ANECDOTES OF THE LATE SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.



Too much intelligence is often as pernicious to biography as too little;
the mind remains perplexed by contradiction of probabilities, and finds
difficulty in separating report from truth. If Johnson then lamented that
so little had ever been said about Butler, I might with more reason be led
to complain that so much has been said about himself; for numberless
informers but distract or cloud information, as glasses which multiply will
for the most part be found also to obscure. Of a life, too, which for the
last twenty years was passed in the very front of literature, every leader
of a literary company, whether officer or subaltern, naturally becomes
either author or critic, so that little less than the recollection that it
was ONCE the request of the deceased, and TWICE the desire of those whose
will I ever delighted to comply with, should have engaged me to add my
little book to the number of those already written on the subject. I used
to urge another reason for forbearance, and say, that all the readers
would, on this singular occasion, be the writers of his life: like the
first representation of the Masque of Comus, which, by changing their
characters from spectators to performers, was ACTED by the lords and ladies
it was WRITTEN to entertain. This objection is, however, now at an end, as
I have found friends, far remote indeed from literary questions, who may
yet be diverted from melancholy by my description of Johnson's manners,
warmed to virtue even by the distant reflection of his glowing excellence,
and encouraged by the relation of his animated zeal to persist in the
profession as well as practice of Christianity.