"Dr. Johnson" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to give a definition of nonsense, Dr. Johnson replied, "Sir, it is nonsense to bolt a ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... this person "has an idea that the train has started", and the other "had no idea that the dinner would be so bad". But this word 'idea' is perhaps the worst case in the English language. Matters have not mended here since the times of Dr. Johnson; of whom Boswell tells us: "He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind". There is perhaps ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... to mortals like himself, may demand, like Augustus, to be dismissed at his departure with applause." He reflected that he, an ironmonger's son, was not born to save the world, and if the great Dr. Johnson could say what he did, with how little ought not a humble Cowfold tradesman to be satisfied! We all of us have too vast a conception of the duty which Providence has imposed upon us; and one great service which modern geology and astronomy ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... Dr. Johnson has called 'metaphysical distresses.' It is striking enough to observe how differently the quiet monasteries of the Carthusian and Trappist brotherhoods affected Matthew Arnold and Robert Louis Stevenson. In his well-known elegiac stanzas Matthew ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... Dr. Johnson rises from trap-door P. S., and Ghost of BOSWELL from trap-door O. P. The latter bows respectfully to the House, and obsequiously to the Doctor's Ghost, ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... humour, no outre illustration, no divergence from the beaten track is attempted; the heavy and portentous gravity of his manner and matter is unrelieved by a single touch of light—all is sombre, deep, profound. One can fancy that Dr. Buchanan is inclined to think, with Dr. Johnson, that a punster is as ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... of the World, laughing, "I shall have to nickname you Dr. Johnson Redivivus. I believe, were the subject under discussion, you would admire the coiffure of the Furies. It would occur to you that it must ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... to be dealt with until we solemnly understand that whether men shall be Christians and poets, or infidels and dunces, does not depend on the way they cut their hair, tie their breeches, or light their fires. Dr. Johnson might have worn his wig in fullness conforming to his dignity, without therefore coming to the conclusion that human wishes were vain; nor is Queen Antoinette's civilized hair-powder, as opposed to Queen Bertha's savagely loose hair, the cause of Antoinette's laying ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... already, that have just gasped for breath and died. The last paragraph I particularly object to, it is so full of vanity. Your male friends will still treat you like a woman; and many a man, for instance Dr. Johnson, Lord Littleton, and even Dr. Priestley have insensibly been led to utter warm eulogiums in private that they would be sorry openly to avow without some cooling explanatory ifs. An author, especially a woman, should be cautious, lest she too hastily swallows the crude praises which partial ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... great error has been committed by those who class Aeschylus and Sophocles together as belonging to the same era, and refer both to the age of Pericles, because each was living while Pericles was in power. We may as well class Dr. Johnson and Lord Byron in the same age, because both lived in the reign of George III. The Athenian rivals were formed under the influences of very different generations; and if Aeschylus lived through a considerable ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as can be conjectured, the image the world formed of the Professor was a sort of aggregate of Dr. Johnson, Bentley, Grotius, Mezzofanti, and a slight touch of, say Conington, to bring him well up to date. But so much of the first that whenever the raconteur repeated one of the Professor's moderately bon-mots, he always put ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... day to count up the different treatments of pneumonia that have been in fashion in our day; there must be seven or eight, and I am only afraid the next thing will be a sort of skepticism and contempt of remedies. Dr. Johnson said long ago that physicians were a class of men who put bodies of which they knew little into bodies of which they knew less, but certainly this isn't the fault of the medicines altogether; you and I know well enough they are often most stupidly ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... glad you write the word "lunch," and not "luncheon." I told FRED that—but he went to Johnson's Dictionary, and read out something about "Lunch" being only a colloquial form of "luncheon." Still, I don't care a little bit. Dr. JOHNSON lived so long ago, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... Cambridge, where his memory is still cherished; and a mulberry-tree, supposed in some way to be his, rather unkindly kept alive. Milton was not a submissive pupil; in fact, he was never a submissive anything, for there is point in Dr. Johnson's malicious remark, that man in Milton's opinion was born to be a rebel, ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... musical catalogue of the British Museum, compiled by Thomas Oliphant, Esq., it is stated that the words to Acis and Galatea "are said to be written, but apparently partly compiled, by John Gay." This serenata is included among Gay's Poems in Dr. Johnson's edition of the English Poets, 1790, as well as in Chalmers's edition of 1810, and in the complete edition of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 219, January 7, 1854 • Various
... read anyhow, and, assuming thus much to be demonstrated, we may pass to something else. What is a weightier consideration in the matter of reading than either how or when. As a question, it would be differently answered in different ages of the world. We know that Dr. Johnson once took a little girl on his knee and put her directly down again because she had not read "Pilgrim's Progress." The great lexicographer might take up and put down a good many children nowadays before he found the right ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... requested to inspect a quaint protuberance in a pile of granite at a little distance off, which bears a remote resemblance to a gigantic human face, adorned with a short beard; and which, he is informed, is considered quite a portrait (of all the people in the world to liken it to!) of Dr. Johnson! It is, therefore, publicly known as "Johnson's Head." If it can fairly be compared with any of the countenances of any remarkable characters that ever existed, it may be said to exhibit, in violent exaggeration, the worst physiognomical peculiarities of Nero and ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... inn, now the caretaker's house, visited by Dr. Johnson and Boswell in 1773, the poet Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy in 1803, while some of the many other celebrities who called from time to time had left their signatures on the window-panes. Burns and his friend Nasmyth the artist breakfasted there on one occasion, and Burns ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... alleged to have said that the Anglo-Saxon race was incapable of art, and that in this respect Chicago was pre-eminently Anglo-Saxon. "Alleged," I say, for reports of lectures in the American papers are always to be taken with caution, and are very often as fanciful as Dr. Johnson's reports of the debates in Parliament. The reporter is not generally a shorthand writer. He jots down as much as he conveniently can of the lecturer's remarks, and pieces them out from imagination. Thus, I ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... was my gloves which I had left there. But what did gloves matter, I asked myself, in a world, as Dr. Johnson describes it, ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... the accumulated dirt, and trace with finger-tip the fast-vanishing inscription. It says, "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith." This, then, is the way the world reveres its great ones. Of what avail a monument to the poet in Westminster Abbey, dignified by the celebrated epitaph of Dr. Johnson, when his tomb is thus relegated to the domain of neglect and oblivion? Even the site at present indicated is "entirely conjectural:" the precise position of the poet's grave has ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... apprehend, however, that he invented nothing. For, besides that subsequent intercourse with Persians would have defeated the effect of his representation had it reposed on a fiction, it is known that the Greeks did not rightly appreciate tallness. 'Procerity,' to use Dr. Johnson's stately word in speaking of the stately Prussian regiment, was underrated in Greece; perhaps for this reason, that in some principal gymnastic contests, running, leaping, horsemanship, and charioteering, it really ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... conduct he held towards the members of his family, was of the same kind as that he observed towards animals. He was for the most part extravagantly fond of them; but, when he was displeased, and this frequently happened, and for very trivial reasons, his anger was alarming. Mary was what Dr. Johnson would have called, "a very good hater." In some instance of passion exercised by her father to one of his dogs, she was accustomed to speak of her emotions of abhorrence, as having risen to agony. In a word, her conduct during her girlish years, ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... [3] Dr. Johnson, it is well known, was a firm believer in ghosts, as the following extract will show:—"That the dead are seen no more," said Imlac, "I will undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages, and of all nations. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... forgetting; and yet, in the very week when I am revising this passage, I observe advertised a new edition, attractively illustrated, of the "Evenings at Home"—a joint work of Mrs. Barbauld's and her brother's, (the elder Dr. Aikin.) Mrs. Barbauld was exceedingly clever. Her mimicry of Dr. Johnson's style was the best of all that exist. Her blank verse "Washing Day," descriptive of the discomforts attending a mistimed visit to a rustic friend, under the affliction of a family washing, is picturesquely circumstantiated. And her prose hymns for ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... that Proteus-like idea, with as many appellations as the nine-titled Corcyra! 'Give me,' I demanded of a scholar some time ago, 'give me a definition of poetry.' 'Tres-volontiers;' and he proceeded to his library, brought me a Dr. Johnson, and overwhelmed me with a definition. Shade of the immortal Shakespeare! I imagine to myself the scowl of your spiritual eye upon the profanity of that scurrilous Ursa Major. Think of poetry, dear B——, think of poetry, and then think of Dr. Samuel Johnson! ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... ill mannered. We do not speak of such expressions as, Has your mother sold her mangle? and the like, used only by persons who have never asked themselves where they expect to go to? but of all unnecessary demands whatever. "Sir," said the great Dr. Johnson, "it is uncivil to be continually asking, Why is a dog's tail short, or why is ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... Pembroke College, graceless varlets, raise an alarm of fire that they may see the frightened poet drop from the window, half dead with alarm; old Foulis, the Glasgow printer, volunteers to send from his press such, a luxurious edition of Gray's poems as the London printers can not match; Dr. Johnson, holding the page to his eyes, growls over this stanza, and half-grudgingly praises that. I had spent perhaps the pleasantest day which the fates vouchsafed me during my sojourn in England; and here I was back ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... Dr. Johnson, the grandfather of young Verplanck, on the mother's side, came from Stratford to be President of Columbia College, the year after his grandson was born. To him, in an equal degree with his grandmother, we must give the credit of bringing forward the precocious boy in his ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... agree with Dr. Johnson, that Ben Jonson wrote the prologue and epilogue to this play. Shakspeare had a little before assisted him in his Sejanus.... I think I now and then perceive his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... Well, as a matter of fact, they do leave a large part of it. If they did not they would have no excuse for having subordinates. The reward of good work is more work. This is less of a hardship than it sounds. Sir James Barrie once quoted Dr. Johnson's statement that doubtless the Lord could have made a better fruit than the strawberry, but that he doubtless never did, and added to it that He doubtless could have created something that was more fun than hard work, but ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... him an irreplaceable portion of the good humour of life; and I found that the name of Harry Clifton touched more than one chord. He had heard Harry Clifton sing. As a child, music-halls were barred to him, but Harry Clifton, it seems, was so humane and well-grounded—his fundamentals, as Dr. Johnson would say, were so sound—that he sang also at Assembly Rooms, and there my friend was taken, in his tender years, by his father, to hear him. There he heard the good fellow, who was conspicuously jolly and most ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... "the Truth" in such a tone as to make it unlikely that his "message" should be accepted by opponents. Like Carlyle, however, he had a heart rich in affection, no breach in friendship, he says, ever began on his side; while, as "a good hater," Dr. Johnson might have admired him. He carried into political and theological conflicts the stubborn temper of the Border prickers, his fathers, who had ridden under the Roses and the Lion of the Hepburns. So far Knox was an example of the doctrine of heredity; that we know, however little we learn ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... herself—when she's in love. I don't care if she is old or fat or homely or prosy. She feels that little flutter under her ribs and she drops from the tree like a ripe plum. I didn't care if Roger Mifflin and I were as odd a couple as old Dr. Johnson and his wife, I only knew one thing: that when I saw that little red devil again I was going to be all his—if he'd have me. That's why the old Moose Hotel in Bath is always sacred to me. That's where I learned that life still held something fresh for me—something better than ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... it occurred to me that this childish incident suggested an answer to the question asked by Dr. Johnson, "What becomes of all the clever children?" Too often, it is to be feared, are the precious human buds sacrificed to the same mistaken zeal that led to the destruction of the roses which had been expected with so much pleasure by ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... superb congregation of beauties shown. Portraits of Garrick,—that intensely interesting Stratford portrait,—Earl Spencer, Pitt, Earl Stanhope, Colonel St. Leger, George IV., Duke of Cumberland, George III., Earl Cathcart, Canning, Dr. Johnson, Fox, and several showings of himself, made up a body of work unsurpassed in importance by that of the president ...
— Some Old Time Beauties - After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment • Thomson Willing
... and the darkness that followed it was deeper than ever. Who are their foremost writers to-day? The Hauptmanns and the Sudermanns, gropers in obscurity, violent sentimentalists, 'bigots to laxness,' Dr. Johnson would have called them. Their world is a moral and artistic chaos agitated by spasms of hysteria. Their work is a mass of decay touched with gleams of phosphorescence. The Romans would have called it immunditia. What is your ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... afterwards conveyed to it [Yale College], by a deed transmitted to Dr. Johnson, his Rhode Island farm, for the establishment of that Dean's bounty, to which sound classical learning in Connecticut has been much indebted.—Hist. Sketch of ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... E. Lord Rochester wrote a poem of seventeen stanzas upon NOTHING. The Latin poem on the same subject, to which H. N. E. refers, is probably that by Passerat, inserted by Dr. Johnson in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various
... you, gentlemen, as an humble individual who is much concerned about the body. This little joke is purely a professional one. It must go no farther. I am afraid the public thinks uncharitably of undertakers, and would consider it a proof that Dr. Johnson was right when he said that the man who would make a pun would pick a pocket. Well; we all try to do the best we can for ourselves—everybody else as well as undertakers. Burials may be expensive, but so is legal redress. So is spiritual provision; ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... now to record a very curious incident in Dr. Johnson's life, which fell under my own observation; of which pars magna fui, and which I am persuaded will, with the liberal-minded, be much ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... would probably have ensured the speedy triumph of Shere Ali and his lasting gratitude to Great Britain, now laid him under no sense of obligation[284]. He might have replied to Lord Lawrence with the ironical question with which Dr. Johnson declined Lord Chesterfield's belated offer of patronage: "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... following line, translated from Juvenal by Dr. Johnson, is much superior to the original, owing to the easy personification of Worth and Poverty, and to the consequent conciseness ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... unimaginative pedants who cannot conceive that there may be things in creation which have never yet chanced to come across their mole's vision. After all, now that I am cooler, I can afford to admit that I have been no more sympathetic to Armitage than Dr. Johnson ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... so many confessions of sharp practice almost merits his canonization as a minor saint of society. Dr. Johnson has indeed placed him on a Simeon Stylites pillar, an immortality of penance from which no good member of the writers' guild is likely to pray his deliverance. He commends the fine art and high science of dissimulation ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... there, however, a desire for locomotion was expressed. Dr. Johnson, in the enclosure behind St. Clement Danes, is very restive. I asked him if he would object to removal. "Sir," said the Little Lexicographer (as his sculptor has made him), "I should derive satisfaction from it. A man cannot be considered as enviable who ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... if he said it was all right, it was all right," she murmured. "It is only the phrasing that makes me slightly nervous. Why should he ask me not to get rattled?" The term was by this time as familiar to her as any in Dr. Johnson's dictionary. "Of course he knows I do get rattled much too easily; but why should I be in danger of getting rattled now if nothing has happened?" She gave a very small start as she remembered something. "Could it be that Captain Palliser- - But ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Spectator 118.] The style of the two writers reflects the qualities of their minds. Addison's writing is fluent, easy, and lucid. He wrote and corrected with great care, and his words very closely express his thought. Landor speaks of his prose as a 'cool current of delight', and Dr. Johnson, in an often quoted passage, calls it 'the model of the middle style ... always equable and always easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences.... His page is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour. He is ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... enter! And what a man was Blake to enter it! The society of President Reynolds, and Mr. Mason the poet, and Mr. Sheridan the play-actor, and pompous Dr. Burney, and abstract Dr. Delap,—all honorable men; a society that was dictated to by Dr. Johnson, and delighted by Edmund Burke, and sneered at by Horace Walpole, its untiring devotee: a society presided over by Mrs. Montagu, whom Dr. Johnson dubbed Queen of the Blues; Mrs. Carter, borrowing, by right of years, her matron's plumes; Mrs. Chapone, sensible, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... parts of them. Their works are their hands and their feet, their organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. To a man, it is as absurd to imitate the manner of Dean Swift in writing as it would be to imitate the manner of Dr. Johnson in eating. But Stevenson was not a man, he was a boy; or, to speak more accurately, the attitude of his mind towards his work remained unaltered from boyhood till death, though his practice and experiment gave him, as he grew older, a greater mastery ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... we could make in England.... You speak of all the various strange things I am to see, and the amount of knowledge I shall involuntarily acquire, by this residence in America; but you know I am what Dr. Johnson would have considered disgracefully "incurious," and the lazy intellectual indifference which induced me to live in London by the very spring of the fountain of knowledge without so much as stooping my lips to it, prevails ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... sustained to him the most intimate relations? We know Shakespeare—or he CAN be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps, than any other great author that ever lived—know, in the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which we know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell's Biography. The moral proportion which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was SHED ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... that unjust and bloody war which finally severed from England that great country the United states of America, now the most powerful and dangerous rival that this kingdom ever had. The statue of Dr. JOHNSON was the first that was put into St. PAUL'S CHURCH! A signal warning to us not to look upon monuments in honour of the dead as a proof of their virtues; for here we see St. PAUL'S CHURCH holding up to the veneration of posterity a man whose own writings, together ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... herself; and at last she went so far as to declare that the ghost had promised to attend a witness, who might be selected, into the vault under the Church of St. John's, Clerkenwell, where the body of the supposed victim was buried. Her story caused such excitement, that at last Dr. Johnson, Dr. Douglas (afterwards Bishop of Salisbury), and one or two other gentlemen, undertook an investigation of the affair, which proved beyond all doubt that it was a trick, though they could not discover how it was performed, nor could they ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... discharged all the army of my former pursuits, fancies, and pleasures; a motley host! and have literally and strictly retained only the ideas of a few friends, which I have incorporated into a lifeguard. I trust in Dr. Johnson's observation, "Where much is attempted, something is done." Firmness, both in sufferance and exertion, is a character I would wish to be thought to possess: and have always despised the whining yelp of complaint, and the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... there are not more orchards attached to the gardens on the Cotswolds. The reader will doubtless remember Dr. Johnson's advice to his friends, always to have a good orchard attached to their houses. "For," said he, "I once knew a clergyman of small income who brought up a family very reputably, which he ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... man is bound to speak of the fair as he has found his market in it, we ought to acknowledge the superabundant and quick succession of literary novelties for the present volume. There is little of our own; because we have uniformly taken Dr. Johnson's advice in life—"to play for much, and stake little" This will extenuate our assuming that "from castle to cottage we are regularly taken in:" indeed, it would be worse than vanity to suppose that price or humble pretensions should exclude us; ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 407, December 24, 1829. • Various
... in miniature. "To define an epitaph is useless; everyone knows it is an inscription on a tomb. An epitaph is indeed commonly panegyrical, because we are seldom distinguished by a stone but by our friends," says Dr. Johnson. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... year 1759 Reynolds began to write, and three of his essays were printed in the Idler, which was conducted by Dr. Johnson. Northcote records that at the same time he committed to paper a variety of remarks which afterwards served him as hints for his discourses. One or two of these will give us as good an idea as we are likely to get from ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... of recent days has absurdly misrepresented Johnson as a smoker. The author of a book on tobacco published a few years ago wrote—"Dr. Johnson smoked like a furnace"—a grotesquely untrue statement—and "all his friends, Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, were his companions in ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... man's descent from the monkey. Such, too, was the genial and graceful Henry Erskine, the brother of the Lord Chancellor of that name, the pride and the favourite of his profession—the sparkling and ready wit who, thirteen years before the day of Burns, had met the rude manners of Dr. Johnson with a well-known repartee. When the Doctor visited the Parliament House, Erskine was presented to him by Boswell, and was somewhat gruffly received. After having made his bow, Erskine (p. 046) slipped a shilling into Boswell's hand, whispering ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... interested in 'The Rochester Knockings,' and the case of the Fox girls, a replica of the old Cock Lane case which amused Dr. Johnson and Horace Walpole. The Fox girls became professional mediums, and, long afterwards, confessed that they were impostors. They were so false that their confession is of no value as evidence, but certainly they were humbugs. The air was full of ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... performer of prologues and epilogues is indicated by the frequency of her performances and long tenure at Drury Lane (she retired in 1769) and documented by the panegyrics of Fielding, Murphy, Churchill, Garrick, Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole, Goldsmith, fellow players, contemporary memoir writers, and audiences who admired her.[3] Dr. Johnson, I feel, gives the most balanced, just contemporary appraisal of Mrs. Clive the actress: "What Clive did best, she did better than Garrick; but could not do half so many things ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... as if I were to try to explain the new ideas of any age to a person of the age that has gone before." She paused, seeking a concrete illustration that would touch me. "As if I were explaining to Dr. Johnson the methods and the ultimate vogue of the cockney ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... Nevertheless, I was but little interested in the legends of the remote antiquity of Lichfield, being drawn thither partly to see its beautiful cathedral, and still more, I believe, because it was the birthplace of Dr. Johnson, with whose sturdy English character I became acquainted, at a very early period of my life, through the good offices of Mr. Boswell. In truth, he seems as familiar to my recollection, and almost as vivid in his personal aspect to my mind's eye, as the kindly figure of my ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... only. He was secretly engaged in dissipations, which finally became so low, that I was compelled to leave him to pursue his course, and thus to witness another example of the application of that striking remark of Dr. Johnson, "that negligence and irregularity, if long continued, will render knowledge useless, wit ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... his contribution, it must be admitted that his judgment is generally sound. But of the accepted jokes from unattached contributors, it is a notable fact that at least seventy-five per cent. come from North of the Tweed. Dr. Johnson, ponderous enough in his own humour, admitted that "much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young;" and it is probable that to him, as well as to Walpole—who suggested that proverbial surgical operation—is owing much of the false impression entertained in England as to ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... fine and interesting from top to toe, but it does seem to me as if things were dreadfully mixed. Dr. Johnson and Jack Sheppard, I suppose, was all real and could live in houses; but when it comes to David Copperfields and Lady Dedlocks and little Miss Flites, that wasn't real and never lived at all, they was all talked about in just the same way, and their favorite tramping grounds ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... [32] Dr. Johnson was the first as Borrow was the second to earn this distinction. Johnson, as reported by ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... could not speak of Yaverland again so soon. She tried to make time by wrangling. "Why do you call him the great Dr. Johnson? He was just ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... by the DUTCH EAST INDIA COMPANY, in 1610. It was at least forty, and perhaps forty-seven, years later that England woke up to the fascinations of the new drink. Dr. Johnson puts it at even a later date, for he claims that tea was first introduced into England by Lords Arlington and Ossory, in 1666, and really made its debut into society when the wives of these noblemen gave ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... was in a good humour, and "had given to Princess Charlotte the centre sapphire of Charles's crown," acted "the manner of decapitation on my shoulders." He had "forgotten" Cromwell, who, as Lord Auchinleck reminded Dr. Johnson, had "gart kings ken that they had a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... understanding the difference between a constitution and a government, Dr. Johnson, and all writers of his description, have always bewildered themselves. They could not but perceive, that there must necessarily be a controlling power existing somewhere, and they placed this power ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... of his life, our astonishment never wanes while observing the ceaseless industry of every moment of his career, during the seventh day as well as the other six; and this, too, in spite of a promise won from him by Dr. Johnson, when on his death-bed, that he would never use his pencil on a Sunday. But the habit of a long working life was too strong upon him, and he soon persuaded himself that it was better to have made the promise than distress a dying friend, although ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... "Certainly, Dr. Johnson is right,—great happiness in an English post-chaise properly driven; more exhilarating than a palanquin. 'Post equitem sedet atra cura,'—true only of such scrubby hacks as old Horace could have ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Again, remember Dr. Johnson's warning, Beware of cant. In that intensely serious century men were more occupied with the realities than the forms of things. By encouraging rebellion in England and Ireland, by burning so many scores of poor English ...
— English Seamen in the Sixteenth Century - Lectures Delivered at Oxford Easter Terms 1893-4 • James Anthony Froude
... unenviable reputation, and were widely different from the Queen's and Rossin of the present day. Some of my readers will doubtless remember John Gait's savage fling at them several years later. To parody Dr. Johnson's characterization of the famous leg of mutton, they were ill-looking, ill-smelling, ill-provided and ill-kept. In a word, they were unendurable places of sojourn for a man of fastidious tastes and sensitive nerves. Perhaps the Captain's tastes were fastidious, though I can hardly believes that ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... order to appear richer or smarter than we are. While, on the contrary, we rarely insist upon the intrinsic qualities for which things are really valuable, without which no trouble or money would be spent on them, without which their difficulty of obtaining would, as in the case of Dr. Johnson's musical performance, become identical with impossibility. I wonder how many people ever point out to a child that the water in a tank may be more wonderful and beautiful in its beryls and sapphires and agates than all the contents of all the jewellers' shops in Bond Street? Moreover, we rarely ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... fashion; and, in general, there was something not un-English in their mise and tournure. The superiority of French women in these matters is incontestable. Perhaps we may account for it something on the principle by which Dr. Johnson explained the excellence of our neighbours in cookery, when he suspected that the inferiority of their meats rendered indispensable some extraordinary skill in dressing it. The general arrangement and progress of the evening was very English ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various
... nation. Wordsworth is English, but he was a recluse. Browning is English, but he lived apart or abroad, and was a tourist of genius. The most English of all our great men of letters, next to Shakespeare, is certainly Dr. Johnson, but he was no great poet. Shakespeare, it may be suspected, is too poetic to be a perfect Englishman; but his works refute that suspicion. He is the Englishman endowed, by a fortunate chance, with matchless powers of expression. He is not silent or dull; but he understands silent ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... (Gustave's poetry) has not gained a wide audience among the public. But with regard to poetry nowadays, there are plenty of persons who say as Dr. Johnson said of the verse of Spratt, "I would rather praise ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... people who will deny anything. There are some who will say that St. Paul would not have condemned the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever wrote; but there is no arguing against this. 'Every man,' said Dr. Johnson, 'has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a right to knock him down for it.' But even granting that generosity and high spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ, allowance must be made for the lapse of two thousand years, during which time it is only reasonable ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... that vain repetition of certain phrases and thoughts, which mars the work of sacred poets generally, and which has led to an unjustly strong censure being laid on them by critics, so different from each other as Dr. Johnson and Mr. Matthew Arnold. As the alleged Paganism of some of Herrick's sacred poems exists only in the imagination of readers, so the alleged insincerity is equally hypothetical, and can only be supported by the argument (notoriously ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Dr. Johnson has said,—"There are a thousand familiar disputes which reason never can decide; questions that elude investigation, and make logic ridiculous; cases where something must be done, and where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... than poverty? Then again he had an uneasy trick of putting his hand up to his throat, as if he expected to find something the matter with it; and he had the awkward habit—which I do not think he could have copied from Dr. Johnson, because most probably he had never heard of him—of trying always to retrace his steps on the exact boards on which he had trodden to arrive at any particular part of the room. Besides, to settle the question, ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Ladies and gentlemen,—Dr. Johnson's experience of that club, the members of which have travelled over one another's minds in every direction, is not to be compared with the experience of the perpetual president of a society like this. Having on previous occasions said everything ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... attention, she was practically self-educated. Her first novel, Evelina, pub. anonymously in 1778, at once by its narrative and comic power, brought her fame, and, through Mrs. Thrale (q.v.), she made the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, with whom she became a great favourite. Her next literary venture was a comedy, The Witlings; but, by the advice of her f., it was not put upon the stage. In 1782, however, she produced Cecilia, which, like its predecessor, had an enormous sale, and which, though not perhaps ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... expressed the hope that Lord CURZON would make an explicit statement, on the ground that their Lordships' House was in no need of a soporific, I fully expected one of the occupants of the mausoleum to rise and reprove him in the words of Dr. JOHNSON, "Sir, in order to be facetious it is not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... from Socrates down to Artemus Ward. He tells us of the wicked bachelor who spoke of marriage as 'a very harmless amusement' and advised a young friend of his to 'marry early and marry often'; of Dr. Johnson who proposed that marriage should be arranged by the Lord Chancellor, without the parties concerned having any choice in the matter; of the Sussex labourer who asked, 'Why should I give a woman half my ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... rambled everywhere his purse permitted, read everything he could lay his hands on, and talked everlastingly; in 1756 published an 'Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful,' and married Miss Jane Mary Nugent; in 1758 dared at David Garrick's dinner table to contradict Dr. Johnson; in 1765 became a member of Parliament; and for the next sixteen years was the life and soul of the Whig party. When that party, in 1782, finally came into power, Burke's only reward, however, was a minor office, a fact which, in view of his great merits, has amazed posterity. ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... every guest could take his part in the cry, instead of one mighty Tom of a fellow, like Dr. Johnson, silencing all besides by the tremendous depth of his diapason. On such occasions she afforded CHERE EXQUISE; and every now and then there was some dish of French, or even Scottish derivation, which, as well as the numerous assortment of VINS EXTRAORDINAIRES produced ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... of Forth. Next day we passed the Shetlands, of which we had a good view. The rocky shores of these islands, all rugged and surf-beaten, with myriads of wild-fowl darkening the air around them, presented a most tempting field of exploration. I longed to take a ramble in the footsteps of Dr. Johnson; but to see the Shetlands would be to lose Iceland, and of the two I preferred seeing the latter. After a pleasant passage of two days and a half from Grangemouth we made the Faroe Islands, and had the good fortune to secure, without the usual loss of time occasioned ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... thought that if any man ought to have been free from persecution it was George Whitefield, bringing great masses of the people into the kingdom of God, wearing himself out for Christ's sake: and yet the learned Dr. Johnson called him a mountebank. Robert Hall preached about the glories of heaven as no uninspired man ever preached about them, and it was said when he preached about heaven his face shone like an angel's, and yet good Christian John Foster writes of Robert Hall, saying: "Robert Hall is a mere actor, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... oblivion. The greatest of his contemporaries knew and acknowledged his transcendent merit, and since his death, there has not been one man of genius whose opinion of Fielding is recorded, that has not spoken of him with veneration and delight. Dr. Johnson, spite of a personal enmity, could not but concede his extraordinary powers. Lady Mary Wortley Montague reluctantly confessed that 'cousin Fielding' was the greatest original genius of the age; the fastidious Gray ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... to think of. He envied the men who kneeled down on the scaffold, or leaped off the ladder, in full possession at the last moment of all their senses and all their graces. 'Give me a direct answer, sir,' demanded Dr. Johnson of his physician when on his deathbed. . . . 'Then I will take no more opiates, for I have prayed that I may be able to render up my soul to God unclouded.' And when pressed by his attendants to take some generous nourishment, he replied almost with his last breath, 'I ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... own patrons, whom else we should have known only as nominis umbras. But a more impressive illustration is found in the case of John Henderson, that man of whom expectations so great were formed, and of whom Dr. Johnson and Burke, after meeting and conversing with him, pronounced (in the Scriptural words of the Ethiopian queen applied to the Jewish king, Solomon) 'that the half had not been told them.' For this man's memory almost the sole original record exists in Aguttar's funeral sermon; for though other ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... dirt are the chief enemies of books. At short intervals, books and shelves ought to be dusted by the amateur himself. Even Dr. Johnson, who was careless of his person, and of volumes lent to him, was careful about the cleanliness of his own books. Boswell found him one day with big gloves on his hands beating the dust out of his library, as was his custom. There is nothing so hideous as a dirty thumb-mark ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... as Dr. Johnson describes them, referring to the severity of the climate and the poverty of the soil, Prince Charles and his adherents were lodged in a small country house, with a hole in the roof for a chimney, and a fire in the middle of the room. The young adventurer, reared among the delicacies of the palace ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... this convivial gathering when I am back in London—in that crowded, bustling heart of the world, and I hope some day to have the pleasure of seeing you there—of seeing all of you, my friends. I will take you to my favorite haunt, the Cheshire Cheese, in Fleet Street, where the great and learned Dr. Johnson was wont to foregather. But I have much to do before I can return to England. The task that brought me to this barbarous country—this land of snow and ice—is of a most peculiar and difficult nature. I will take the present opportunity ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... Scotland, there is more festivity at the New Year, and perhaps one of the most singular customs is that which was told by a gentleman to Dr. Johnson during his tour in the Hebrides. On New Year's eve, in the hall or castle of the Laird, where at festal seasons there may be supposed to be a very numerous company, one man dresses himself in a cow's hide, upon which the others beat with sticks. He runs, with all this noise, round the house, ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... before the Julia sailed, Dr. Johnson paid his last call. He was not quite so bland as usual. All he wanted was the men's names to a paper, certifying to their having received from him sundry medicaments therein mentioned. This voucher, endorsed by Captain Guy, secured his ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... celebrated theatre built after the Restoration, at which Betterton performed, and of which Sir William Davenant was manager. Lastly, here was the house and printing-office of Richardson. In Bolt-court, not far distant, lived Dr. Johnson, who resided also for some time in the Temple. A list of his numerous other residences is to be found in Boswell[2]. Congreve died in Surrey-street, in the Strand, at his own house. At the corner of Beaufort-buildings, was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... ever, in pointing out the sights, the Fleet prison, and where the Ludgate stood six years gone; and the Devil's Tavern, of old Ben Jonson's time, and the Mitre and the Cheshire Cheese and the Cock, where Dr. Johnson might be found near the end of the week at his dinner. He showed me the King's Mews above Charing Cross, and the famous theatre in the Haymarket, and we had but turned the corner into Piccadilly when he cried excitedly at a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... some quality, by the due application of which he might deserve well of the world; and whoever he be that has but little in his power should be in haste to do that little, lest he be confounded with him that can do nothing.—DR. JOHNSON. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... breeze between Miss Jenkyns and Captain Brown over the relative merits of Dr. Johnson and the author of "Pickwick Papers"—then being published in parts—as writers of light and agreeable fiction. Captain Brown read an account of the "Swarry" which Sam Weller gave at Bath. Some of us laughed very ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... made a practice of reading books as he walked the highways was Dr. Johnson, and it is recorded that he presented a curious spectacle indeed, for his shortsightedness compelled him to hold the volume close to his nose, and he shuffled along, rather than walked, stepping high over shadows and stumbling over ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... conversation was very pleasant. The members sat together about a table, and the conversation was quite general and very bright. The talk turned, during the evening, on Scotsmen. The Englishmen present seemed to have something left of the old prejudice about Scotland with which Dr. Johnson was possessed. They imputed to the modern Scotsmen the same thrifty habit and capacity for looking after himself that prevailed a hundred years before, when Dr. Johnson and John Wilkes, who quarrelled about everything else, became ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... distinctly forbidden by Moses; but have not critics judicially pronounced it author-theft? Has not metaphor been sounded through every note of its key-board, to strike out all that is base whereunto to liken it? Have not old Dr. Johnson's seven-footed words—the tramp of whose heavy brogans has echoed down the staircase of years even unto our day—declared plagiarists from the works of buried writers 'jackals, battening on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... at the word of a sergeant," but I loved them still more when I saw their good-natured, unostentatious way of life. They were, above all things, easy and sympathetic livers. Almost the only thing that shocked and disgusted them was being treated as heroes. Dr. Johnson talked about the "plebeian magnanimity of the British common soldier" and meant the right thing, though, in truth, there was nothing plebeian in the said magnanimity,—nothing which would not have been worthy of the highest birth and the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... arrival in town, and the White Hart Tavern, where Mr. Pickwick fell in with Mr. Sam Weller; the regions about Leicester Fields and Russell Square sacred to the memory of Captain Booth and the lovely Amelia and Becky Sharp; where Garrick drank tea with Dr. Johnson and Henry Esmond tippled with Sir Richard Steele. There was yet a Pump Court, and many places along Oxford Street where Mantalini and De Quincy loitered: and Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Evans' Coffee House, or shall I say the Cave of Harmony, and The Cock and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... which Dr. Johnson selected the quotations for his Dictionary is well known, and as a general rule these are tolerably accurate; but under the thirteenth heading of the verb to sit will be found a curious perversion of a text of Scripture. There we ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... House gave 'another laugh,' and the interrogator subsided. The real humour of the situation, which was unfortunately lost upon the House of Commons, was, that as agricultural allotments had not been thought of in the days of Dr. Johnson, no explanation of the term in this use is to be found in Johnson's Dictionary; as, however, this happened to be unknown, alike to the questioner and to the House, the former missed a chance of 'scoring' brilliantly, and the House the chance of a third ...
— The evolution of English lexicography • James Augustus Henry Murray
... make them the objects of Ministerial vengeance," they refused to pay a penny tax with the religious fervor of men doing battle for the welfare of the human race. Consider the dry common sense with which Dr. Johnson disposed of the alleged Tyranny of Great Britain: "But I say, if the rascals are so prosperous, oppression has agreed with them, or there has been no oppression"; and contrast it with the reverent spirit which pervades the writings of John Dickinson or the formal protests ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... baseless prejudices, uncompromising selfishness, irregular mental activity. The morbid element in his nervous system was also witnessed in the form of epilepsy, from which he suffered, more or less, during his whole life. The "vile melancholy" which Dr. Johnson inherited from his father, and which, to use his own expression, "made him mad all his life, at least not sober," never perverted nor hampered the exercise of his intellectual powers. He heard the voice ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... of Parody from the fifteenth century, although Dr. Johnson speaks as though it originated with Philips. Notwithstanding the great scope it affords for humorous invention, it has never become popular, nor formed an important branch of literature; perhaps, because the talent of the parodist always suffered from ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... conscience-stricken readers will please particularly to reproach themselves for having ever supposed that important spiritual manifestation to have been a gross imposture which was thoroughly detected. They will please to believe that Dr. Johnson believed in it, and that, in Mr. Howitt's words, he "appears to have had excellent reasons for his belief". With a view to this end, the faithful will be so good as to obliterate from their Boswells the following passage: "Many of my readers, I am convinced, ...
— Contributions to All The Year Round • Charles Dickens
... place, you can help by telling every one about it, and by getting people, old and young, interested. Do you know that not one person to whom I have spoken about it—aside from Dr. Johnson, the people at the A.S.P.C.A., and Mr. Harison—knew anything about it? Strange, was it not? A good many things are permitted because people do not know just how ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 15, February 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... look back, I remember no figure in the theater more remarkable than Terriss. He was one of those heaven-born actors who, like kings by divine right, can, up to a certain point, do no wrong. Very often, like Dr. Johnson's "inspired idiot," Mrs. Pritchard, he did not know what he was talking about. Yet he "got there," while many cleverer men stayed behind. He had unbounded impudence, yet so much charm that no one could ever be angry with him. Sometimes he reminded me of a butcher-boy flashing past, whistling, ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... scrupled to take freedoms whereto all graces were lacking. "Tetty" it should not be, if for no other reason, for this—that the chance of writing "Tetty" as a title is a kind of facile literary opportunity; it shall be denied. The Essay owes thus much amends of deliberate care to Dr. Johnson's wife. But, indeed, the reason is graver. What wish would he have had but that the language in the making whereof he took no ignoble part should somewhere, at some time, treat his ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... more people read these works by La Trobe, the more they respected the Brethren. "In a variety of publications," said the London Chronicle, "he removed every aspersion against the Brethren, and firmly established their reputation." He was well known in higher circles, was the friend of Dr. Johnson, and worked in union with such well-known Evangelical leaders as Rowland Hill, William Romaine, John Newton, Charles Wesley, Hannah More, Howell Harris, and Bishop Porteous, the famous advocate of negro emancipation. Above ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... rather ambiguously, "I think I never saw his countenance more indicative of high admiration than while reciting aloud from those productions."[222] In one of his letters Scott spoke of the "beautiful and feeling verses by Dr. Johnson to the memory of his humble friend Levett, ... which with me, though a tolerably ardent Scotchman, atone for a thousand of his prejudices."[223] Not only did he admire the great biography, but he called Boswell "such a biographer as no man but [Johnson] ever had, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... those who endeavoured to ask our attention to what we called the daubs of the one or the doggerel of the other. {5}This, I think, should teach us not even to attempt to criticize until we are sure that we appreciate. Yet what a vast amount of criticism there is in the world which errs (like Dr. Johnson) from sheer ignorance. When Sir Lucius O'Trigger found fault with Mrs. Malaprop's language she naturally resented such ignorant criticism. "If there is one thing more than another upon which I pride myself, it is the use of my oracular ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... Death, into eloquence—the eloquence of pure thought, touched gravely and afar off by emotion. In general, the atmosphere of his intellect is that lumen siccum which he loved to commend, "not drenched or bloodied by the affections." Dr. Johnson said that the wine of Bacon's writings was ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... whose names, in days gone by, Upon the scroll of fame stood high. And when I think of Smollett's tales, Of waspish Pope's ill-natured rails, Of Fielding dull, of Sterne too free, Of Swift's uncurbed indecency, Of Dr. Johnson's bludgeon-wit, I must confess I'm ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... of Robert Milligan, Esq., of Cotswold, Gloucestershire.] niece to Joanna Baillie: select party for Sir William Pepys, who is eighty-two, a most agreeable, lively old gentleman, who tells delightful anecdotes of Mrs. Montague, Sir Joshua, Burke, and Dr. Johnson. Mrs. Montague once whispered to Sir William, on seeing a very awkward man coming into the room, "There is a man who would give one of his hands to know what to do with the other." Excellent house of Mrs. Hughan's, ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... in his essay on Madame D’Arblay, that Lady Miller kept a vase “wherein fools were wont to put bad verses.” Dr. Johnson also said, when Boswell named a gentleman of his acquaintance who wrote for the vase, “He was a blockhead for his pains”; on the other hand, when told that the Duchess of Northumberland wrote, Johnson said, “Sir, the Duchess of Northumberland may do what she pleases: nobody will ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... looked keenly for it. And if he associated minor degrees of goodness with any kind of folly or mental ineptitude, he did not so relate sanctity; though he gave it, for companion, ignorance; and joined the two, in Joe Gargery, most tenderly. We might paraphrase, in regard to these two great authors, Dr. Johnson's famous sentence: "Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no joys." Dickens has many scoundrels, but Thackeray has no saints. Helen Pendennis is not holy, for she is unjust and cruel; Amelia is not holy, for she is an egoist in love; Lady Castlewood is not holy, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... precedence, came the Ploughman Poet and the Ettrick Shepherd, Boswell and Dr. Johnson, Dr. John Brown and Thomas Carlyle, Lady Nairne and Drummond of Hawthornden, Allan Ramsay and Sir Walter; and is it not a proof of the Wizard's magic art, that side by side with the wraiths of these real people walked, or seemed to walk, the Fair Maid of Perth, Jeanie ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... course and will cultivate the habit of looking rather at the round of the ladder of fortune which is below our own and realising the countless points in which our lot is better than that of others. As Dr. Johnson says, 'Few are placed in a situation so gloomy and distressful as not to see every day beings yet more forlorn and miserable from whom they may learn to rejoice ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... uttered the word "coach" with the importance of one who, as Dr. Johnson saith of later date, is conscious of the dignity of putting horses to his chariot. The worshipful Master Maulstatute did not, however on this occasion, do Julian the honour of yoking to his huge family caroche the two "frampal jades" (to use the term of the period), which were wont to drag that ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... middle of December. They had then had no cold weather. All things relative to our new constitution were going on well. Federal senators are; New Hampshire, President Langdon and Bartlett. Massachusetts, Strong and Dalton. Connecticut, Dr. Johnson and Ellsworth. New Jersey, Patterson and Ellmer. Pennsylvania, Robert Morris and M'Clay. Delaware, Reed and Bassett. Virginia, Richard Henry Lee and Grayson. Maryland, Charles Carroll, of Carrolton, and John Henry. All of these are federalists, except ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson |
