Courtenay, in his Poetical Review, which I have several times quoted:
'While through life's maze he sent a piercing view, His mind expansive to the object grew. With various stores of erudition fraught, The lively image, the deep-searching thought, Slept in repose;--but when the moment press'd, The bright ideas stood at once confess'd; Instant his genius sped its vigorous rays, And o'er the letter'd world diffus'd a blaze: As womb'd with fire the cloud electrick flies, And calmly o'er th' horizon seems to rise; Touch'd by the pointed steel, the lightning flows, And all th' expanse with rich effulgence glows.'
We shall in vain endeavour to know with exact precision every production of Johnson's pen. He owned to me, that he had written about forty sermons; but as I understood that he had given or sold them to different persons, who were to preach them as their own, he did not consider himself at liberty to acknowledge them. Would those who were thus aided by him, who are still alive, and the friends of those who are dead, fairly inform the world, it would be obligingly gratifying a reasonable curiosity, to which there should, I think, now be no objection. Two volumes of them, published since his death, are sufficiently ascertained; see vol. iii. p. 181. I have before me, in his hand-writing, a fragment of twenty quarto leaves, of a translation into English of Sallust, De Bella Catilinario. When it was done I have no notion; but it seems to have no very superior merit to mark it as his. Beside the publications heretofore mentioned, I am satisfied, from internal evidence, to admit also as genuine the following, which, notwithstanding all my chronological care, escaped me in the course of this work:
'Considerations on the Case of Dr. Trapp's Sermons,' + published in 1739, in the Gentleman's Magazine. [These Considerations were published, not in 1739, but in 1787. Ante, i. 140, note 5.] It is a very ingenious defence of the right of abridging an authour's work, without being held as infringing his property. This is one of the nicest questions in the Law of Literature; and I cannot help thinking, that the indulgence of abridging is often exceedingly injurious to authours and booksellers, and should in very few cases be permitted. At any rate, to prevent difficult and uncertain discussion, and give an absolute security to authours in the property of their labours, no abridgement whatever should be permitted, till after the expiration of such a number of years as the Legislature may be pleased to fix.
But, though it has been confidently ascribed to him, I cannot allow that he wrote a Dedication to both Houses of Parliament of a book entitled The Evangelical History Harmonized. He was no croaker; no declaimer against the times. [See ante, ii. 357.] He would not have written, 'That we are fallen upon an age in which corruption is not barely universal, is universally confessed.' Nor 'Rapine preys on the publick without opposition, and perjury betrays it without inquiry.' Nor would he, to excite a speedy reformation, have conjured up such phantoms of terrour as these: 'A few years longer, and perhaps all endeavours will be in vain. We may be swallowed by an earthquake: we may be delivered to our enemies.' This is not Johnsonian.
There are, indeed, in this Dedication, several sentences constructed upon the model of those of Johnson. But the imitation of the form, without the spirit of his style, has been so general, that this of itself is not sufficient evidence. Even our newspaper writers aspire to it. In an account of the funeral of Edwin, the comedian, in The Diary of Nov. 9, 1790, that son of drollery is thus described: 'A man who had so often cheered the sullenness of vacancy, and suspended the approaches of sorrow.' And in The Dublin Evening Post, August 16, 1791, there is the following paragraph: 'It is a singular circumstance, that, in a city like this, containing 200,000 people, there are three months in the year during which no place of publick amusement is open. Long vacation is here a vacation from pleasure, as well as business; nor is there any mode of passing the listless evenings of declining summer, but in the riots of a tavern, or the stupidity of a coffee-house.'
I have not thought it necessary to specify every copy of verses written by Johnson, it being my intention to, publish an authentick edition of all his Poetry, with notes. BOSWELL. This Catalogue, as Mr. Boswell calls it, is by Dr. Johnson intitled Designs. It seems from the hand that it was written early in life: from the marginal dates it appears that some portions were added in 1752 and 1753. CROKER.
[1171] On April 19 of this year he wrote: 'When I lay sleepless, I used to drive the night along by turning Greek epigrams into Latin. I know not if I have not turned a hundred.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 364. Forty-five years earlier he described how Boerhaave, 'when he lay whole days and nights without sleep, found no method of diverting his thoughts so effectual as meditation upon his studies, and often relieved and mitigated the sense of his torments by the recollection of what he had read, and by reviewing those stores of knowledge which he had reposited in his memory.' Works, vi.