'DEAR HONOURED MOTHER, Neither your condition nor your character make it fit for me to say much. You have been the best mother, and I believe the best woman in the world. I thank you for your indulgence to me, and beg forgiveness of all that I have done ill, and all that I have omitted to do well. God grant you his Holy Spirit, and receive you to everlasting happiness, for Jesus Christ's sake. Amen. Lord Jesus receive your spirit. I am, dear, dear mother, Amen. Your dutiful son, SAM. JOHNSON.' With the Three days later he heard of her death. tenderness of conscience which always marked him he wrote: -"You will conceive my sorrow for the loss of my mother, of the best mother. If she were to live again surely I should behave better to her. But she is happy, and what is past is nothing to her; and for me, since I cannot repair my faults to her, I hope repentance will efface them.' He continues :-'I shall send a bill of twenty pounds in a few days, which I thought to have brought to my mother; but God suffered it not. I have not power or composure to say much more.' These twenty pounds he had earned by his Rasselas. While she was still breathing, while 'her weakness afflicted him beyond what he was willing to communicate to her,' he had to wrestle with poverty, and to call on his swelling heart for a book for which the booksellers would be willing to give him money. He would fain sit down and weep. But there was required of him a song and melody in his heaviness. It is little wonderful that the song was a song of sadness. He had not only to write a story, but what to a man of his nature was no doubt still more painful, to make a bargain about it. He must have some money and have it quickly. On the very day on which he sent his last letter to his mother, he wrote to Mr. Strahan, the printer, as follows: 'SIR, When I was with you last night I told you of a story which I was preparing for the press. The title will be "The Choice of Life or The History of ... Prince of Abissinia." • ... 1 It will make about two volumes like little Pompadour that is about one middling volume. The bargain which made with Mr. Johnson 2 was seventy five pounds (or guineas) a volume, and twenty-five pounds for the second edition. I will sell this either at that price or for sixty, the first edition of which he shall himself fix the number, and the property then to revert to me, or for forty pounds, and share the profit, that is retain half the copy. I shall have occasion for thirty pounds on Monday night, when I shall deliver the book which I must entreat you upon such delivery to procure me. I would have it offered to Mr. Johnson, but have no doubt of selling it, on some of the terms mentioned. I will not print my name, but expect it to be known. Jan. 20, 1759. Get me the money if you can January 20th this year was a Saturday. Johnson had been writing the book all the week. 'He told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he composed Rasselas in the evenings of one week, sent it to the press in portions as it was written, and had never since read it over.' It was on Saturday, January 13, that he seems first to have heard of his mother's danger; at all 1 By 'little Pompadour,' Johnson, no doubt, means the second and cheaper edition of The History of the Marchioness de Pompadour, which had been just published. 2 Mr. Johnson the bookseller was, I conjecture, W. Johnston, who, with Strahan and Dodsley, purchased the book. 3 6 'Fifty-five pounds' written first and then scored over. 4 Johnson did not generally print his name to his books. 5 Boswell's Life of Johnson, vi. xxviii. • Ib. i. 341. events his first letter to her bears that date. He must have begun his story on the following Monday, and written it in hot haste. If he worked seven days to the week he wrote each evening more than seventeen pages of the present edition; and if he rested on the Sunday he wrote more than twenty pages. It would be a great effort for most people merely to copy so much matter. That he sent it to the press in portions, as it was written, does not seem consistent with this letter, and Sir Joshua's memory probably failed him on this point. For the first edition Johnson received one hundred pounds, and for the second twenty-five. His friend, the Italian scholar, Baretti, says that any other person with the degree of reputation he then possessed would have got £400 for that work, but Johnson never understood the art of making the most of his productions? With the money that he received he defrayed the expenses of his mother's funeral, and paid some little debts which she had left. The house in which in her widowhood she had carried on her husband's trade as a bookseller, though it was Johnson's own, and though he was sorely tried by want of money, he would not let or sell. He left it to his mother's old servant, Catherine Chambers, for her use during her life-time. 'My mother's debts,' he wrote, 'dear mother, I suppose I may pay with little difficulty; and the little trade may go silently forward. I fancy Kitty can do nothing better; and I shall not want to put her out of a house, where she has lived so long, and with so much virtue 2.' The week of sorrow and strain and toil was at an end. Did the memory of it, more than seventy years later, move Thomas Carlyle to write the beautiful Reminiscences of his father in the few days in which the old man lay dead in the bed-chamber waiting for his burial? If it did, it was a memory rich in fruits. The gloom which surrounded Johnson as in his garret in Gough Square he wrote his story on The Choice of Life shows 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 341, n. 3. 2 Ib. i. 515. itself in almost every page. Even in his happiest hours he would have written sadly of life. Great though the enjoyments were that he often found in it, yet when he thought of it he was never happy. Did the question rise 'whether life was upon the whole more happy or miserable, he was decidedly for the balance of misery!' With Imlac he would have always said:-'Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed 2.' But now, in the words of the old man whom Rasselas met in his moonlight walk along the bank of the Nile, he could have added with a sigh:-"I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband". And yet, in all his unhappiness, his loneliness, his poverty, his ill-health, not a complaint escapes his mouth. He might have said with the noble Venetian merchant : 'I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, But his part he played from first to last without whining. There was not a touch of bitterness in his nature. From Swift's savage humour and from Voltaire's biting irony he was equally free. Life is unhappy, but it may be made less unhappy by wisdom, by moderation, and by the resolute discharge of duty. Innocent pleasures must be enjoyed whenever they offer, and 'the short gleams of gaiety which life allows us' must not be needlessly clouded. (But after all, 'there is but one solid basis of happiness; and that is, the reasonable hope of a happy futurity. As for the choice of life, that choice which harasses us on the threshold of life, and troubles us in our course with idle regrets, to few indeed is it really free. With the hermit we must say :-'To him that lives well every form of life is good; nor can I give any other 2 Post, p. 67. 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, iv. 300. 3 Post, p. 143. 5 Post, p. 119. 4. Merchant of Venice, i. 1. 77. • Boswell's Life of Johnson, iii. 363. rule for choice than to remove from all apparent evil'.' The poet Imlac tells the same lesson. 'Very few,' he said, 'live by choice; every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly co-operate 2. This is a truth--if, that is to say, it be a truth-which Johnson often enforced. In The Idler he puts it in the mouth of 'Omar the prudent,' a man who had passed seventy-five years in making schemes of life, none of which came to anything. "Young man," said Omar, "it is of little use to form plans of life.” To Boswell, Johnson writes :-'To prefer one future mode of life to another upon just reasons requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us.' In his diary he records :-'Scarcely any man persists in a course of life planned by choice, but as he is restrained from deviation by some external power. He who.may live as he will, seldom lives long in the observation of his own rules". To his hero he shows the different states of life. Surely,' says the young Prince, as hopeful as he was trustful,' surely happiness is somewhere to be found". But youth he finds lost in folly, acting without a plan, sad or cheerful only by chance, and following a course of life which should cause shame, and was certain if it came to old age to bring misery and remorse. The teachers of morality he sees powerless to support their own unhappiness by their 'polished periods and studied sentences", and the hermit has to own to him that a life such as his will be certainly miserable, but not certainly devout ". The philosopher who directs his hearers to live according to nature he discovers to be 'one of the sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer"; and the astronomer, learned, benevolent, gifted with knowledge and many virtues, is one more instance how ' of the uncertainties of our present |