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JOHNSONIANA
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out of a watch which his master had given to him when dying; and thereby came in for some stinging ridicule from Person. Hawkins, indeed, was grievously scandalised by Johnson's liberal bequest of an annuity to Barber; and the more so, one guesses, because it seems to have been only through Hawkins's importunity that Johnson was induced to make a will at the last moment. A man who succeeded in combining the censures of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Bentham, and Porson, to say nothing of Boswell, Malone, and Murphy, must certainly have had his weaknesses. Yet Johnson had a kindness for him; and one rather guesses that, after all, he was nothing worse than an unusually dull, censorious, and self-righteous specimen of the British middle-class of his time. His most characteristic saying is that Fielding was the 'inventor of a cant phrase, goodness of heart, which means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog.' A good man is one who can see the wickedness of Tom Jones and fully appreciate the virtues of Blifil. Now, if Johnson had died at the age of fifty-four or fifty-five, Hawkins, had he condescended to undertake the task, would have had no rivals in writing a biography, and we should have been duly grateful