��censure in a country where, as every baby is allowed to carry a whip, no person can escape except by chance. The unpub lished crimes, unknown distresses, and even death itself, how ever, daily occurring in less liberal governments and less free nations, soon teach one to content one's self with such petty grievances, .and make one acknowledge that the undistinguishing severity of newspaper abuse may in some measure diminish the diffusion of vice and folly in Great Britain, and while they fright delicate minds into forced refinements and affected insipidity, they are useful to the great causes of virtue in the soul, and liberty in the state ; and though sensibility often sinks under the roughness of their prescriptions, it would be no good policy to take away their licence \
Knowing the state of Mr. Johnson's nerves, and how easily they were affected, I forbore reading in a new Magazine one day, the death of a Samuel Johnson who expired that month ; but my companion snatching up the book, saw it himself, and con trary to my expectation ' Oh (said he) ! I hope that Death will now be glutted with Sam. Johnsons 2 , and let me alone for
thus dragged into a partnership in of gaining popular applause, which
the most detestable depravity that to noble minds is the highest of all
the human mind can invent.' Chal- rewards, seemed now to be totally
Tiers' s British Essayists, -x.\x. Preface, cut off, and no longer to be hoped
p. 25. for.' Annual Register, 1771, i. 60.
A man who had received, as he A young German, travelling in Eng- had, ^6,000 for a mere compilation land in 1782, recorded: 'It is shock- was scarcely justified in putting an ing to a foreigner to see what violent end to his life. He should have left satires on men, rather than on things, suicide to his publishers, who were daily appear in the newspapers, of great losers by him. See Hume's which they tell me there are at least Letters to Strahan, p. 283. a dozen, if not more, published every
1 Horace Walpole wrote on Dec. day.' Moritz's Travels in Eng-
31, 1769 (Letters, v. 211): 'The land, p. 184. See also Life, i. 116,
licentiousness of abuse surpasses all n. i.
example. The most savage mas- 2 Among the contemporaries of sacre of private characters passes for Johnson bearing the same name are sport.' Burke wrote two years the following : later: 'Distinction of character i. Rev. Samuel Johnson, Libra- seemed at an end ; and that power- rian of St. Martin's in the Fields, ful incentive to all public and private Life, i. 135.
virtue of establishing a fair fame and 2. and 3. Rev. William Samuel
T 2 some
�� �
