Immortal Memories

day Celebration held at the Three Cro

r. I am one of those who, in the interval have stood beside his open grave; and I know you will permit me to testify here to the fact that rarely has such brilliant scholarship been combined with so kindly a nature, and with so much generosity to other workers in the literary field. One may sigh that it is not possible to perpetu

Yet how gladly does any lover, not only of Dr. Johnson, but of all good literature, come to Lichfield. Four cathedral cities of our land stand forth in my mind with a certain magnetic power to draw even the most humble lover of books towards them-Oxford, Bath, Norwich, Lichfield, these four and no others. Oxford we all love and revere as the nourishing mother of so many famous men. Here we naturally recall Dr. Johnson's love of it-his defence of it against all comers. The glamour of O

nd of George Borrow. I recall that in the reign of one of its Bishops-the father of Dean Stanley-there was a literary circl

friends. I saw the other day the statement that Anna Seward's name was unknown to the present generation. Now I have her works in nine volumes [6]; I have read them, and I doubt not but that there are many more who have done the same. Sir Walter Scott's friendship would alone preserve her memory if every line she wrote deserved to be forgotten

y not hear the

heavy eave-dro

r all, her verses please me, with all their faults, better than those of Mrs. Barbauld

etter writing faculty has immortalized more than one English author, Horace Walpole for exampl

e us in very marked outline. As with Walpole also, she must have written with an eye to publication. Veracity was not her strong point, but her literary faculty was very marked indeed. Those who have read the letters that treat of her sister's betrothal and death, for example, will not e

ch I imagine with all its priggishness will always survive as a classic for children. There, for a short time, came Major André, betrothed to Honora Sneyd, but destined to die so tragically in the American War of Independence. It is to Miss Seward's malicious talent as a letter writer that we owe the exceedingly picturesque account of Day's efforts to obtain a wife upon a particular pattern, his selection of Sabrina Sidney, whom he prepared for that high destiny by sending her to a boarding school until she was of the right age-his lessons in stoicism-his disappointment because she screamed when he fired pist

famed two gia

ets! hear them

m the mangled

s poor Shakspere'

as Goldsmith, when thrown into the company of both. Still undoubtedly Johnson's last word upon Garrick is the best-'his death has eclipsed the gaiety of nations and diminished the public stock of harmless pleasure.' We who live more than a hundred years later are able to recognize that Garrick has been the one great actor from that age to this. As a rule the mummers are mimics and little more, and generations go on, giving them their brief but glorious hour of fame, and then leaving them as mere names in the history of the stage. Garrick was preserved from th

and others. Boswell's Life of Johnson is the greatest biography in the English language; we all admit that. It is crowded with incident and anecdote. Neither Walter Scott nor Rousseau, each of whom has had an equal number of pages devoted to his personality, lives so distinctly for future ages as does Johnson in the pages of Boswell. Understanding all this, we are entitled to ask ourselves what we should have thought of Dr. Johnson had there been no Boswell; and to this question I do not hesitate to answer that we should have loved him as much as ever, and that there would still have been a mass of material with the true Boswellian flavour. He would not have made an appeal to so large a public, but some ingenious person would have drawn together all the anecdotes, all th

. Johnson reach anything in the shape of real inspiration in his many poems, [15] although it must be admitted that earlier generations admired them greatly. To have been praised ardently by Sir Walter Scott, by Byron, and by Tennyson should seem sufficient to demonstrate that he was a poet, were it not that, as I could prove if time allowed, poets are almost invariably bad critics of poetry. Sir Walter Scott read The Vanity of Human Wishes with "a choking sensation in the

s the scholar

nt, the patron

his epitaph

t which the w

moral or ad

literature. Rasselas, for example, while never ranking with us moderns quite so high as it did with the excellent Miss Jenkins in Cranford, is a never failing delight. So far from being a dead book, is there a young man or a young woman setting out in the world of to-day, aspiring to an all-round literary cultivation, who is not required to k

elves to grow old. Many of these 'Lives' are very beautiful. They are all suggestive. Only the other day I read them again in the fine new edition that was prepared by that staunch Johnsonian, Dr. Birkbeck Hill. The greatest English critic of

hat he had said about Milton. He read some extracts, after Johnson's death, from the Meditations, and wrote contemptuously of them. [18] But if Cowper had always possessed, in addition to his fascinating other-worldliness the healthy worldliness of Dr. Johnson, perhaps we should all have been the happier. To me that collection of Prayers and Meditations seems one of the most helpful books that I have ever read, and I am surprised that it is not constantly reprinted in a handy form. [19] It is a valuable inspiration to men to keep

often felt that his work did not receive half the encouragement that it deserved. We hear sometimes, at least in London, of authors who advertise themselves. I rather fancy that all such advertisement is monopolized by the novelist, and that the newspapers do not trouble themselves very much about literary men who work in other fields than that of fiction. Fiction has much to be said for it, but as a rule it reaps its reward very promptl

as by no means a rich man. Mr. Reade has clearly been able to spare no expense, with the result that here are many interesting facts corrective of earlier students. The whole is a valuable record of the ancestry of Dr. Johnson. It shows clearly that whereas Dr. Johnson thought very little of his ancestry, and scarcely knew anything of his grandfather on the paternal or the maternal side, he really sprang from a very remarkable stock, notably on the maternal side; and that his mother's family, the Fords, had among their connexions all kinds of fairly prosperous people, clergymen, officials, professional men as well as sturdy yeomen. These ancestors of Dr. Johnson did not help him much to push his way in t

misfortune not to be a citizen of Lichfield-you who are will not wish to challenge me-that this city has distinguished itself in quite an unique way. I do not believe that it can be found that any other town or city of England-I will not say of Scotland or of Ireland-has done hon

towns contend

e living Homer b

the house in which he was born. Your citizens not only did that for Johnson, but they gave him other marks of their esteem. He writes from Lichfield to Sir Joshua Reynolds to express his pleasure that his portrait has been "much visited and much admired." "Every man," he adds, "has a lurking desire to appear considerable in his native place." Then we all remember Boswell's na?ve con

e to those who in later years return to "calf-land." Then how good he was to an old schoolfellow who called upon him here. The fact that this man had failed in the battle of life while Johnson had succeeded, only made the Doctor the kinder. I know of no more human picture than that-"A Mr. Jackson," as he is called by Boswell, "in his coarse grey coat," obviously very poor, and as Boswell suggests, "dull and untaught." The "great Cham of Literature" listens patiently as the worthy Jackson tells his troubles, so much more patiently than he would

also a great moralist-a superb inspiration to a better life. We should not love Johnson so much were he not presented to us as a man of many weaknesses and faults akin to our own, not a saint by any means, and therefore not so far removed from us as some more ethereal characters of whom we may read. Johnson striving to methodize his life, to fight against sloth and all the minor vices to which he was prone, is the Johnson whom s

g. Let us drink in solemn silence, upstanding