poem on verbal criticism, are not inapplicable:

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

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

SAMUEL JOHNSON was born at Lichfield, September 7, 1709, O. S[b]. His
father, Michael Johnson, was a bookseller in that city; a man of large,
athletic make, and violent passions; wrong-headed, positive, and, at
times, afflicted with a degree of melancholy, little short of madness.
His mother was sister to Dr. Ford, a practising physician, and father of
Cornelius Ford, generally known by the name of parson Ford, the same who
is represented near the punch-bowl in Hogarth's Midnight Modern
Conversation. In the life of Fenton, Johnson says, that "his abilities,
instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and
dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and the
wise." Being chaplain to the earl of Chesterfield, he wished to attend
that nobleman on his embassy to the Hague. Colley Cibber has recorded
the anecdote. "You should go," said the witty peer, "if to your many
vices you would add one more." "Pray, my lord, what is that?"
"Hypocrisy, my dear doctor." Johnson had a younger brother named