decision of that glorious
country, which I have the daily delight to hear applauded in others, as
eminently just, generous, and humane.

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.

Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller at Lichfield,
in Staffordshire; a very pious and worthy man, but wrong-headed,
positive, and afflicted with melancholy, as his son, from whom alone I
had the information, once told me: his business, however, leading him to
be much on horseback, contributed to the preservation of his bodily
health and mental sanity, which, when he stayed long at home, would
sometimes be about to give way; and Mr. Johnson said, that when his
workshop, a detached building, had fallen half down for want of money to
repair it, his father was not less diligen