veritas sufficit." This rule, the present biographer promises, shall
guide his pen throughout the following narrative.

It may be said, the death of Dr. Johnson kept the public mind in
agitation beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited
so much attention; and, when the press has teemed with anecdotes,
apophthegms, essays, and publications of every kind, what occasion now
for a new tract on the same thread-bare subject? The plain truth shall
be the answer. The proprietors of Johnson's works thought the life,
which they prefixed to their former edition, too unwieldy for
republication. The prodigious variety of foreign matter, introduced into
that performance, seemed to overload the memory of Dr. Johnson, and, in
the account of his own life, to leave him hardly visible. They wished to
have a more concise, and, for that reason, perhaps, a more satisfactory
account, such as may exhibit a just picture of the man, and keep him the
principal figure in the foreground of his own picture. To comply with
that request is the design of this essay, which the writer undertakes
with a trembling hand. He has no discoveries, no secret anecdotes, no
occasional controversy, no sudden flashes of wit and humour, no private
conversation, and no new facts, to embellish his work. Every thing has
been gleaned. Dr. Johnson said of himself, "I am not uncandid, nor
severe: I sometimes say more than I mean, in jest, and people are apt to
think me serious[a]." The exercise of that privilege, which is enjoyed
by every man in society, has not been allowed to him. His fame has given
importance even to trifles; and the zeal of his friends has brought
every thing to light. What should be related, and what should not, has
been published without distinction: "dicenda tacenda locuti!" Every
thing that fell from him has been caught with eagerness by his admirers,
who, as he says in one of his letters, have acted with the diligence of
spies upon his conduct. To some of them the following lines, in Mallet's