JOHNSONIANA[1]
Dr. Birkbeck Hill has completed his labours upon Johnson's life by publishing this collection of Johnsonian Miscellanies. He thanks only too warmly the person who had the good fortune to suggest this scheme. The suggestion, it must be said, needed very little originality. When Croker published his edition of Boswell's life, he saw that it would be desirable to gather the anecdotes from other sources. With curious infelicity, he at first thrust them into Boswell's text; but in later issues they appeared in a separate volume. For that performance Croker, in spite of the criticisms of Macaulay and Carlyle, deserves the thanks of all true Boswellians. Dr. Birkbeck Hill has now given his own collection, which necessarily coincides in great part with Croker's. He has, moreover, added to it a full apparatus of notes, indexes, and references to the original sources.
- ↑ Johnsonian Miscellanies, arranged and edited by George Birkbeck Hill, D.C.L., LL.D. Oxford, 1897, 2 vols. 8vo.
