It may be said, the death of Dr. Johnson kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example.  No literary character ever excited so much attention; and, when the press has teemed with anecdotes, apophthegms, essays, and publications of every kind, what occasion now for a new tract on the same thread-bare subject?  The plain truth shall be the answer.  The proprietors of Johnson’s works thought the life, which they prefixed to their former edition, too unwieldy for republication.  The prodigious variety of foreign matter, introduced into that performance, seemed to overload the memory of Dr. Johnson, and, in the account of his own life, to leave him hardly visible.  They wished to have a more concise, and, for that reason, perhaps, a more satisfactory account, such as may exhibit a just picture of the man, and keep him the principal figure in the foreground of his own picture.  To comply with that request is the design of this essay, which the writer undertakes with a trembling hand.  He has no discoveries, no secret anecdotes, no occasional controversy, no sudden flashes of wit and humour, no private conversation, and no new facts, to embellish his work.  Every thing has been gleaned.  Dr. Johnson said of himself, “I am not uncandid, nor severe:  I sometimes say more than I mean, in jest, and people are apt to think me serious[a].”  The exercise of that privilege, which is enjoyed by every man in society, has not been allowed to him.  His fame has given importance even to trifles; and the zeal of his friends has brought every thing to light.  What should be related, and what should not, has been published without distinction:  “dicenda tacenda locuti!” Every thing that fell from him has been caught with eagerness by his admirers, who, as he says in one of his letters, have acted with the diligence of spies upon his conduct.  To some of them the following lines, in Mallet’s poem on verbal criticism, are not inapplicable: 

  “Such that grave bird in northern seas is found. 
  Whose name a Dutchman only knows to sound;
  Where’er the king of fish moves on before,
  This humble friend attends from shore to shore;
  With eye still earnest, and with bill inclined,
  He picks up what his patron drops behind,
  With those choice cates his palate to regale,
  And is the careful Tibbald of a whale.”

After so many essays and volumes of Johnsoniana, what remains for the present writer?  Perhaps, what has not been attempted; a short, yet full, a faithful, yet temperate, history of Dr. Johnson.

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, September 7, 1709, O. S[b].  His father, Michael Johnson, was a bookseller in that city; a man of large, athletic make, and violent passions; wrong-headed, positive, and, at times, afflicted with a degree of melancholy, little short of madness.  His mother was sister to Dr. Ford, a practising physician, and father of Cornelius Ford, generally known by the name of parson