and unattractive women, together with a poor physician, whose practice, unprofitable to himself, was probably far more so to his victims, forming a community in which a favor done to one gave a pang to the rest, and where he himself found so little comfort, that he dreaded to enter his own door, but would not dislodge them, because they could have no home but for him. Truly, if it was required of those who censure Johnson to exercise equal generosity, the voices of condemnation would be few and small. While Lord Brougham, as it seems to us, hardly does justice to the great moralist, presenting a view of him which is deficient in harmony and wholeness, and made up of parts not always consistent with each other, the shade of Boswell would be beside itself with exultation to find his own opinion of his own merits confirmed by so competent a judge; for assuredly the Auchinleck patrician never dreamed that his connection with Johnson would suggest to any human mind the recollection of the intercourse of Plato and Xenophon with Socrates. His Lordship praises not only his tact, cleverness, and skill, but his admirable good-humor, his strict love of truth, his high and generous principle, his kindness to his friends, and his well-meant, but sometimes grotesque devotion, and says that his book, once taken up, is the most difficult of all others to lay down. Certainly, no man of really intellectual taste ever joins in the contempt which is poured on Boswell's name ; nor, on the other hand, will many be ready to subscribe to such extensive praise as this. The truth is, that his contemporaries were as much at a loss to know what place to assign him, as men of the present day. Lord Stowell, when pressed on the subject, could only say that he was universally welcome as a "jolly fellow." was his pleasure to parade those weaknesses which most men keep to themselves, and as he kept his banner of folly perpetually flying, they did no justice to the merits which he possessed in no small degree. What but a strong admiration of intellectual power could have induced him to lead the life which he did? And it shows how oddly our notions of high and low are perverted, that so many wonder at his submitting to the caprice of Johnson, while it is considered perfectly natural that such a person as Miss Burney should feel herself honored by the trust of preparing snuff for the queen. It We have no disposition to find fault with Lord Brougham's estimate of Johnson's literary merits; and what he says of the style of the great moralist is altogether discriminating and true. To Johnson's poetry he assigns a rank perhaps too high, if it be regarded as poetry; but when we regard it as eloquent and powerful declamation, like that of Juvenal, against the vices and follies of the times, it certainly exhibits a striking union of deep feeling with majesty and might. He loved the regular cadences of verse, which he is said to have read in a very impressive way; and we see, in fact, in his prose, that measured step and those balanced periods which would seem wearily formal and mechanical in any other, but which affect us differently in his case, because they are the natural expression of his mind. Some of his writings Lord Brougham characterizes as dull and flimsy, in which he has reference principally to the Rambler and Idler, and seems to us to express a hasty and ill-considered opinion. Dull the Rambler may be, but flimsy it is not; it is dull to us because it was an ephemeral publication, which found readers and satisfied them in the day for which it was intended; and, if it has lost its attraction, it is in the same predicament with the Spectator, which no one now thinks of sitting down to devour. That it was not wholly speculative and unpractical appears from the circumstance pointed out by Lord Brougham himself, that Johnson, in some of these light periodicals, has an able argument against imprisonment for debt and capital punishment, thus anticipating by three quarters of a century questions of great interest, which his own age cared little for, but which have become subjects of vast importance at the present day. We fully accede to the justice of the opinion which pronounces the Lives of the Poets the best of Johnson's works. Some of these biographies are spoken of with contempt, for their prejudice and narrowness, by those who have never read them. Lord Brougham thinks the life of Milton, for example, does not deserve the censure usually cast upon it; and any one can see, that, while Johnson had no sympathy with Milton's politics, and was unable to appreciate the peculiar beauties of Lycidas, he assigns to the Paradise Lost a place among the highest efforts of the human mind. The life of Savage is here spoken of as overpraised, and that of Swift as most objectionable; while it is admitted that Johnson may have been so severe on the Dean of St. Patrick's because he was so untrue to the sacred profession, which, with his tastes and principles, he ought never to have assumed. As to Johnson's prejudices, whatever they were, they never worked in darkness; he always fearlessly avowed them; while his clearheaded sagacity, his sharp critical discernment, his manly indignation at every thing unworthy, his occasionally profound discussions, and pointed and glittering remarks, giving life to the narrative which generally flows full with thought, and, among other attractions, his occasional solemnity and tenderness of feeling, — these various merits are united in a work which will never lose its charm for intellectual readers so long as our language endures. But Dr. Johnson's works of various kinds, excellent and instructive as they are, will be more or less esteemed as the literary fashion changes; always sure, however, of readers of the higher order, however neglected by the light and trifling generation who disdain all things but new. If they were lost and forgotten, his fame would rest securely on his conversation as Boswell has recorded it, which is unrivalled for its point, brilliancy, and strength; it is here that his clear and powerful mind makes the richest display of its activity, and the vast variety of its resources. It goes straight as a cannon-ball to the heart of every subject; with intuitive discernment he sees the matter at once in all its bearings ; no mysticism nor illusion can stand for a moment before him; but so far from giving a cold dissection of the question presented, his views are made interesting by the finest possible illustrations, and that quick sarcasm and playful humor, always at perfect command, in which he was never exceeded. We do not well understand on what authority Lord Brougham undertakes to place Swift before him. The Dean's range was limited, he says, but within it he must have been very great. It is true that he had that strong common sense and wit which are among the chief elements of success; but we do not know that he had the overflowing abundance and easy command of his resources which conversation requires. Addison, too, he says, has left a great reputation of this kind, and Bolingbroke's superiority to all others cannot be doubted. But it seems to us, that he might as well exalt the social powers of Adam and Eve, who may have been great in conversation, for aught we know, though the existing records of it are quite too few to sustain a confident opinion. When Lord Brougham speaks of Johnson's conversation as no conversation in any proper sense of the word, as destitute of all free interchange of thought, and allowing no free discussion of sentiments and opinions, he is evidently misled by Boswell's record, for that worthy did not care to set down any thing but what Johnson said; the remarks of others were introduced only when they served as suggestions for his own. It would have been inhuman to require of him to treasure up all the lifeless and indifferent things which were said, merely for the sake of keeping the entireness of the conversation. And yet the prominence which is thus given to the remarks of Johnson makes them appear oracular and dictatorial, as if to hear what he would say was the only object and concern of the whole party. Now Boswell had this feeling, — that it was the province of all others to listen, and Johnson's alone to speak; but others doubtless viewed the matter in a different light; and these were like all other conversations, in which each one took his share, while Johnson bore the most distinguished part, as indeed he would, were he living in any circle of the present day. Let the attempt be made to record the sayings of any other master of conversation, — Sir James Mackintosh, for example, and one easily sees that in these social efforts Johnson has no brother near his throne. -- Though Lord Brougham, in his particular criticisms on Dr. Johnson's mind and character, is not always entirely just, his summary of the whole is given in terms to which no objection can be made. He says, that those who saw him but once or twice formed an erroneous estimate of his temper, which was rather kindly and sociable, and not at all sullen or morose; he allows that Johnson, to the last, had nothing of that severity and querulousness which the old are so apt to feel. He admits that he was friendly, actively so, in the highest degree, that he was even imprudently charitable, that he was strictly and always just, that his love of truth was wonderful, in matters both small and great, and that his habitual piety, his sense of his own unworthiness, and his generally blameless life entitled him to a place among the good and great, while he showed his right appreciation of this world's honors by attaching more importance to his worth than to his fame. Certainly this is high praise, and such as few can ever deserve. But we do not see in this writer the hearty sympathy with which Carlyle, for example, enters into the struggles and sorrows of brave old Samuel," admires the heroism and manly independence of his bearing, and does not upbraid him with the coarseness of his manners, out of respect for the firm energy with which, through his dreary voyage of life, he forced his strained and shattered vessel, built in the eclipse," through the dark and resisting sea. Next in order is Adam Smith, who is represented in Croker's Boswell, the main characteristic of which is a brave neglect of dates and all kinds of precision, as having come in conflict with Johnson, when the latter was on his Northern tour. It is said that the subject of difference was Smith's account of Hume's last sickness; that Johnson, with his usual benignity, told Smith that he lied, and that he of the Moral Sentiments, in return, applied to the moralist a term which properly belongs to younger branches of the canine race, and is not often, we believe, used in the best society with respect to them, though of this we speak doubtfully, having no means in our solitary attic of knowing what refinements may have been introduced by the elegant literature of the day. It is a pity to disturb the story of this classical communion; but as Johnson was in Scotland in 1773, and Hume died in 1776, it was certainly premature in the Doctor to take offence three years before offence was given. In fact, this slight anachronism brings the authenticity of the whole account into serious question; not, however, to the disparagement of Sir Walter Scott, whom Lord Brougham is inclined to blame for it. He indeed reported it to Croker; but he said distinctly that he had it from Professor John Millar, to whom, therefore, the responsibility belongs. It was no doubt an imaginative picture of what the meeting of these two great men, if they came together, was likely to have been, dealing with the future as Mr. Landor brings up the voices of the past. Not much is known of the early days of Adam Smith, save that he was stolen by gypsies in his childhood, but soon happily rescued, and that his delicate health in youth drove him to the usual resource of books and study. Having obtained an exhibition for Baliol College, he spent seven years at Oxford, but afterwards retained very little reverence and affection for that time-honored institution. Of the enlargement of mind which then distinguished it some judg |