traveller has greater opportunities of adventure; but Browne traversed no unknown seas, or Arabian deserts; and, surely, a man may visit France and Italy, reside at Montpellier and Padua, and, at last, take his degree at Leyden, without any thing miraculous. What it was that would, if it was related, sound so poetical and fabulous, we are left to guess; I believe without HDT WHAT? INDEX

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hope of guessing rightly. The wonders, probably, were transacted in his own mind; self-love, cooperating with an imagination vigorous and fertile as that of Browne, will find or make objects of astonishment in every man’s life; and, perhaps, there is no human being, however hid in the crowd from the observation of his fellow-mortals, who, if he has leisure and disposition to recollect his own thoughts and actions, will not conclude his life in some sort a miracle, and imagine himself distinguished from all the rest of his species by many discriminations of nature or of fortune. The success of this performance was such as might naturally encourage the author to new undertakings. A gentleman of Cambridge, whose name was Merryweather, turned it not inelegantly into Latin; and from his version it was again translated into Italian, German, Dutch, and French; and, at Strasburg, the Latin translation was published with large notes, by Levinus Nicolaus Moltkenius. Of the English annotations, which in all the editions, from 1644, accompany the book, the author is unknown. Of Merryweather, to whose zeal Browne was so much indebted for the sudden extension of his renown, I know nothing, but that he published a small treatise for the instruction of young persons in the attainment of a Latin style. He printed his translation in Holland with some difficulty. The first printer to whom he offered it, carried it to Salmasius, “who laid it by,” says he, “in state for three months,” and then discouraged its publication: it was afterwards rejected by two other printers, and, at last, was received by Hackius. The peculiarities of this book raised the author, as is usual, many admirers and many enemies; but we know not of more than one professed answer, written under the title of Medicus Medicatus, by Alexander Ross, which was universally neglected by the world. At the time when this book was published, Dr. Browne resided at Norwich, where he had settled in 1636, by the persuasion of Dr. Lushington, his tutor, who was then rector of Barnham Westgate, in the neighbourhood. It is recorded by Wood, that his practice was very extensive, and that many patients resorted to him. In 1637 he was incorporated doctor of physick in Oxford. He married, in 1641, Mrs. Mileham, of a good family in Norfolk; “a lady,” says Whitefoot, “of such symmetrical proportion to her worthy husband, both in the graces of her body and mind, that they seemed to come together by a kind of natural magnetism.” This marriage could not but draw the raillery of contemporary wits upon a man who had just been wishing, in his new book, “that we might procreate, like trees, without conjunction,” and had lately declared, that “the whole world was made for man, but only the twelfth part of man for woman;” and, that “man is the whole world, but woman only the rib or crooked part of man.” Whether the lady had been yet informed of these contemptuous positions, or whether she was pleased with the conquest of so formidable a rebel, and considered it as a double triumph, to attract so much merit, and overcome so powerful prejudices; or whether, like most others, she married upon mingled motives, between convenience and inclination; she had, however, no reason HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to repent, for she lived happily with him one-and-forty years, and bore him ten children, of whom one son and three daughters outlived their parents: she survived him two years, and passed her widowhood in plenty, if not in opulence. Browne having now entered the world as an author, and experienced the delights of praise and molestations of censure, probably found his dread of the publick eye diminished; and, therefore, was not long before he trusted his name to the criticks a second time; for, in 1646, he printed Inquiries into vulgar and common Errours; a work, which, as it arose not from fancy and invention, but from observation and books, and contained not a single discourse of one continued tenour, of which the latter part arose from the former, but an enumeration of many unconnected particulars, must have been the collection of years, and the effect of a design early formed and long pursued, to which his remarks had been continually referred, and which arose gradually to its present bulk by the daily aggregation of new particles of knowledge. It is, indeed, to be wished, that he had longer delayed the publication, and added what the remaining part of his life might have furnished: the thirty-six years which he spent afterwards in study and experience, would, doubtless, have made large additions to an inquiry into vulgar errours. He published, in 1673, the sixth edition, with some improvements; but I think rather with explication of what he had already written, than any new heads of disquisition. But with the work, such as the author, whether hindered from continuing it by eagerness of praise, or weariness of labour, thought fit to give, we must be content; and remember, that in all sublunary things there is something to be wished which we must wish in vain. This book, like his former, was received with great applause, was answered by Alexander Ross, and translated into Dutch and German, and, not many years ago, into French. It might now be proper, had not the favour with which it was at first received filled the kingdom with copies, to reprint it with notes, partly supplemental, and partly emendatory, to subjoin those discoveries which the industry of the last age has made, and correct those mistakes which the author has committed, not by idleness or negligence, but for want of Boyle’s and Newton’s philosophy. He appears, indeed, to have been willing to pay labour for truth. Having heard a flying rumour of sympathetick needles, by which, suspended over a circular alphabet, distant friends or lovers might correspond, he procured two such alphabets to be made, touched his needles with the same magnet, and placed them upon proper spindles: the result was, that when he moved one of his needles, the other, instead of taking, by sympathy, the same direction, “stood like the pillars of Hercules.” That it continued motionless, will be easily believed; and most men would have been content to believe it, without the labour of so hopeless an experiment. Browne might himself have obtained the same conviction by a method less operose, if he had thrust his needles through corks, and set them afloat in two basins of water. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Notwithstanding his zeal to detect old errours, he seems not very easy to admit new positions, for he never mentions the motion of the earth but with contempt and ridicule, though the opinion which admits it was then growing popular, and was surely plausible, even before it was confirmed by later observations. The reputation of Browne encouraged some low writer to publish, under his name, a book called Nature’s Cabinet unlocked, -- translated, according to Wood, from the physicks of Magirus; of which Browne took care to clear himself, by modestly advertising, that “if any man had been benefited by it, he was not so ambitious as to challenge the honour thereof, as having no hand in that work.” In 1658, the discovery of some ancient urns in Norfolk gave him occasion to write Hydriotaphia, Urn-Burial, or a Discourse of sepulchral Urns; in which he treats, with his usual learning, on the funeral rites of the ancient nations; exhibits their various treatment of the dead; and examines the substances found in his Norfolcian urns. There is, perhaps, none of his works which better exemplifies his reading or memory. It is scarcely to be imagined, how many particulars he has amassed together, in a treatise which seems to have been occasionally written; and for which, therefore, no materials could have been previously collected. It is, indeed, like other treatises of antiquity, rather for curiosity than use; for it is of small importance to know which nation buried their dead in the ground, which threw them into the sea, or which gave them to birds and beasts; when the practice of cremation began, or when it was disused; whether the bones of different persons were mingled in the same urn; what oblations were thrown into the pyre; or how the ashes of the body were distinguished from those of other substances. Of the uselessness of these inquiries, Browne seems not to have been ignorant; and, therefore, concludes them with an observation which can never be too frequently recollected: ”All, or most apprehensions, rested in opinions of some future being, which, ignorantly or coldly believed, begat those perverted conceptions, ceremonies, sayings, which christians pity or laugh at. Happy are they, which live not in that disadvantage of time, when men could say little for futurity, but from reason; whereby the noblest mind fell often upon doubtful deaths, and melancholy dissolutions: with these hopes Socrates warmed his doubtful spirits against the cold potion; and Cato, before he durst give the fatal stroke, spent part of the night in reading the immortality of Plato, thereby confirming his wavering hand unto the animosity of that attempt. “It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seems progressional, and otherwise made in vain: without this accomplishment, the natural expectation and desire of such a state were but a fallacy in nature: unsatisfied considerators would quarrel at the justness HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of the constitution, and rest content that Adam had fallen lower, whereby, by knowing no other original, and deeper ignorance of themselves, they might have enjoyed the happiness of inferiour creatures, who in tranquillity possess their constitutions, as having not the apprehension to deplore their own natures; and being framed below the circumference of these hopes of cognition of better things, the wisdom of God hath necessitated their contentment. But the superiour ingredient and obscured part of ourselves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be able, at last, to tell us we are more than our present selves; and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments.” To his treatise on urn-burial, was added the Garden of Cyrus, or the quincunxial Lozenge, or network Plantation of the Ancients, artificially, naturally, mystically, considered. This discourse he begins with the Sacred Garden, in which the first man was placed; and deduces the practice of horticulture, from the earliest accounts of antiquity to the time of the Persian Cyrus, the first man whom we actually know to have planted a quincunx; which, however, our author is inclined to believe of longer date, and not only discovers it in the description of the hanging gardens of Babylon, but seems willing to believe, and to persuade his reader, that it was practised by the feeders on vegetables before the flood. Some of the most pleasing performances have been produced by learning and genius, exercised upon subjects of little importance. It seems to have been, in all ages, the pride of wit, to show how it could exalt the low, and amplify the little. To speak not inadequately of things really and naturally great, is a task not only difficult but disagreeable; because the writer is degraded in his own eyes, by standing in comparison with his subject, to which he can hope to add nothing from his imagination: but it is a perpetual triumph of fancy to expand a scanty theme, to raise glittering ideas from obscure properties, and to produce to the world an object of wonder, to which nature had contributed little. To this ambition, perhaps, we owe the frogs of Homer, the gnat and the bees of Virgil, the butterfly of Spenser, the shadow of Wowerus, and the quincunx of Browne. In the prosecution of this sport of fancy, he considers every production of art and nature, in which he could find any decussation or approaches to the form of a quincunx; and, as a man once resolved upon ideal discoveries seldom searches long in vain, he finds his favourite figure in almost every thing, whether natural or invented, ancient or modern, rude or artificial, sacred or civil; so that a reader, not watchful against the power of his infusions, would imagine that decussation was the great business of the world, and that nature and art had no other purpose than to exemplify and imitate a quincunx. To show the excellence of this figure, he enumerates all its properties; and finds it in almost every thing of use or pleasure HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and to show how readily he supplies what he cannot find, one instance may be sufficient: “though therein,” says he, “we meet not with right angles, yet every rhombus containing four angles equal unto two right, it virtually contains two right in every one.” The fanciful sports of great minds are never without some advantage to knowledge. Browne has interspersed many curious observations on the form of plants, and the laws of vegetation; and appears to have been a very accurate observer of the modes of germination, and to have watched, with great nicety, the evolution of the parts of plants from their seminal principles. He is then naturally led to treat of the number five; and finds, that by this number many things are circumscribed; that there are five kinds of vegetable productions, five sections of a cone, five orders of architecture, and five acts of a play. And observing that five was the ancient conjugal, or wedding number, he proceeds to a speculation, which I shall give in his own words: “the ancient numerists made out the conjugal number by two and three, the first parity and imparity, the active and passive digits, the material and formal principles in generative societies.” These are all the tracts which he published. But many papers were found in his closet: “some of them,” says Whitefoot, “designed for the press, were often transcribed and corrected by his own hand, after the fashion of great and curious writers.” Of these, two collections have been published; one by Dr. Tenison, the other, in 1722, by a nameless editor. Whether the one or the other selected those pieces, which the author would have preferred, cannot be known; but they have both the merit of giving to mankind what was too valuable to be suppressed; and what might, without their interposition, have, perhaps, perished among other innumerable labours of learned men, or have been burnt in a scarcity of fuel, like the papers of Pierescius. The first of these posthumous treatises contains Observations upon several Plants mentioned in Scripture: these remarks, though they do not immediately either rectify the faith, or refine the morals of the reader, yet are by no means to be censured as superfluous niceties, or useless speculations; for they often show some propriety of description, or elegance of allusion, utterly undiscoverable to readers not skilled in oriental botany; and are often of more important use, as they remove some difficulty from narratives, or some obscurity from precepts. The next is, of Garlands, or coronary and garland Plants; a subject merely of learned curiosity, without any other end than the pleasure of reflecting on ancient customs, or on the industry with which studious men have endeavoured to recover them. The next is a letter, on the Fishes eaten by our Saviour with his Disciples, after his Resurrection from the Dead: which contains no determinate resolution of the question, what they were, for, indeed, it cannot be determined. All the information that diligence or learning could supply, consists in an enumeration of the fishes produced in the waters of Judea. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Then follow, Answers to certain Queries about Fishes, Birds, Insects; and a Letter of Hawks and Falconry, ancient and modern; in the first of which he gives the proper interpretation of some ancient names of animals, commonly mistaken; and in the other, has some curious observations on the art of hawking, which he considers as a practice unknown to the ancients. I believe all our sports of the field are of Gothick original; the ancients neither hunted by the scent, nor seemed much to have practised horsemanship, as an exercise; and though in their works there is mention of aucupium and piscatio, they seemed no more to have been considered as diversions, than agriculture, or any other manual labour. In two more letters, he speaks of the cymbals of the Hebrews, but without any satisfactory determination; and of rhopalick, or gradual verses, that is, of verses beginning with a word of one syllable, and proceeding by words of which each has a syllable more than the former; as, ”O deus, æterne stationis conciliator.” AUSONIUS. And after this manner pursuing the hint, he mentions many other restrained methods of versifying, to which industrious ignorance has sometimes voluntarily subjected itself. His next attempt is, on Languages, and particularly the Saxon Tongue. He discourses with great learning, and generally with great justness, of the derivation and changes of languages; but, like other men of multifarious learning, he receives some notions without examination. Thus he observes, according to the popular opinion, that the Spaniards have retained so much Latin as to be able to compose sentences that shall be, at once, grammatically Latin and Castilian: this will appear very unlikely to a man that considers the Spanish terminations; and Howell, who was eminently skilful in the three provincial languages, declares, that, after many essays, he never could effect it. The principal design of this letter, is to show the affinity between the modern English, and the ancient Saxon; and he observes, very rightly, that “though we have borrowed many substantives, adjectives, and some verbs, from the French; yet the great body of numerals, auxiliary verbs, articles, pronouns, adverbs, conjunctions, and prepositions, which are the distinguishing and lasting parts of a language, remain with us from the Saxon.” To prove this position more evidently, he has drawn up a short discourse of six paragraphs, in Saxon and English; of which every word is the same in both languages, excepting the terminations and orthography. The words are, indeed, Saxon, but the phraseology is English; and, I think, would not have been understood by Bede or Elfric, notwithstanding the confidence of our author. He has, however, sufficiently proved his position, that the English resembles its paternal language more than any modern European dialect. There remain five tracts of this collection yet unmentioned; one, of artificial Hills, Mounts, or Barrows, in England; in reply to an interrogatory letter of E.D. whom the writers of the HDT WHAT? INDEX

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BIOGRAPHIA BRITANNICA suppose to be, if rightly printed, W.D. or Sir William Dugdale, one of Browne’s correspondents. These are declared by Browne, in concurrence, I think, with all other antiquaries, to be, for the most part, funeral monuments. He proves, that both the Danes and Saxons buried their men of eminence under piles of earth, “which admitting,” says he “neither ornament, epitaph, nor inscription, may, if earthquakes spare them, outlast other monuments: obelisks have their term, and pyramids will tumble; but these mountainous monuments may stand, and are like to have the same period with the earth.” In the next, he answers two geographical questions; one concerning Troas, mentioned in the acts and epistles of St. Paul, which he determines to be the city built near the ancient Ilium; and the other concerning the Dead sea, of which he gives the same account with other writers. Another letter treats of the Answers of the Oracle of Apollo, at Delphos, to Croesus, king of Lydia. In this tract nothing deserves notice, more than that Browne considers the oracles as evidently and indubitably supernatural, and founds all his disquisition upon that postulate. He wonders why the physiologists of old, having such means of instruction, did not inquire into the secrets of nature: but judiciously concludes, that such questions would probably have been vain; “for in matters cognoscible, and formed for our disquisition, our industry must be our oracle, and reason our Apollo.” The pieces that remain are, a Prophecy concerning the future State of several Nations; in which Browne plainly discovers his expectation to be the same with that entertained lately, with more confidence, by Dr. Berkeley, “that America will be the seat of the fifth empire;” and, Museum clausum, sive Bibliotheca abscondita: in which the author amuses himself with imagining the existence of books and curiosities, either never in being or irrecoverably lost. These pieces I have recounted, as they are ranged in Tenison’s collection, because the editor has given no account of the time at which any of them were written. Some of them are of little value, more than as they gratify the mind with the picture of a great scholar, turning his learning into amusement; or show upon how great a variety of inquiries, the same mind has been successfully employed. The other collection of his posthumous pieces, published in octavo, London, 1722, contains Repertorium; or some account of the Tombs and Monuments in the Cathedral of Norwich; where, as Tenison observes, there is not matter proportionate to the skill of the antiquary. The other pieces are, Answers to sir William Dugdale’s Inquiries about the Fens; a letter concerning Ireland; another relating to urns newly discovered; some short strictures on different subjects; and a Letter to a Friend on the Death of his intimate Friend, published singly by the author’s son, in 1690. There is inserted in the BIOGRAPHIA BRITANNICA, a Letter containing Instructions for the Study of Physick: which, with the essays here offered to the publick, completes the works of Dr. Browne. To the life of this learned man, there remains little to be HDT WHAT? INDEX

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added, but that, in 1665, he was chosen honorary fellow of the college of physicians, as a man, “virtute et literis ornatissimus,” eminently embellished with literature and virtue and in 1671, received, at Norwich, the honour of knighthood from Charles the second, a prince, who, with many frailties and vices, had yet skill to discover excellence, and virtue to reward it with such honorary distinctions, at least, as cost him nothing, yet, conferred by a king so judicious and so much beloved, had the power of giving merit new lustre and greater popularity. Thus he lived in high reputation, till, in his seventy-sixth year, he was seized with a colick, which, after having tortured him about a week, put an end to his life at Norwich, on his birthday, October, 19, 1682. Some of his last words were expressions of submission to the will of God, and fearlessness of death. He lies buried in the church of St. Peter Mancroft, in Norwich, with this inscription on a mural monument, placed on the south pillar of the altar: M. S. Hic situs est THOMAS BROWNE, M. D. Et miles. Anno 1605, Londini natus; Generosa familia apud Upton In agro Cestriensi oriundus. Schola primum Wintoniensi, postea In Coll. Pembr. Apud Oxonienses bonis literis Haud leviter imbutus; In urbe hac Nordovicensi medicinam Arte egregia, et felici successu professus; Scriptis quibus tituli, RELIGIO MEDICI Et PSEUDODOXIA EPIDEMICA, aliisque Per orbem notissimus. Vir prudentissimus, integerrimus, doctissimus; Obijt Octob. 19, 1682. Pie posuit moestissima conjux Da. Doroth. Br. Near the foot of this pillar Lies Sir Thomas Browne, knt. and doctor in physick, Author of Religio Medici, and other learned books, Who practised physick in this city 46 years, And died Oct. 1682, in the 77th year of his age. In memory of whom, Dame Dorothy Browne, who had been his affectionate Wife 47 years, caused this monument to be Erected. Besides this lady, who died in 1685, he left a son and three daughters. Of the daughters nothing very remarkable is known; HDT WHAT? INDEX

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but his son, Edward Browne, requires a particular mention. He was born about the year 1642; and, after having passed through the classes of the school at Norwich, became bachelor of physick at Cambridge; and afterwards removing to Merton college in Oxford, was admitted there to the same degree, and afterwards made a doctor. In 1668 he visited part of Germany; and in the year following made a wider excursion into Austria, Hungary, and Thessaly; where the Turkish sultan then kept his court at Larissa. He afterwards passed through Italy. His skill in natural history made him particularly attentive to mines and metallurgy. Upon his return, he published an account of the countries through which he had passed; which I have heard commended by a learned traveller, who has visited many places after him, as written with scrupulous and exact veracity, such as is scarcely to be found in any other book of the same kind. But whatever it may contribute to the instruction of a naturalist, I cannot recommend it, as likely to give much pleasure to common readers; for, whether it be that the world is very uniform, and, therefore, he who is resolved to adhere to truth will have few novelties to relate; or, that Dr. Browne was, by the train of his studies, led to inquire most after those things by which the greatest part of mankind is little affected; a great part of his book seems to contain very unimportant accounts of his passage from one place where he saw little, to another where he saw no more. Upon his return, he practised physick in London; was made physician first to Charles the second, and afterwards, in 1682, to St. Bartholomew’s hospital. About the same time, he joined his name to those of many other eminent men, in a translation of Plutarch’s lives. He was first censor, then elect, and treasurer of the college of physicians; of which, in 1705, he was chosen president, and held his office till, in 1708, he died, in a degree of estimation suitable to a man so variously accomplished, that king Charles had honoured him with this panegyrick, that “he was as learned as any of the college, and as well bred as any of the court.” Of every great and eminent character, part breaks forth into publick view, and part lies hid in domestick privacy. Those qualities, which have been exerted in any known and lasting performances, may, at any distance of time, be traced and estimated; but silent excellencies are soon forgotten; and those minute peculiarities which discriminate every man from all others, if they are not recorded by those whom personal knowledge enables to observe them, are irrecoverably lost. This mutilation of character must have happened, among many others, to sir Thomas Browne, had it not been delineated by his friend Mr. Whitefoot, “who esteemed it an especial favour of providence, to have had a particular acquaintance with him for two-thirds of his life.” Part of his observations I shall therefore copy. “For a character of his person, his complexion and hair was answerable to his name; his stature was moderate, and a habit of body neither fat nor lean, but eusarkos. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“In his habit of clothing, he had an aversion to all finery, and affected plainness, both in the fashion and ornaments. He ever wore a cloak, or boots, when few others did. He kept himself always very warm, and thought it most safe so to do, though he never loaded himself with such a multitude of garments, as Suetonius reports of Augustus, enough to clothe a good family. “The horizon of his understanding was much larger than the hemisphere of the world: all that was visible in the heavens he comprehended so well, that few that are under them knew so much: he could tell the number of the visible stars in his horizon, and call them all by their names that had any; and of the earth he had such a minute and exact geographical knowledge, as if he had been by divine providence ordained surveyor-general of the whole terrestrial orb, and its products, minerals, plants, and animals. He was so curious a botanist, that, besides the specifical distinctions, he made nice and elaborate observations, equally useful as entertaining. “His memory, though not so eminent as that of Seneca or Scaliger, was capacious and tenacious, insomuch as he remembered all that was remarkable in any book that he had read; and not only knew all persons again that he had ever seen, at any distance of time, but remembered the circumstances of their bodies, and their particular discourses and speeches. “In the Latin poets he remembered every thing that was acute and pungent; he had read most of the historians, ancient and modern, wherein his observations were singular, not taken notice of by common readers; he was excellent company when he was at leisure, and expressed more light than heat in the temper of his brain. “He had no despotical power over his affections and passions, (that was a privilege of original perfection, forfeited by the neglect of the use of it,) but as large a political power over them, as any stoick, or man of his time; whereof he gave so great experiment, that he hath very rarely been known to have been overcome with any of them. The strongest that were found in him, both of the irascible and concupiscible, were under the control of his reason. Of admiration, which is one of them, being the only product either of ignorance or uncommon knowledge, he had more and less than other men, upon the same account of his knowing more than others; so that though he met with many rarities, he admired them not so much as others do. “He was never seen to be transported with mirth, or dejected with sadness; always cheerful, but rarely merry, at any sensible rate; seldom heard to break a jest; and when he did, he would be apt to blush at the levity of it: his gravity was natural, without affectation. “His modesty was visible in a natural habitual blush, which was increased upon the least occasion, and oft discovered without any observable cause. “They that knew no more of him than by the briskness of his writings, found themselves deceived in their expectation, when they came in his company, noting the gravity and sobriety of his aspect and conversation; so free from loquacity or much talkativeness, that he was sometimes difficult to be engaged in any discourse; though when he was so, it was always singular, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and never trite or vulgar. Parsimonious in nothing but his time, whereof he made as much improvement, with as little loss as any man in it: when he had any to spare from his drudging practice, he was scarce patient of any diversion from his study; so impatient of sloth and idleness, that he would say, he could not do nothing. “Sir Thomas understood most of the European languages; viz. all that are in Hutter’s Bible, which he made use of. The Latin and Greek he understood critically; the oriental languages, which never were vernacular in this part of the world, he thought the use of them would not answer the time and pains of learning them; yet had so great a veneration for the matrix of them, viz. the Hebrew, consecrated to the oracles of God, that he was not content to be totally ignorant of it; though very little of his science is to be found in any books of that primitive language. And though much is said to be written in the derivative idioms of that tongue, especially the Arabick, yet he was satisfied with the translations, wherein he found nothing admirable. “In his religion he continued in the same mind which he had declared in his first book, written when he was but thirty years old, his Religio Medici, wherein he fully assented to that of the church of England, preferring it before any in the world, as did the learned Grotius. He attended the publick service very constantly, when he was not withheld by his practice; never missed the sacrament in his parish, if he were in town; read the best English sermons he could hear of, with liberal applause; and delighted not in controversies. In his last sickness, wherein he continued about a week’s time, enduring great pain of the colick, besides a continual fever, with as much patience as hath been seen in any man, without any pretense of stoical apathy, animosity, or vanity of not being concerned thereat, or suffering no impeachment of happiness: ‘Nihil agis, dolor.’ “His patience was founded upon the christian philosophy, and a sound faith of God’s providence, and a meek and holy submission thereunto, which he expressed in few words. I visited him near his end, when he had not strength to hear or speak much; the last words which I heard from him were, besides some expressions of dearness, that he did freely submit to the will of God, being without fear; he had often triumphed over the king of terrours in others, and given many repulses in the defence of patients; but, when his own turn came, he submitted with a meek, rational, and religious courage. “He might have made good the old saying of ‘dat Galenus opes,’ had he lived in a place that could have afforded it. But his indulgence and liberality to his children, especially in their travels, two of his sons in divers countries, and two of his daughters in France, spent him more than a little. He was liberal in his house entertainments and in his charity: he left a comfortable, but no great estate, both to his lady and children, gained by his own industry. “Such was his sagacity and knowledge of all history, ancient and modern, and his observations thereupon so singular, that, it hath been said, by them that knew him best, that, if his profession, and place of abode, would have suited his ability, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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he would have made an extraordinary man for the privy council, not much inferiour to the famous Padre Paulo, the late oracle of the Venetian state. “Though he were no prophet, nor son of a prophet, yet in that faculty which comes nearest it, he excelled, i.e. the stochastick, wherein he was seldom mistaken, as to future events, as well publick as private; but not apt to discover any presages or superstition.” It is observable, that he, who, in his earlier years, had read all the books against religion, was, in the latter part of his life, averse from controversies. To play with important truths, to disturb the repose of established tenets, to subtilize objections, and elude proof, is too often the sport of youthful vanity, of which maturer experience commonly repents. There is a time when every man is weary of raising difficulties only to task himself with the solution, and desires to enjoy truth without the labour or hazard of contest. There is, perhaps, no better method of encountering these troublesome irruptions of skepticism, with which inquisitive minds are frequently harassed, than that which Browne declares himself to have taken: “If there arise any doubts in my way, I do forget them; or, at least, defer them, till my better settled judgment, and more manly reason, be able to resolve them: for I perceive every man’s reason is his best dipus, and will, upon a reasonable truce, find a way to loose those bonds, wherewith the subtilties of errour have enchained our more flexible and tender judgments.” The foregoing character may be confirmed and enlarged by many passages in the Religio Medici; in which it appears, from Whitefoot’s testimony, that the author, though no very sparing panegyrist of himself, had not exceeded the truth, with respect to his attainments or visible qualities. There are, indeed, some interiour and secret virtues, which a man may, sometimes, have without the knowledge of others; and may, sometimes, assume to himself, without sufficient reasons for his opinion. It is charged upon Browne, by Dr. Watts, as an instance of arrogant temerity, that, after a long detail of his attainments, he declares himself to have escaped “the first and father-sin of pride.” A perusal of the Religio Medici will not much contribute to produce a belief of the author’s exemption from this father-sin; pride is a vice, which pride itself inclines every man to find in others, and to overlook in himself. As easily may we be mistaken in estimating our own courage, as our own humility; and, therefore, when Browne shows himself persuaded, that “he could lose an arm without a tear, or, with a few groans, be quartered to pieces,” I am not sure that he felt in himself any uncommon powers of endurance; or, indeed, any thing more than a sudden effervescence of imagination, which, uncertain and involuntary as it is, he mistook for settled resolution. “That there were not many extant, that, in a noble way, feared the face of death less than himself,” he might, likewise, believe at a very easy expense, while death was yet at a distance; but the time will come, to every human being, when it HDT WHAT? INDEX

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must be known how well he can bear to die; and it has appeared that our author’s fortitude did not desert him in the great hour of trial. It was observed, by some of the remarkers on the Religio Medici, that “the author was yet alive, and might grow worse as well as better:” it is, therefore, happy, that this suspicion can be obviated by a testimony given to the continuance of his virtue, at a time when death had set him free from danger of change, and his panegyrist from temptation to flattery. But it is not on the praises of others, but on his own writings, that he is to depend for the esteem of posterity; of which he will not easily be deprived, while learning shall have any reverence among men; for there is no science in which he does not discover some skill; and scarce any kind of knowledge, profane or sacred, abstruse or elegant, which he does not appear to have cultivated with success. His exuberance of knowledge, and plenitude of ideas, sometimes obstruct the tendency of his reasoning and the clearness of his decisions: on whatever subject he employed his mind, there started up immediately so many images before him, that he lost one by grasping another. His memory supplied him with so many illustrations, parallel or dependent notions, that he was always starting into collateral considerations; but the spirit and vigour of his pursuit always gives delight; and the reader follows him, without reluctance, through his mazes, in themselves flowery and pleasing, and ending at the point originally in view. “To have great excellencies and great faults, ‘magnæ virtutes nec minora vitia,’ is the poesy,” says our author, “of the best natures.” This poesy may be properly applied to the style of Browne; it is vigorous, but rugged; it is learned, but pedantick; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure; his tropes are harsh, and his combinations uncouth. He fell into an age in which our language began to lose the stability which it had obtained in the time of Elizabeth; and was considered by every writer as a subject on which he might try his plastick skill, by moulding it according to his own fancy. Milton, in consequence of this encroaching license, began to introduce the Latin idiom: and Browne, though he gave less disturbance to our structures in phraseology, yet poured in a multitude of exotick words; many, indeed, useful and significant, which, if rejected, must be supplied by circumlocution, such as commensality, for the state of many living at the same table; but many superfluous, as a paralogical, for an unreasonable doubt; and some so obscure, that they conceal his meaning rather than explain it, as arthritical analogies, for parts that serve some animals in the place of joints. His style is, indeed, a tissue of many languages; a mixture of heterogeneous words, brought together from distant regions, with terms originally appropriated to one art, and drawn by violence into the service of another. He must, however, be confessed to have augmented our philosophical diction; and, in defence of his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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uncommon words and expressions, we must consider, that he had uncommon sentiments, and was not content to express, in many words, that idea for which any language could supply a single term. But his innovations are sometimes pleasing, and his temerities happy: he has many “verba ardentia” forcible expressions, which he would never have found, but by venturing to the utmost verge of propriety; and flights which would never have been reached, but by one who had very little fear of the shame of falling. There remains yet an objection against the writings of Browne, more formidable than the animadversions of criticism. There are passages from which some have taken occasion to rank him among deists, and others among atheists. It would be difficult to guess how any such conclusion should be formed, had not experience shown that there are two sorts of men willing to enlarge the catalogue of infidels. It has been long observed, that an atheist has no just reason for endeavouring conversions; and yet none harass those minds which they can influence, with more importunity of solicitation to adopt their opinions. In proportion as they doubt the truth of their own doctrines, they are desirous to gain the attestation of another understanding: and industriously labour to win a proselyte, and eagerly catch at the slightest pretence to dignify their sect with a celebrated name. The others become friends to infidelity only by unskilful hostility; men of rigid orthodoxy, cautious conversation, and religious asperity. Among these, it is, too frequently, the practice to make in their heat concessions to atheism or deism, which their most confident advocates had never dared to claim, or to hope. A sally of levity, an idle paradox, an indecent jest, an unreasonable objection, are sufficient, in the opinion of these men, to efface a name from the lists of christianity, to exclude a soul from everlasting life. Such men are so watchful to censure, that they have seldom much care to look for favourable interpretations of ambiguities, to set the general tenour of life against single failures, or to know how soon any slip of inadvertency has been expiated by sorrow and retraction; but let fly their fulminations, without mercy or prudence, against slight offences or casual temerities, against crimes never committed, or immediately repented. The infidel knows well what he is doing. He is endeavouring to supply, by authority, the deficiency of his arguments, and to make his cause less invidious, by showing numbers on his side; he will, therefore, not change his conduct, till he reforms his principles. But the zealot should recollect, that he is labouring by this frequency of excommunication, against his own cause, and voluntarily adding strength to the enemies of truth. It must always be the condition of a great part of mankind, to reject and embrace tenets upon the authority of those whom they think wiser than themselves; and, therefore, the addition of every name to infidelity, in some degree, invalidates that argument upon which the religion of multitudes is necessarily founded. Men may differ from each other in many religious opinions, and HDT WHAT? INDEX

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yet all may retain the essentials of christianity; men may sometimes eagerly dispute, and yet not differ much from one another: the rigorous persecutors of errour should, therefore, enlighten their zeal with knowledge, and temper their orthodoxy with charity; that charity, without which orthodoxy is vain; charity that “thinketh no evil,” but “hopeth all things,” and “endureth all things.” Whether Browne has been numbered among the contemners of religion, by the fury of its friends, or the artifice of its enemies, it is no difficult task to replace him among the most zealous professors of christianity. He may, perhaps, in the ardour of his imagination, have hazarded an expression, which a mind intent upon faults may interpret into heresy, if considered apart from the rest of his discourse; but a phrase is not to be opposed to volumes; there is scarcely a writer to be found, whose profession was not divinity, that has so frequently testified his belief of the sacred writings, has appealed to them with such unlimited submission, or mentioned them with such unvaried reverence. It is, indeed, somewhat wonderful, that he should be placed without the pale of christianity, who declares, “that he assumes the honourable style of a christian,” not because it is “the religion of his country,” but because “having in his riper years and confirmed judgment seen and examined all, he finds himself obliged, by the principles of grace, and the law of his own reason, to embrace no other name but this;” who, to specify his persuasion yet more, tells us, that “he is of the reformed religion; of the same belief our Saviour taught, the apostles disseminated, the fathers authorized, and the martyrs confirmed;” who, though “paradoxical in philosophy, loves in divinity to keep the beaten road; and pleases himself that he has no taint of heresy, schism, or errour:” to whom, “where the scripture is silent, the church is a text; where that speaks, ‘tis but a comment;” and who uses not “the dictates of his own reason, but where there is a joint silence of both: who blesses himself, that he lived not in the days of miracles, when faith had been thrust upon him; but enjoys that greater blessing, pronounced to all that believe and saw not.” He cannot surely be charged with a defect of faith, who “believes that our Saviour was dead, and buried, and rose again, and desires to see him in his glory:” and who affirms that “this is not much to believe;” that “we have reason to owe this faith unto history;” and that “they only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith, who lived before his coming; and, upon obscure prophecies, and mystical types, could raise a belief.” Nor can contempt of the positive and ritual parts of religion be imputed to him, who doubts, whether a good man would refuse a poisoned eucharist; and “who would violate his own arm, rather than a church.” The opinions of every man must be learned from himself: concerning his practice, it is safest to trust the evidence of others. Where these testimonies concur, no higher degree of historical certainty can be obtained; and they apparently concur to prove, that Browne was a zealous adherent to the faith of Christ; that he lived in obedience to his laws, and died in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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confidence of his mercy.

March: Samuel Johnson, arrested for debt, was released through the intercession of Samuel Richardson. In short order, this would happen yet again. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1757

March 28, Monday: The servant Robert-François Damiens had made the mistake on January 5, 1757 of failing to kill the French king Louis XV. While tens of thousands of commoners crowded the square in Paris, he was to be slowly tortured, and was to be torn to pieces by teams of horses, whereupon his hopefully-still-conscious torso and head were to be tossed upon a bonfire. “Executions are intended to draw spectators,” explained Samuel Johnson. “If they do not draw spectators, they do not answer their purpose.” Aristocrats by the dozens had rented rooms overlooking the Place de Grève, in which they could best observe the torture and mutilation. This was considered a patriotic and religious observance. Included among the renters was 42-year-old would-be aristocrat Giovanni Jacopo (or Giacomo Girolamo) Casanova, who was trying to impress his 17-year-old fiancée and her family. His party included not only her wealthy devout guardian (who happened to be plumpish, sour-faced, and in her sixties), but also a prostitute who was posing as a “niece of the pope” and a handsome but penniless young Italian, Tiretta, who was relying on his charm. (Despite the briefness of his stay in Paris the youth who as yet had learned no French had acquired a nickname, “Monsieur Six Times.”) We understand that the women stood in the front row at the only window, bending far forward, resting their elbows on the window sill, so the men standing behind might also view the proceedings. The party lasted for four hours as refreshments were served and the aristocrats engaged in small talk set against the prisoner’s screams.

When the French official torturers had Damiens chained to a strong wooden table, they placed the knife with HDT WHAT? INDEX

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which the would-be regicide had attempted to kill the monarch again into his right hand, and then proceeded to char it slowly to the bone in a sulphurous fire. Melted lead, boiling oil, burning pitch, and melted wax and sulfur were thrown on his breasts, arms, thighs, and legs. They also were gouging various parts of his body, heating their pincers red-hot in a charcoal forge. They wound long leather straps up the length of his arms and his legs and attached these straps to cart horses. The horses, whipped, tugged Damiens in various directions, but he was such an extremely muscular and fit man that his arms and legs simply were not to be yanked off. This went on for more than an hour with Damiens uttering his screams and the horses being lashed.

“My God, give me strength, give me strength. Lord, my God, have pity on me. Lord, my God, I am suffering so much. Lord, my God, give me patience.”

Even when the torturers had brought in a couple of additional cart horses, the limbs failed to separate. Casanova’s memoirs insist that never once did the women turn their heads, although at one point he himself had been forced to turn his eyes from the horror of the scene — and saw that his young Italian friend had raised the voluminous skirts and petticoats of the old duenna and was having at her (upper-class women of that period were wearing petticoats rather than the sort of snug between-the-legs panties we now favor — Peter the Great had remarked a half century earlier, when a woman stumbled in front of his carriage, “The gates of Paradise are open.”). For the following two hours Casanova studied the frozen face of the old lady, her lips pursed and her teeth clenched, as the faint rocking motion went on and on. Casanova was marveling that the man was able to maintain his erection for such a great length of time. There was a little conference in the square, and after the king was consulted and had given his consent, the torturers slashed a few of the muscles and tendons of Damiens’s legs. With another hour and a half of lashing and the horses straining into their harnesses under the lash, they managed to get one leg off. Then the other leg came off as well. When the torturers slashed a shoulder an arm came off, Damiens screaming throughout this process. At the window, Tiretta was bobbing away behind the old woman. When the last of the limbs came off, the little party left in a carriage. (This Place de Grève eventually would be replaced as the main execution spot by a square which would receive a new name, the Place de la Revolution. There, Louis XVI would be guillotined and once again many such small parties would be taking place in rooms overlooking the square — but this time attended by commoners.) The old duenna, when she stepped down from the carriage, said “Au Revoir” to everyone else but ignored Tiretta. Over dinner that evening, during the guy talk, the young man claimed to have been able to ejaculate four times. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1758

As early as this point, James Boswell was known to be keeping a journal. Already he had publications, in several periodicals. Already he had contracted gonorrhea and already he had fathered at least one illegitimate child.

In this year Samuel Johnson was beginning his series of essays for The Idler. He published ON THE BRAVERY OF THE COMMON ENGLISH SOLDIER. He continued to be in financial difficulties, and at one point only a last- moment loan from a friend prevented his being again arrested for debt. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1759

Sarah Johnson, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s mother, died. Having published his dictionary of the English language, looking for another source of income, he put out THE HISTORY OF RASSELAS, PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA:

The shaggy eyebrows unbent a little as he rolled the steps toward the shelf where the Johnsonian literature was placed. Jo skipped up, and sitting on the top step, affected to be searching for her book, but was really wondering how best to introduce the dangerous object of her visit. Mr. Laurence seemed to suspect that something was brewing in her mind, for after taking several brisk turns about the room, he faced round on her, speaking so abruptly that RASSELAS tumbled face downward on the floor. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1760

Samuel Johnson reached 50 years of age. His series of “The Idler” essays came to an end. At a monthly meeting in London of a group formed by Thomas Bray, the Associates for Founding Classical Libraries and Supporting Negro Schools, he and Benjamin Franklin met. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1761

May 31, Sunday: Oliver Goldsmith entertained Samuel Johnson at dinner in his Fleet Street home (thus we mark the beginning of a notable friendship). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1762

James Boswell returned from Scotland to London.

Samuel Johnson began to receive an annual pension from the crown. Having earlier characterized pensioners in his Dictionary as state hirelings and traitors to the country, he greeted this new personal situation with apprehension. He was, however, reassured by being advised that such pensions were in recognition of past service to the nation rather than in expectation of service yet to be provided.

According to one account the sandwich originated at this point, at the Beef Steak Club above the Covent Garden Theatre in London. John Montagu, 4th earl of Sandwich, was on a roll and had been at the gaming table for a full 24 hours without stopping to eat, when he ordered the help to bring him some slabs of meat between slices of bread — so as not to get the cards all greasy.

Joanna Baillie was born in Bothwell.

Launcelot Greaves, by Tobias Smollett.

The Shipwreck, Falconer. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1763

At the age of 23, James Boswell met Dr. Samuel Johnson and, while studying at the University of Utrecht, also met Marie Arouet de Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Johnson, age 53, was just publishing his THE LIFE OF ASCHAM and ACCOUNT OF THE IMPOSTURE OF THE COCK-LANE GHOST.

At about this point William Guthrie (with the assistance of Ralph Bigland) prepared A COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEERAGE; FROM THE BEST AUTHORITIES. ILLUSTRATED WITH ELEGANT COPPERPLATES OF THE ARMS OF THE NOBILITY, BLAZONED IN THE HERALD’S OFFICE, BY THE PROPER OFFICERS; COPPERPLATES OF THE PREMIERS IN THEIR PARLIAMENTARY ROBES; AND AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE HISTORY OF EACH FAMILY, VIGNETTES AND OTHER ORNAMENTS PROPER FOR THE SUBJECT. Although he invited the noble personages, whose noble ancestors were glorified in this worshipful work, to correct any insufficiencies of laudation before the pages were committed to the press, this work is nevertheless marked by a lack of any great involvement in accuracy. The battle of Dettingen, for instance, a historical event of some significance to the illustrious ancestors of the dukes of Cumberland and Marlborough in particular, is reported in one place to have gone down in 1744, in another to have gone down in 1742 — whereas works of history are strongly united in averring that this event had gone down in 1743. For another instance, King George IId is reported to have left Hanover for Aschaffenberg on June 16th only to arrive at his destination on June 10th, something which would only be possible were the journey, of 227 miles, to have required longer than one year. For yet another instance, the House of Peers is reported to have addressed His Majesty the King on the subject of the battle of Culloden on August 29, 1746 despite the fact that, as of that date, England had been in between one Parliament and another.

May 16, Monday: At the bookstore of Thomas Davies in London, Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell met for the 1st time. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1764 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The initial volume of William Guthrie’s A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE WORLD, FROM THE CREATION TO THE PRESENT TIME; INCLUDING ALL THE EMPIRES, KINGDOMS, AND STATES, THEIR REVOLUTIONS, FORMS OF GOVERNMENT, LAWS, RELIGIONS, CUSTOMS AND MANNERS, THE PROGRESS OF LEARNING, ARTS, SCIENCES, COMMERCE, AND TRADE. TOGETHER WITH THEIR CHRONOLOGY, ANTIQUITIES, PUBLIC BUILDINGS, AND CURIOSITIES OF NATURE AND ART, BY WILLIAM GUTHRIE, ESQ., JOHN GRAY, ESQ., AND OTHERS, EMINENT IN THIS BRANCH OF LITERATURE (this 12-volume set would continue into 1767).

“The Club” was formed, with 54-year-old Dr. Samuel Johnson and 41-year-old Sir Joshua Reynolds and 34- year-old Oliver Goldsmith as charter members. Eventually this group would come to include Joseph Banks, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Charles Burney, Charles James Fox, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Adam Smith, and William Windham (it would not include William Guthrie).

Goldsmith’s AN HISTORY OF ENGLAND IN A SERIES OF LETTERS FROM A NOBLEMAN TO HIS SON. AN HISTORY OF ENGLAND AN HISTORY OF ENGLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1765

Samuel Johnson’s edition of the plays of William Shakespeare. During a period of depression he first met the Thrale family, Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale and Henry Thrale of Streatham Park, and they took him into their home and into their hearts.

(Henry Thoreau would access the 4th edition of this, printed in 1793.) WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1766

Samuel Johnson was 56 years of age. He wrote THE FOUNTAINS.

When Robert Chambers succeeded the famous William Blackstone as Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford University, he found himself so daunted by his new duties that he asked Samuel Johnson to write most of his lectures for him. Johnson would keep this a secret from Boswell. (Might this Robert Chambers be the father of the twins William and Robert Chambers, born in 1802?) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1767

Dr. Erasmus Darwin met James Watt and Dr. Samuel Johnson.

February: During a visit to the library of King George III, Dr. Samuel Johnson encountered the monarch himself. During the conversation (according to Boswell) the monarch “expressed a desire to have the literary biography of his country ably executed.”

The Reverend Joseph Priestley’s THE HISTORY AND PRESENT STATE OF ELECTRICITY, which would later be translated into Dutch, French, and German. Completing his study of electricity, he would begin working with “mephitic air” (air containing carbon dioxide). This work with different kinds of air would lead to the discovery of “dephlogisticated air,” which is to say, oxygen. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1770

William Guthrie’s A NEW SYSTEM OF MODERN GEOGRAPHY.

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s THE FALSE ALARM. At some point during the 1770s, he would begin to challenge the James Macpherson “translation” of the bard “Ossian,” as an evident forgery.

JAMES MACPHERSON HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1771

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s THOUGHTS ON THE LATE TRANSACTIONS RESPECTING FALKLAND’S ISLANDS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1773

Over the strong objections of various members of “The Club,” James Boswell was accepted into membership. He would be devoting himself to a record of the actions and side comments of Dr. Samuel Johnson during the final period of his life.

Hannah More became one of the aspiring writers of London. She would become associated with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, Edmund Burke, and William Wilberforce. She would engage David Garrick to produce her plays.

Professor Christian Garve translated Edmund Burke’s 1759 A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL WITH SEVERAL OTHER ADDITIONS, as ÜBER DEN URSPRUNG UNSERER BEGRIFFE VOM ERHABENEN UND SCHÖNEN (Riga).

The family of Gasparo Grimani was still in London, for they were godparents at an Italian christening. (They seem to have been in Paris as well, for the daughter is said to have been kidnapped there and never found. The wife Antonia Fabbri Grimani is said to have fallen ill shortly after this, and she would die in Paris in about 1776.)

For the 4th edition of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, it was extensively revised.

August 18, Wednesday-November 22, Monday: Dr. Samuel Johnson, age 63, and James Boswell toured Scotland. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1774

William Guthrie’s CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

At the age of 64, Dr. Samuel Johnson visited Wales with the Thrales. His THE PATRIOT. The first “Collected Edition” of Dr. Johnson’s works was published (Davies, in financial difficulties, had started this without Dr. Johnson’s authorization, and when Johnson found out about it the whole idea incensed him — but his temper dissipated as he learned of Davies’ financial straits and the publication effort would continue).

When Lord Chesterfield’s letters of advice to his illegitimate son were published by his son’s widow, it became possible to understand why it was that the young man had needed to resist them. As Dr. Samuel Johnson would comment: [T]hey teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing- master. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1775

Dr. Samuel Johnson had so contemptuously dismissed the 3d-Century epic poems of James Macpherson, that at this point he was threatening a physical assault. At the age of 65 Johnson needed to begin to carry a cudgel, with which to defend himself if attacked. From this point forward all Johnson’s work against this “Ossian” thingie would need, for his personal safety, to be conducted behind the scenes.

JAMES MACPHERSON

Dr. Johnson’s A JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND and his TAXATION NO TYRANNY.

He visited France with the Thrales. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1776

Britain’s House of Commons heard the first motion to outlaw slavery in Britain and her colonies. David Hartley proclaimed human enslavement to be “contrary to the laws of God and the rights of man” but his motion did not carry. “How is it,” asked Dr. Samuel Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” The British author was only one of many Europeans who thought it strange that a nation run by slavemasters should be so noisily demanding its own freedom.

In a fresco by Brumidi on a wall of our federal capitol, a group of white slavemasters are caught in the act of demanding their own freedom:

Many Scots-Irish emigrants were becoming involved in the American War of Independence. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1777

Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was to become the subject of James Boswell’s THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D., actually himself wrote a record of his own life, but in the presence of his servant Francis Barber he had destroyed this writing. When Boswell read to him an evaluation in the Critical Review in this year, placing Julius Caesar’s account of his actions in one category, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus’s reflections on his life in a second category, and Huetius’s contexture of the times of his life in a third category, in contradistinction to all these “journalists, temporal and spiritual: Elias Ashmole, William Lilly, George Whitefield, John Wesley, and a thousand other old women and fanatic writers of memoirs and meditations” in a quite derogatory separate category, Johnson commented that few writers have “gained any reputation by recording their own actions.”

December 27, Saturday: Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote to James Boswell: “This is the time of year in which all express their good wishes to their friends, and I send mine to you and your family. May your lives be long, happy, and good.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1778

June: Fanny Burney’s novel of manners, EVELINA, THE HISTORY OF A YOUNG LADY’S ENTRANCE INTO THE WORLD, had at this point secured such worldly success, in that Edmund Burke had sat up all night reading it, in that Dr. Johnson had laughed uproariously over it, in that Sir Joshua Reynolds had made wild and favorable guesses as to its author, and in that her father Charles Burney, organist and music historian, had commented favorably upon it, that she was able to confess, to her father, that it has been she, his own ill-favored daughter, who had written it. And she was known to dance jigs, strictly in private you understand, jigs of glee, at the thought that she had become so publicly known.2 (Later, Louisa May Alcott would be intrigued by this novel of manners, and would feel there was some sort of submerged resemblance between Fanny’s experience in the Burney household with the Burney father figure she so needed to please and Lou’s experience in the Alcott household with the Alcott father figure she so needed to please.)

2.The term “celebrity” would not be invented for another half century (by Emerson in 1848). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1779

March 15, Monday: Dr. Samuel Johnson’s THE LIVES OF THE MOST EMINENT ENGLISH POETS; WITH CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THEIR WORKS. Henry Thoreau would access, in this, Dr. Johnson’s comments about John Milton. EMINENT ENGLISH POETS HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1781

Dr. Samuel Johnson’s PREFACES BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL TO THE WORKS OF THE MOST EMINENT ENGLISH POETS.

April 4, Wednesday: Henry Thrale died. Dr. Samuel Johnson would function as one of the four executors of his large estate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1782

At the age of 16, Isaac C. D’Israeli addressed some verses to Samuel Johnson. He would become a frequent guest at table with the publisher John Murray.

A new expanded edition of William Shaw’s AN ENQUIRY INTO THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE POEMS ASCRIBED TO OSSIAN was presented, about half of which we believe to have been contributed by Johnson. Evaluation: This stuff had been a fraud (nevertheless, in this year in Copenhagen Nicolai Abildgaard was painting his “Ossian”). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

When Alexander Boswell, 8th Laird of Auchinleck, died, James Boswell came into his inheritance as the 9th Laird of Auchinleck and finally was able to ease off on his taking cases at law and move his family back from Scotland to London — where he could indulge as much as he liked in dissipation and society! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

8th Laird of Auchinleck

9th Laird HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1784

With the sale of the Thrale brewery, the life of the widowed Hester Thrale eased. She got married again, with an Italian musician, Gabriel Piozzi, becoming Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi. As this new relationship developed, her friend Dr. Samuel Johnson became distressed.

December 13, Monday: Samuel Johnson died. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1785

James Boswell, in his JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES, remarked “A page of my Journal is like a cake of portable soup. A little may be diffused into a considerable portion.”3

JOURNAL OF A TOUR An example of the contents: “I happened to ask where John Knox was buried. Dr. Johnson burst out, ‘I hope in the high-way. I have been looking at his reformations.’” Some would be offended at his detailed and uncensored account of such conversations — a real gentleman simply wouldn’t have chatted and told in such manner. SAMUEL JOHNSON

3.We can find in contemporaneous issues of the London Chronicle advertisements for this “solid broth” packaged for the nourishment of gentlemen “on journeys and at sea.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1786

Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi’s ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. DURING THE LAST TWENTY YEARS OF HIS LIFE (mark up your scorecard please: Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi had been during Dr. Johnson’s life his bosom friend Hester Thrale). HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1787

Sir John Hawkins’s LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1791

James Boswell’s THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D., one of the two most successful biographies in the English language to date, which in the course of two centuries would never be out of print:4

“Come in!” And Mr. Laurence’s gruff voice sounded gruffer than ever, as Jo tapped at his door. “It’s only me, Sir, come to return a book,” she said blandly, as she entered. “Want any more?” asked the old gentleman, looking grim and vexed, but trying not to show it. “Yes, please. I like old Sam so well, I think I’ll try the second volume,” returned Jo, hoping to propitiate him by accepting a second dose of Boswell’s JOHNSON, as he had recommended that lively work.

LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON

Dr. Johnson was quoted by Boswell as having remarked “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.” James Ferguson Conant has remarked this in his essay “Cavell and the Concept of America” (CONTENDING WITH STANLEY CAVELL, ed. Russell B. Goodman, Oxford UP, 2005, page 55): Is there, as President Woodrow Wilson thought, an internal relation between the concept of America and a certain ideal? Or is it that, as Chesterton thought, there is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals? Or does America stripped of its ideals amount to nothing more than President Coolidge’s view 4. This would be, however, the only endeavor at which Boswell would ever be really successful. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of the matter? Or is there a distinction to be drawn, as Waldo Emerson thought, between the ideal and its debasement by those who most loudly proclaim it?

(deathmask) HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1793

The 4th edition of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s THE PLAYS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. WITH THE CORRECTIONS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF VARIOUS COMMENTATORS. TO WHICH ARE ADDED, NOTES BY SAMUEL JOHNSON AND GEORGE STEEVENS. THE 4TH ED. REV. AND AUGM. (WITH A GLOSSARIAL INDEX) BY THE EDITOR OF DODSLEY’S COLLECTION OF OLD PLAYS (15 volumes; London: T. Longman, B. Law and son, [etc.]) (Henry Thoreau would access Volumes I,5 III, and IV of this in early 1835).

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, I WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, III WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, IV

5. You will note that, unfortunately, the very best I am able to provide electronically at the present moment in regard to Volume I of this Johnson edition is an 1822 reprint! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1806

Samuel Johnson’s THE WORKS OF SAMUEL JOHNFON, LL.D. A NEW EDITION IN TWELVE VOLUMES. WITH AN ESSAY ON HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, BY ARTHUR MURPHY, ESQ. (London: Printed by J. Nichols and Son, Red- Lion-Paffage, Fleet-Street. For J. Johnfon, J. Nichols and Son, R. Baldwin, F. and C. Rivington, Otridge and Son, W.J. and J. Richardfon, A. Strahan, Leigh and Sotheby, etc., 1806). This would be available to Henry Thoreau in Waldo Emerson’s library. He would refer to Johnson in his college essays of December 16, 1836 and January 1837 for Professor Channing’s class. DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, I DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, II DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, III DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, IV DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, V DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, VI DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, VII DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, VIII DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, IX DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, X DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, XI DR. SAMUEL JOHNFON, XII You will note on the title pages of some of the earlier volumes of this 1806 edition that it had been expected that this edition would extend not to 12 but 15 volumes. You will also note that in the case of Volume VI we have been unable to secure electronic copy and have supplied instead electronic copy for that volume in the following 1816 edition. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1815

Robert Anderson prepared LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D., WITH CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS ON HIS WORKS (Edinburgh).

The James Macpherson “translation” of the bard Ossian, which had already as of the 1770s been challenged as an evident forgery by Dr. Samuel Johnson, and had already been declared a forgery by the Highland Society of Scotland as of 1805, was continuing to be mined by poets and artists in all the major European languages as a source of inspiration and subject matter. Napoléon Bonaparte was fond of referring to Ossian as “the Northern Homer,” and had the painter François Gérard decorate his palace at Malmaison “in the style of Ossian,” and for his bedroom in the Quirinale in Rome, had the painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres do a “Dream of Ossian” on the ceiling.6 JAMES MACPHERSON

6. What, no mirror over the bed? This Ingres ceiling painting is now at the Musée Ingres in Montauban. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1828

One of the dictionaries Henry Thoreau would have on his shelf: A DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: BY SAMUEL JOHNSON AND JOHN WALKER. WITH THE PRONUNCIATION GREATLY SIMPLIFIED, AND ON AN ENTIRELY NEW PLAN; AND WITH THE ADDITION OF SEVERAL THOUSAND WORDS. BY R.S. JAMESON. SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND CORRECTED. London: J.O. Robinson, 1828. JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

THE BEAUTIES OF CHESTERFIELD, CONSISTING OF SELECTIONS FROM HIS WORKS. BY ALFRED HOWARD, ESQ. Stereotyped at the Boston Type and Stereotype Foundry, published by Charles Ewer of No. 141 Washington Street, Boston. This little volume would be in the personal library of Henry Thoreau and we may wonder what benefit he derived from reading the advice of a lord whose advice was that one should never be guilty of so undignified a thing as laughing in public.

BEAUTIES OF CHESTERFIELD

James Boswell had recorded a remark Dr. Samuel Johnson made about Lord Chesterfield: This man (said he) I thought had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1835

During this year and the following one, the 4-volume edition by Simon Wilkins of SIR THOMAS BROWNE’S 7 WORKS, INCLUDING HIS LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE (London: W. Pickering).

MICHAEL DRAYTON DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

SIR THOMAS BROWNE, I SIR THOMAS BROWNE, II SIR THOMAS BROWNE, III SIR THOMAS BROWNE, IV

(These volumes would be available to Henry Thoreau in Waldo Emerson’s library.)

7. The life of Sir Thomas used in Volume I was that of Dr. Samuel Johnson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

April 21, Tuesday: David Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, and would make notes from, Volum es I, 8 III, and IV of the 15 volumes of the 4th edition of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s THE PLAYS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. WITH THE CORRECTIONS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF VARIOUS COMMENTATORS. TO WHICH ARE ADDED, NOTES BY SAMUEL JOHNSON AND GEORGE STEEVENS. THE 4TH ED. REV. AND AUGM. (WITH A GLOSSARIAL INDEX) BY THE EDITOR OF DODSLEY’S COLLECTION OF OLD PLAYS (London: T. Longman, B. Law and son, [etc.], 1793).

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, I WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, III WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, IV

8. You will note that, unfortunately, the very best I am able to provide electronically at the present moment in regard to Volume I of this Johnson edition is an 1822 reprint! HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

WALDEN: Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy white pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it. It was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods, through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man’s discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself.

KING RICHARD III WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

1836

December 16, Friday: The iron fence around Boston Common was complete at a total expenditure of $80,000.

David Henry Thoreau’s Harvard College essay on an assignment in Professor Channing’s class, “Show how it is that a writer’s nationality and individual genius may be fully manifested in a Play or other Literary work upon a Foreign or Ancient subject — and yet full justice be done to the Subject.” In this essay he begged to differ with Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had famously opinioned that William Shakespeare’s “adherence to the real story, and to the Roman manners has impeded the natural vigor of his genius.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

In constructing this essay Thoreau had made reference to the CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE of Isaac C. D’Israeli in one or another edition available at that point in time (however, since as an adult Thoreau would acquire a one-volume 1851 New-York edition of this for his personal library, that is the edition presented here in electronic form):

CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE

Show how it is that a Writer’s Nationality and Individual Genius may be fully manifested in a Play or other Literary Work, upon a Foreign or Ancient Subject — and yet full Justice be done to the Subject. Man has been called a bundle of habits.9 This truth, I imagine, was the discovery of a philosopher — one who spoke as he thought and thought before he spoke — who realized it, and felt it to be, as it were, literally true. It has a deeper meaning, and admits of a wider application than is generally allowed. The various bundles which we label French, English and Scotchmen, differ only in this, that while the first is made up of gay, showy and fashionable habits, –the second is crowded with those of a more sombre hue, bearing the stamp of utility and comfort; –and the contents of the third, it may be, are as rugged and unyielding as their very envelope. The color and texture of these contents vary with different bundles; but the material is uniformly the same. Man is an abstract and general term, it denotes the genus; French, English, Scotch, &c., are but the differentiae. It is with the genus alone that the philosopher and poet have to do. Where then shall they study it? As well here as there, surely, if it be every where the same; one may as well view the moon from mount AEtna as from the Andes, her phenomena will be equally

9. The Reverend William Paley on “Virtue,” in THE PRINCIPLES OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, 1786: “There are habits, not only of drinking, swearing, and lying, ... but of every modification of action, speech, and thought: Man is a bundle of habits....” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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obvious, his map equally correct, whatever the point from which he observes her. But he must look through a national glass. It may be desirable, indeed, to see clearly with the naked eye; we should then need no astronomers; yet the same glass, since a glass we must use, will afford us an equally accurate view, whatever station we choose. If our view be affected at all by the quality of the instrument, the effect will be constant and uniform, though our observatories be rolled about upon wheels. It would seem then, that an author’s nationality may be equally obvious, and yet full justice be done to his subject, whether that subject be an ancient or modern, foreign or domestic one. By full justice I mean, he may do all he intended to, or that any one can reasonably expect or require. Nay further, his nationality may be even more striking in treating of a foreign than a domestic subject; since what is peculiar and national in the writer, by the side of what is real history and matter-of- fact in the description, will be made the more manifest by the contrast. What is peculiar in the French character will sooner appear in a book of travels than a domestic diary; in his descriptions of foreign scenes and customs the Frenchman himself will be the most conspicuous object. Suppose him to weave these materials into a novel or poem, to introduce his innkeeper or postillion, he is fully adequate to his task — he has only to learn particulars — his must be an inductive method — the phenomena he observes are to be referred to a general law. Is human nature our study, the humanity of the Romans, for instance, we ourselves, our friends, the community, are our best text book. We wish to paint, perhaps, the old Roman courtier; so far as we know anything of him, we know him as a man; as possessing in a greater or less degree, the same faults and virtues that we observe in men of modern times; does he possess different ones, he is a sealed book to us — he is no longer one of us; we can no more conceive of him, describe him, class him, than the naturalist can class or conceive of, he knows not what; an animal, it may be, but he neither walks, swims nor flies, eats, drinks, nor sleeps, and yet lives. I come now to speak of that peculiar structure and bent of mind which distinguishes an individual from his nation. Much that has already been said will apply equally well to this part of our subject. In a play or poem the author’s individual genius is distinguished by the points of character he seizes upon, and the features most fondly dwelt upon, as well as the peculiar combination he delights in, and the general effect of his picture. Into his idea of his fellow enters one half himself; he views his subject only through himself, and strange indeed would it be, did not the portrait betray the medium through which the original was observed. As the astronomer must use his own eyes, though he looks through a national glass, not only are we to consider the quality of the lens, but also the condition of the observer’s visual organs. A defect in his sight will not be made up for by distance, will be equally evident, whether it be the instrument itself or the star to which it points, that is subjected to his scrutiny. To read history with advantage one must possess, we are told, a vivid imagination, that he may in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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a measure realize and enter into the spirit of the story, so as to make himself familiar with the scenes and characters there described. Every one is differently impressed, and each impression bears the stamp of the individual’s taste and genius. One seizes greedily upon circumstances which another neglects; one associates with an event those scenes which witnessed it, one grasps the ludicrous, another the marvellous; and thus, when the taste and judgment come to weave these conceptions into poetry, their identity is not lost. Here, then, surely, one’s individual genius is fully manifested. The original ‘Sweet Auburn’ has been ascertained to be Lishoy in the county of Westmeath, Ireland. Though Goldsmith intended to represent an English village, “he took from Lishoy,” says his biographer, “only such traits and characteristics as might be applied to village life in England, and modified them accordingly. He took what belonged to human nature in rustic life, and adapted it to the allotted scene. In the same way a painter takes his models from real life around him, even when he would paint a foreign or a classic group.” We may suppose Goldsmith to have written this justly celebrated poem in the Irish village named, where he passed his youth. Many of his observations apply rather, in their full extent, to an Irish than an English village; but this is a difference not in kind, but degree. The desolation which was the subject of these verses was by no means confined to his native country. “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay,” is, alas! a truth but too universal in its application. Has not this author done full justice to his subject? Let the popularity of his poem answer. Goldsmith is visible in every line. As to his nationality, I will only add that the hypercritical have discovered that many of his descriptions “savor more of the rural scenery and rustic life of an English than an Irish village”; which is proof enough that what is national makes no mean figure in the “Deserted Village.” D’Israeli, speaking of Dante, observes; “Every great genius is influenced by the objects and feelings which occupy his own times, only differing from the race of his brothers by the magical force of his developments; the light he sends forth over the world he often catches from the faint and unobserved spark which will die away and turn to nothing in another hand.” So confident were his commentators that his ‘Inferno’ was but an earthly hell after all, that the poem had no sooner appeared than they set about tracing its original; which, satisfactorily to their own minds, they finally discovered. His biographer relates that in the year 1304, among the novel and diverse sports on an occasion of public rejoicing, one was, the representation of the Infernal regions upon a stage of boats on the Arno at Florence. This, he adds, was the occasion of the ‘Inferno.’ Dante himself has remarked, “I found the original of my hell in the world which we inhabit.” Shakspeare is justly styled the ‘poet of nature’; here is the secret of his popularity. His was no ideal standard, man was his hobby. It was one of the characteristics of his genius that it HDT WHAT? INDEX

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adapted itself to the reality of things, and was on familiar terms with our feelings. His characters are men, though historically faulty, yet humanly true; domesticated at once, they are English in all but the name. Now this characteristic is capable of being made equally manifest, whether his genius be employed upon an ancient or modern, foreign or domestic subject. He is as much the poet of nature in the one case as in the other, in describing a Roman as a London mob; in Antony’s speech over the dead body of Caesar, as in the character of Falstaff. Were Antony Percy, and Percy Antony, — “There were an Antony Would ruffle up your spirits” — and exert perhaps as magical an influence over the wounds of Caesar and the stones of Rome as did the true Roman orator. We are told by one author (Pope) that “Invention is one of the great characteristics of the genius of Shakspeare.” “Yet,” he asks, “What can we reason but from what we know?” This separating Invention from Imagination, as he does, seems altogether unnecessary, as another remarks, “seems to be merely dividing the included from the including term”. It may be, as Johnson has observed, that “Shakspeare’s adherence to the real story and to Roman manners has impeded the natural vigor of his genius”; he may have been confined, but he was no less Shakspeare; though chained he was not tamed. We are not to compare Shakspeare chained with Shakspeare at liberty, but Shakspeare in chains with others in the same condition. A caravan is made up of animals as distinct in their nature and habits as their fellows of the forest. I question, in the next place, whether our Poet’s powers of Imagination are less manifest when employed upon an ancient or foreign subject. Take, for instance, one of the most powerful passages of his ‘Julius Caesar,’ beginning “But yesterday the word of Caesar might Have stood against the world;” &c. What is there foreign in the sentiment here? To be sure, the word Caesar occurs thrice, Brutus and Cassius each once; but they were no impediment, no more so, at least, than Hotspur or Macbeth would have been. The individual is merged in the man. Is it answered that in the latter case the character will be well known, and therefore the poet will feel more at ease, more at home, and under less restraint? I answer, this very familiarity, though a desideratum with the biographer, may prove a hindrance to the poet; facts are so many guideboards, confining him to a beaten track and leaving no room for Imagination. Some talk as if this faculty, wearied by a flight to so distant a scene, would be unable to exhibit its accustomed fertility and vigor: or among so many strange scenes and faces, being overcome by feelings of home sickness and loneliness, would lose a great portion of its energy and creative power. But this objection is far from applying to Shakspeare. He was, as we say, never less alone than when alone. Fortunately, his familiarity with Roman history was not so remarkable as to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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multiply guideboards to a troublesome degree; or supersede the necessity of his judging for himself, or hazarding a conjecture now and then. Shakspeare is Shakspeare, whether at home or abroad. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1837

January: David Henry Thoreau the Harvard College senior was assigned by Professor Channing an essay on the topic of L’ALLEGRO & IL PENSEROSO, and he kicked off this topic with a comment by Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had well observed in his biographical notice of John Milton that “No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth.” Thoreau turned this snippet into a hook upon which to hang his essay by characterizing it as a “transition from L’Allegro to Il Penseroso.” THE ACTUAL DOCUMENT

However, this Harvard senior also wrote, in a more serious vein, that:

[T]ime loiters in his course, were it for but a moment –past –present –future –mingle as one.

TIME AND ETERNITY

It is my opinion that Thoreau was in possession of an attitude about perspectival space and of the eternity behind time which was fully formed by the point at which he copied his first journals into the first record we have of these journals, the new blank book he began in 1837 as “Gleanings — Or What Time Has Not Reaped Of My Journal.” Presumably these ideas antedate 1837 to at least some extent, for in an essay written in September 1836, his Junior year at Harvard, speaking of the human imagination, he wrote:

Its province is unbounded, its flights are not confined to space, the past and the future, time and eternity, all come within the sphere of its range.

However, the manner in which Thoreau held this attitude, and the manner in which he sought to communicate it to others, do seem to have developed over time, as his communication skills were elaborated by his experience as a writer and as a lecturer, and as he observed more and more the consequences in the lives of others of other sorts of attitude toward time and eternity.

{1/3d of the sheet is missing} college {the remainder of the line has been torn away} bright spot in the student’s history, a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night, shedding a grateful lustre over long years of toil, and cheering him onward to the end of his pilgrimage. Immured within the dank but classic walls of a Stoughton or Hollis his wearied and {a sheet, or perhaps more, is missing here} The precise date of these poems is not known, they were probably, however, together with his Comus and Lycidas, the fruit of those five years of literary leisure, from 1632 to 1637, which our author is known to have spent at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. Surely {about 5/6ths of the sheet is missing} so faithfully the spirit of its divine Author? They were first published in 1645, but for nearly a century obtained but little notice from the lovers of polite literature, the Addisons and Popes of the day. They are thought, by Dr. Warton, to have been originally indebted to Handels’ music for HDT WHAT? INDEX

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whatever notice they at last obtained. L’Allegro is not an effort of Genius, but rather an out-pouring of poetic feeling. We have here a succession of pleasing and striking images, which are dwelt upon just long enough. {the remainder of the line has been torn away} at {a sheet, or perhaps more, is missing here} never been heard of since the days of Robinhood. The metre of these verses is admirably adapted to the subject. The reader can hardly believe that he is not one of the party, tripping it over hill and dale “on the light fantastic toe”. A verse of poetry should strike the reader, as it did the poet, as a whole, not so much as the sign of an idea as that idea itself.

–As Imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the Poet’s pen Turns them to shapes—

{the first half of the line has been torn away} to which they are already {about 1/3d of the sheet is missing} in every respect, so as to satisfy its aerial occupant, it is enough, whatever may be the order of architecture. Thus was it with our architect. But the parts and members of his verses are equally appropriate and striking. With the idea comes the very word, if its sense is not wanted, its sound is. But lo! the sun is up, the hounds are out, the ploughman has already driven his team afield, and as he gaily treads the fragrant furrow, his merry whistle “is heard the fields around,” responsive to the milkmaid’s song, who now repairs with pail on head, and quick elastic step, to her humble stool. The mower, too, has commenced his labors in the meadow at hand,

And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorne in the dale.

Such a picture of rural felicity as is presented in these and the following lines, is rarely to be met with even in poetry. Fancy has her hands full, a thousand images are flitting before her, bringing with them a crowd of delightful associations, and she is forced, in spite of herself, to join the revel and thread the mazes of the dance. And then for

the spicy nut-brown ale, With stories told of many a feat—

There are the “delights”, the “recreations and jolly pastimes that will fetch the day about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful dream”. The poet leaves not a single chord untouched if the reader will but yield himself up to his influence. This whole poem is to be regarded rather as a “sweet digression” than an elaborate effort, as an effusion rather than a production. Johnson has well observed, in his biographical notice of Milton, “No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth.” His mirth wears a pensive hue, his melancholy is but a pleasing contemplative mood. The transition from L’Allegro to Il Penseroso is by no means abrupt, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the vain deluding joys which are referred to in the commencement of the latter, are not those unreproved pleasures which the poet has just recounted, for they are by no means inconsistent with that soft melancholy which he paints, but rather, the fickle pensioners of that Euphrosyne whose sister graces are Meat and Drink, a very different crew from that which waits upon the “daughter fair” of Zephyr and Aurora. The latter are content with daylight and a moderate portion of the night — when tales are done

— “to bed they creep, By whispering winds soon lulled asleep.”

but the others proceed to evening amusements, and even to the London theatres, and the “well-trod stage,” —but only

“If Jonson’s learned sock be on, Or sweetest Shakspeare, Fancy’s child, Warble his native wood-notes wild.”

Beginning with the warning to idle joys, that they depart and leave the poet to “divinest Melancholy,” we soon come to that picture of her, perhaps, the finest in the whole poem. A sable stole thrown over her decent shoulders, with slow and measured steps, and looks that hold “sweet converse” with the skies, reflecting a portion of their own placidness, she gradually draws near. But lo! the “cherub contemplation” delays her lingering steps, her eyes upraised to heaven, the earth is for a space forgot — time loiters in his course, were it but for a moment — past — present — future — mingle as one {about 2 1/2 sheets are missing} The picture of Morning in “Il Penseroso” differs greatly from that in “L’Allegro,” and introduces that mention of the storm-wind in a cloudy day,—

“When rocking winds are piping loud,”—

a very poetic touch. A later poet, Thomson, attributes its sighing to the “sad Genius of the coming storm,” Gray too, seems to have been equally affected by it. “Did you never observe,” he writes, “that pause, as the gust is recollecting itself, and rising upon the ear in a shrill and plaintive tone, like the swell of an Æolian harp? I do assure you there is nothing in the world so like the voice of a spirit.” We are told, that it was while exposed to a violent storm of wind and rain, attended by frequent flashes of lightning, anong [sic] the wilds of Glen-Ken, in Galloway, that Burns composed his far-famed song, the “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled”. Ossian was the child of the storm, its music was ever grateful to his ear. Hence his poetry breathes throughout a tempestuous spirit — when read, as it should be, at the still hour of night, the very rustling of a leaf stirred by the impatient reader, seems to his excited imagination the fitful moaning of the wind, or sighings of the breeze. But if Milton’s winds rock they pipe also, even the monotony of a summer shower is relieved by the cheerful pattering of ‘minute drops from off the eaves’, and if the heavens are for a few moments HDT WHAT? INDEX

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overcast, the splendor of the succeeding sunshine is heightened by contrast. It is amusing to know that Milton was a performer on the bass-viol. He is said even to have been a composer, though nothing remains to prove the assertion. It was his practice, say his biographers, when he hae dined to play on some musical instrument, and either sing himself or make his wife sing, who, he said, had a good voice but no ear. This partiality for the sister muse is no where more manifest than in these poems; whether in; a mirthful or a pensive mood, the “linked sweetness” of “soft Lydian airs”, “the pealing organ”, or ‘the full-voiced quire’, ‘dissolve him into ecstasies.’ These poems are to be valued, if for no other reason, on account of the assistance they afford us in forming our estimate of the man Milton. They place him in an entirely new, and extremely pleasing, light to the reader who was previously familiar with him as the author of the Paradise Lost alone. If before he venerated, he may now admire and love him. The immortal Milton seems for a space to have put on mortality, to have snatched a moment from the weightier cares of heaven and hell, to wander for awhile among the sons of men. But we mistake; though his wings, as he tells us, were already sprouted, he was as yet content to linger awhile, with childlike affection, amid the scenes of his native earth. The tenor of these verses is in keeping with the poets’ early life; he was, as he confesses, a reader of romances, an occasional frequenter of the playhouse, and not at all averse to spending a cheerful evening, now and then, with some kindred spirits about town. We see nothing here of the Puritan. the “storied windows” which were afterwards an abomination in his eyes, admit a welcome, though sombre, light. The learning of Johnson [sic], and the wild notes of Shakspeare, are among the last resources of the mirthful L’Allegro. The student of Milton will ever turn with satisfaction from contemplating the stern and consistent non conformist, and bold defender of civil and religious liberty, engaged, but not involved, in a tedious and virulent controversy,

With darkness and with dangers compassed round,

his dearest hopes disappointed, and himself shut out from the cheering light of day, to these fruits of his earlier and brighter years; though of the earth, yet the flights of one who was contemplating to soar ‘Above the Aonian mount’, a heavenward and unattempted course. I have not undertaken to write a critique, I have dwelt upon the poet’s beauties and not so much as glanced at his blemishes. This may be the result of pure selfishness; Poetry is but a recreation. A pleasing image, or a fine sentiment, loses none of its charms, though Burton, or Beaumont and Fletcher, or Marlowe, or Sir Walter Raleigh, may have written something very similar; or even, in another connexion, have used the identical word whose aptness we so much admire. It always appeared to me that that contemptible kind of criticism which can deliberately, and in cold blood, dissect the sublimest passage, and take pleasure in the detection of slight verbal incongruities, was, when applied to Milton, little better HDT WHAT? INDEX

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than sacrilege, and that those critics who condescended to practice it, were to be ranked with the parish officers who, prompted by a profane and mercenary spirit, tore from their grave and exposed for sale, what were imagined to be the remains of Milton. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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March 30, Thursday: David Henry Thoreau checked out, from Harvard Library, the Reverend Samuel Say (1676-1743)’s POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS, AND TWO CRITICAL ESSAYS (1745).

Thoreau also checked out the initial volume of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s THE LIVES OF THE MOST EMINENT ENGLISH POETS; WITH CRITICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THEIR WORKS. IN FOUR VOLUMES. A NEW EDITION, CORRECTED (London: Printed for C. Bathurst, J. Buckland, [etc., etc.], 1783), the volume which included his study of the life of John Milton.

Thoreau had only recently perused the Milton volume which included that poet’s “Song of Melancholy.” In this biography that Thoreau had checked out, Johnson alleged that “No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy, but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth.” Might this be the origin for the epigraph about melancholy (traveling here as “dejection,” a synonym) with which Thoreau would begin his WALDEN?

Although I am unable to provide electronic text for the 1783 edition that Thoreau consulted, here is the 1795 edition:10 SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1795

10. Page 88 did not scan adequately. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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WALDEN: I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

Thoreau supplemented his borrowings from the Harvard Library by checking out, from the library of the “Institute of 1770,” Sir Walter Scott’s LETTERS ON DEMONOLOGY AND WITCHCRAFT ADDRESSED TO J.G. [JOHN GIBSON] LOCKHART (Illustrated by George Cruikshank; New-York: Harper’s Family Library; J. & J. Harper, 1830). LETTERS ON DEMON...

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 30 of 3 M / Our Moy [Monthly] Meeting held in Town was a pretty solid one Hannah Dennis engaged in testimony in the first — In the last George Carr was taken under the care of Friends —Jonathon & Hannah Dennis took a copu of a minute to visit their children near Philadelphia & while there expectedly to attend the appropriate Yearly Meeting next Month We had a goodly Number of Frineds to Dine with us & among them Edw & Elizabeth Wing — HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1839

December: In Henry Thoreau’s journal for this month we find an indication that he had at least a passing familiarity with James Boswell on Dr. Samuel Johnson:

December: If his fortune deserts him, the brave man in pity still abides by her. Samuel Johnson and his friend Savage, compelled by poverty to pass the night in the streets, resolve that they will stand by their country. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

May 19, Tuesday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as a Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 5 in ON HEROES, HERO- WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY. The lecturer cautioned those of his generation not to “sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched God-forgetting Unbelief; —you were miserable then, powerless, mad.” –He knew, of course, of what he spoke.

“It seems to me that if anything would make me an infidel, it would be the threats lavished against unbelief.” — Professor Maria Mitchell HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1851

Henry Thoreau observed while on Manamoyik (Cape Cod) that the fish for which it had been named was stacked dry on the docks as if it were cordwood: Salt fish were stacked on the wharves, looking like corded wood, maple and yellow birch with the bark left on. I mistook them for this at first, and such in one sense they were, —fuel to maintain our vital fires —an eastern wood which grew on the Grand Banks.

One wonders what Thoreau would have jotted down had he heard someone singing a 19th-Century sailer shanty about the “Cape Cod Girls”: O Cape Cod girls don’t have no combs! Haul away, haul away! They comb their hair with a codfish bone, And we’re bound away for Australia! Now heave ’er up, my bully, bully boys! Haul away, haul away! Heave ’er up and don’t you make a noise, For we’re bound away for Australia! Now Cape Cod kids don’t have no sleds Haul away, haul away! They slide down hill on a codfish head! And we’re bound away for Australia! Now heave ’er up, my bully, bully boys! Haul away, haul away! Heave ’er up and don’t you make a noise, For we’re bound away for Australia! Cape Cod cats don’t have no tails, Haul away, haul away! They lost them all in a northeast gale, And we’re bound away for Australia! Now heave ’er up, my bully, bully boys! Haul away, haul away! Heave ’er up and don’t you make a noise, For we’re bound away for Australia! Cape Cod girls don’t wear no frills, Haul away, haul away! They’re plain and skinny as a codfish gill, And we’re bound away for Australia! Now heave ’er up, my bully, bully boys! Haul away, haul away! Heave ’er up and don’t you make a noise, For we’re bound away for Australia! The abolition of slavery in 1834 in the British West Indies such as on the island of Jamaica, in 1848 in the French Antilles, and in 1849 in the Dutch Antilles, had not resolved the Caribbean market’s need for cheap low-quality salt cod for the feeding of black people as they labored in the sun on the sugar cane, which is why in 1851, while Thoreau was visiting Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, he still saw disgusting practices in HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the codfish salting yard: EARLY the next morning I walked into a fish-house near our hotel, where three or four men were engaged in trundling out the pickled fish on barrows, and spreading them to dry. They told me that a vessel had lately come in from the Banks with forty-four thousand codfish. Timothy Dwight says that, just before he arrived at Provincetown, “a schooner came in from the Great Bank with fifty- six thousand fish, about one thousand five hundred quintals, taken in a single voyage; the main deck being, on her return, eight inches under water in calm weather.” The cod in this fish- house, just out of the pickle, lay packed several feet deep, and three or four men stood on them in cowhide boots, pitching them on to the barrows with an instrument which had a single iron point. One young man, who chewed tobacco, spat on the fish repeatedly. Well, sir, thought I, when that older man sees you he will speak to you. But presently I saw the older man do the same thing. It reminded me of the figs of Smyrna.

There is a good reason why these laborers were treating these split fish carcasses with such contempt. The primary use of such salt fish was still in the feeding of the black workers on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean despite the fact that these black workers were no longer being referred to as slaves. Therefore the tobacco juice which these workers were spitting onto the drying fish, and the fact that these workers were damaging their own product by gaffing it around with those single-point processing poles, truly did not matter at all. One may well wonder whether Thoreau ought have been aware of the reason why such a low-grade industrial indifference to product quality was able to persist.

Since, in 1755, Dr. Samuel Johnson had defined a cod as “any case or husk in which seeds are lodged” on the basis of the Middle English etymology in which a cod is a sack or pouch, Thoreau hypothesized that HDT WHAT? INDEX

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the codfish might have received its name on account of the female containing such a large quantity of eggs:

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An old rhyme goes: The codfish lays a thousand eggs The homely hen lays one. The codfish never cackles To tell you what she’s done. And so we scorn the codfish While the humble hen we prize Which only goes to show you That it pays to advertise.

Well, this old rhyme may not date to Thoreau’s era, but we note that the inventor of the microscope, Leeuwenhoek, had counted the eggs in a single female cod of a middling size and had numbered them at 9,384,000. Alexandre Dumas would write in 1873 in LEGRANDE DICTIONAIRE DE CUISINE that “it has been calculated that if no accident prevented the hatching of the eggs and each egg reached maturity, it would take only three years to fill the sea so that you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod.”

While Thoreau was on Cape Cod, he heard rumors of cows eating cod heads:

CAPE COD: It is rumored that in the fall the cows here are sometimes fed cod’s-head! The godlike part of the cod, which, like the human head, is curiously and wonderfully made, forsooth has but little less brain in it, —coming to such an end! To be craunched by cows! I felt my own skull crack with sympathy. What if the heads of men were to be cut off to feed the cows of a superior order of beings who inhabit the islands in the ether? Away goes your fine brain, the house of thought and instinct, to swell the cud of a ruminant animal! —However, an inhabitant assured me that they did not make a practice of feeding cows on cod-heads; the cows merely would eat them sometimes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Actually, cows weren’t being fed the cod heads, which were a local delicacy pretty much reserved for the humans unless they were spoiled remnants, although Herman Melville, in MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE, did describe seeing a cow that had been parsing a pile of such remnants and offal and was wandering around in fishhead slippers:

MOBY-DICK: Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name; for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark-skin. There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some fishermen’s boats, I saw Hosea’s brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and marching along the sand with each foot in a cod’s decapitated head, looking very slip-shod, I assure ye.

One split the cod heads and floured them before frying, and then crunched them bones and all. The heads for this recipe had the eyes and lips removed, and the fish’s air sacs were often included. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1853

At some point during this year or the following one, Waldo Emerson would register his famous notation about “Motherwit”:

Motherwit. Dr Johnson, Milton, Chaucer, & Burns had it. Unless we had Boswell, we should hardly know how to account for Johnson’s fame, his wit is so muffled & choked in his scholastic style. Yet it animates that, and makes his opinions real. Aunt Mary M.E. has it, & can write scrap letters. Who has it, need never write anything but scraps. H.D. Thoreau has it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1961

Kenneth Walter Cameron’s EMERSON THE ESSAYIST; AN OUTLINE OF HIS PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH 1836, WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON THE SOURCES AND INTERPRETATION OF NATURE, ALSO BIBLIOGRAPHICAL APPENDICES OF GENERAL AND SPECIAL INTEREST TO STUDENTS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, EMPHASIZING THOREAU, EMERSON, THE BOSTON LIBRARY SOCIETY AND SELECTED DOCUMENTS OF NEW ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM (Hartford, Connecticut; Box A, Station A, Hartford 06126: Transcendental Books).

Ronald Earl Clapper received his BA from UCLA, the University of California – Los Angeles. He had studied American literature under Professors Leon Howard, Blake R. Nevius, and Robert P. Falk.

Perry Miller’s “Thoreau in the Context of International Romanticism,” New England Quarterly 34 (June 1961) 147-159. “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

In the introduction to his article, Miller states that Emerson, like many later Thoreauvians, thought of Thoreau mainly as a Naturalist. He then traces the development of Romanticism in Europe and America, focusing on Wordsworth and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Wordsworth was rebelling against the poetic diction of the Neoclassical age; against the “formalized and stereotyped abstract adjectives of Pope and Samuel Johnson.” He believed that poetry should use “the real language of men.” However he was not a Realist; he believed that poetry should have form and that passion comes into literature as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” And one of Goethe’s contributions to Romanticism is in “giving an exact description of objects as they appear to him” so that “even the reflections of the author do not interfere with his descriptions.” Americans were initially hostile to Wordsworth. His gaining popularity resulted, in part, from the Hudson River School of landscape painting. The artists, especially Asher Durand, dramatized Wordsworth’s great “Idea” of the balance between the fact and the idea, between the specific and general in their “union of graphic detail and organizing design.” According to Miller the challenge of Romanticism is in striking and maintaining the delicate balance between object and reflection, of fact and truth, of minute observation and generalized concept.” But Thoreau achieves this through his “duality of vision.” He inspects nature in minute detail and yet makes experience intelligible through typology. He was a Transcendentalist as well as a Natural Historian. (Katherine A. O’Meara, April 14, 1989). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1988

Fiona Stafford’s THE SUBLIME SAVAGE dealt with the Ossian/James Macpherson controversy.

President Thomas Jefferson may still have been reading and appreciating Ossian as late as 1789, and commenting upon his continuing admiration as late as 1799, but is that so strange? • Much later than 1799, as of 1815 even, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was fond of referring to Ossian as “the northern Homer,” had François Gérard paint his palace at Malmaison “in the style of Ossian.” Over his bed in the Quirinale in Rome, instead of a mirror, he had Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres do a “Dream of Ossian” on the ceiling. • Much later than 1815, in the fall of 1843 even, Henry Thoreau was appreciating the poetry of Ossian as if there were no challenge to its authenticity. He was, of course, a Harvard graduate who had specialized in literature and languages, and he did, of course, lecture and publish, and it is clear that no challenge was brought forward on this topic from members of his New England audiences. As of 1846, while Thoreau was working simultaneously on drafts of WEEK and of WALDEN, he was bringing materials forward from his lecture “Homer. Ossian. Chaucer” (upon which he had begun work at the suggestion of Waldo Emerson, another Harvard grad, while he was staying on Staten Island and utilizing the resources of the NY Mercantile Library), without indicating that any concerns had ever been brought to his attention. None of the learned readers of The Dial took any exception to these materials. As of May 1, 1851 Thoreau was writing an alleged Ossian excerpt into his Journal. • Much later than Fall 1843, as of November 1881 even, Walt Whitman was still writing about “an Ossianic night” without any indication of awareness that challenge had been made to the authenticity of the materials!

These instances fall further and further outside the longest of the long 18th Centuries. But Thoreau was not a person of ill will, not a white supremacist, not one of those period blokes who were running at the mouth about the AngloKeltish stock and suchlike, as Emerson and Bronson Alcott were being tempted to do, and as Walt Whitman most certainly did for the duration of his exceedingly long florut. And this was all despite the existence since 1775 of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS and it was all despite the existence since 1782 of Shaw’s AN ENQUIRY INTO THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE POEMS ATTRIBUTED TO OSSIAN. Clearly what we need is a “reception study” to evaluate how belatedly such correctives spread through the learned community, what the lag cycle is and how it can be shortened, etc. The basic problem is that we have at present a publication system that lets stuff get out there and sit on library shelves where essentially it becomes stand-alone uncorrectable. Some of it, such as this embarrassing white-race-pride wannabelieve nonsense about origins, is relatively benign, at least in encouraging such folks to feel proud of themselves (everybody deserves to feel proud of themselves), but other of it —such as for instance a recipe for cooking fiddlehead ferns in a “nature” book, a recipe which would in fact promptly give a family incurable cancers of the stomach— is while equally innocent not so harmless. We issue recalls for our vehicles but not for our ideas. Which is one of the many reasons why I am looking forward to the early date at which all academic publishing is going to be by way of hanging files off of one’s WWW homepage. Once we reach that point, we can be in the process of maintaining and correcting and polishing and elaborating our materials for the duration of our respective floruts. —Which should cut down somewhat on this lag cycle. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FABULATION, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: May 11, 2014

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Samuel Johnson HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK:SAMUEL JOHNSON PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.