must have agitated Boswell not a little, while his own book was slowly rising on the stocks, to hear that the whole first edition of Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes had sold out on the day of issue, and that four editions at least had been called for within a year after publication. But he bided his time, and, in spite of brief intervals of distraction and dissipation, went on steadily with his work.
An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson, by Joseph Towers, Ll. D. (1786) is the most censorious of these early biographies. It is written to teach Johnson’s eulogists that ‘as he had great excellencies, he had also great weaknesses; and the latter appear sometimes to have been nearly as conspicuous as the former.’ The author, Joseph Towers, had lived a life singularly like Johnson’s in some of its outward aspects. He was the son of a bookseller; he had struggled with poverty, and had attained to Latin and Greek; he had come to London to seek his fortune, and had borne a hand in the Biographia Britannica and other large literary undertakings; he was himself an active political pamphleteer and a writer of Lives, long and short; he had been decorated, by the University of Edinburgh, with the degree of Doctor of Laws. The parallel will stretch no further, for Towers was a dissenting minister and a violent Whig. Boswell, while professing abhorrence for his ‘democratical notions and propensities,’ yet speaks of him kindly as ‘an ingenious, knowing, and very convivial man.’ This, coming from a connoisseur of good company, is strong evidence; yet nothing could be less convivial than the temper of the Essay, which, while it quarrels with Johnson’s fame, adds nothing to our knowledge of his life. Indeed, the
