E-text prepared by Al Haines
Transcriber's note:
Page numbers are enclosed between curly brackets to assis the reader in using the index.
by
Author of "Poets and Poetry," "The Claims of French Poetry," etc.
Thornton Butterworth Limited15 Bedford Street, London, W.C.2
First Published . . . . February 1913
Second Impression . . . September 1919
Third Impression . . . . August 1927
Fourth Impression . . . January 1931
All Rights Reserved
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The name of Samuel Johnson is, of course, not the greatest in Englishprose, but even to-day, when he has been dead more than a century and aquarter, it is still the most familiar. We live in an age ofnewspapers. Where all can read, the newspaper press, taken as a whole,will be a fairly accurate reflection of what is in the mind of apeople. Nothing will be mentioned frequently in newspapers which isnot of some interest to a large number of readers; and whatever isfrequently mentioned there cannot fail to become widely known. Triedby this test, Johnson's name must be admitted to be very widely knownand of almost universal interest. No man of letters—perhaps scarcelyeven Shakespeare himself—is so often quoted in the columns of thedaily press. His is a name that may {8} be safely introduced into anywritten or spoken discussion, without fear of the stare ofunrecognizing ignorance; and the only danger to which those who quotehim expose themselves is that of the yawn of over-familiarity. Even inhis own lifetime his reputation extended far beyond the limited circleof literature or scholarship. Actresses delighted in his conversation;soldiers were proud to entertain him in their barracks; innkeepersboasted of his having slept in their inns. His celebrity was such thathe himself once said there was hardly a day in which the newspapers didnot mention his name; and a year after his death Boswell could ventureto write publicly of him that his "character, religious, moral,political and literary, nay his figure and manner, are, I believe, moregenerally known than those of almost any man." But what was, in hisown day, partly a respect paid to the maker of the famous Dictionaryand partly a curiosity about "the great Oddity," as the Edensorinnkeeper called him, has in the course of the nineteenth centurybecome a great deal more.
He is still for us the great scholar and the strongly markedindividuality, but he has gradually attained a kind of apotheosis, akind of semi-legendary position, almost rivalling that of the greatJohn Bull himself, as the {9} embodi