No. 1. Tuesday, 20 March 1750.
1. Juv: Juvenal, i. 19–21.
2. Horace: Johnson has in mind ‘non fumum ex fulgore, sed ex fumo dare lucem / cogitat’; ‘he aims to produce, not smoke out of light, but light from smoke’ (Ars Poetica, 11. 143–4).
3. an estate for ever: Thucydides, History, I. xxii. 4.
4. powers: ‘On Praising Oneself Inoffensively’, Plutarch, Moralia, 539A-547F.
5. læta: Horace, Satires, I. i. 7–8.
6. popularis: Cf. Horace, Odes, III. ii. 20.
No. 2. Saturday, 24 March 1750.
1. STATIUS: ‘such misery it is to be rooted to the spot – miles are lost before they begin, and their hooves re-echo across the deserted plain’; Statius, Thebaid, vi. 400–1.
2. POPE: Windsor Forest, 11. 151–4.
3. hope to hope: A sentiment with parallels in Rasselas, where in chapter 3 Rasselas himself regrets that ‘I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire’, and where in chapter 47 Nekayah observes that ‘none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not exhausted; let me see something to morrow which I never saw before’ (Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 16 and 164). Johnson mistrusted Hobbes, remarking to Thomas Tyers that ‘when I published my Dictionary I might have quoted Hobbes as an authority in language, as well as many other writers of his time; but I scorned, sir, to quote him at all; because I did not like his principles’ (The Early Biographies of Samuel Johnson, ed. O. M. Brack Jr and Robert E. Kelley (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1974), p. 82). But nevertheless his understanding of man as driven more by hope than by gratification is compatible with a notorious passage of Leviathan: ‘the Felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such Finis ultimus, (utmost ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest Good,) as is spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philosophers. Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later’ (chapter II ).
4. inadequate: Cervantes, Don Quixote, pt. 1, chs 7, 15 and 21.
5. libello: Horace, Epistles, I. i. 36–7.
6. Epictetus: ‘Keep before your eyes day by day death and exile, and everything that seems terrible, but most of all death; and then you will never have any abject thought, nor will you yearn for anything immoderately’ (Enchiridion, c. 21).
7. canoros: Horace, Epistles, II ii. 76.
No. 4. Saturday, 31 March 1750.
1. Vitæ: Horace, Ars Poetica, 1. 334.
2. CREECH: Thomas Creech (1659–1700), translator.
3. fiction: According to Arthur Murphy, Johnson had in mind Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748) and Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).
4. Pontanus: Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484–1558) was a French polymath who pursued research in zoology, botany, grammar and literary criticism; his Poetics (1561) imparted a neo-classical flavour to the literary criticism of the early modern period, and was particularly important for reinforcing the authority of Aristotle. Giovanni Pontano (or Jovianus Pontanus) (1426–1503), an Italian poet, man of letters and statesman, was one of the finest Latin prose stylists of the Renaissance. See Scaliger, Poetics, VI. 4.
5. minus: Horace, Epistles, II. i. 170.
6. Apelles: Apelles (fl. fourth century BC) was the greatest painter of antiquity. It is said that a cobbler criticized the drawing of a sandal in a picture by Apelles. Apelles altered the sandal in deference to the cobbler’s opinion, but when the next day the cobbler criticized the drawing of the leg, Apelles replied ‘ne sutor supra crepidam’, ‘a cobbler should not judge of anything above the sole’, or as we say, ‘let the cobbler stick to his last’. Pliny, Natural History, XXXV. xxxvi. 85.
7. chastity of thought: ‘Plurima sunt, Fuscine, et fama digna sinistra / et nitidis maculam haesuram figentia rebus, / quae monstrant ipsi pueris traduntque parentes’; ‘Fuscinus, there are many infamous things – things capable of besmirching even the most brilliant lives – which parents themselves point out and pass on to their sons.’ Juvenal, xiv.
8. effects: For another, celebrated, instance of Johnson’s concern over the receptiveness of the imagination, and the consequent need for only uplifting or strengthening examples to be placed before it by literature, see his comments on the ending of King Lear, in Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 221–3.
9. resentful: Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Miscellanies (1727), ii. 354.
10. but feared: An allusion to the principle of Caligula, ‘oderint, dum metuant’, ‘let them hate, so long as they fear’ (Suetonius, ‘Gaius Caligula’, xxx. 1).
No. 6. Saturday, 7 April 1750.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, I. xi. 28–30.
2. insaniens: ‘Crazy wisdom’ (Horace, Odes, I. xxxiv. 2).
3. ortum: Boethius, Consolatio, III. metr.6.9.
4. canine madness: Rabies.
5. philosophy: Abraham Cowley, Works (1669), sig. Cir (slightly misquoted and abbreviated).
6. new persuit: Again, there is a parallel with Rasselas’s regret that ‘I have already enjoyed too much; give me something to desire’ (Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 16).
No. 7. Tuesday, 10 April 1750.
1. BOETHIUS: Boethius, Consolatio, III. metr. 9.1–2, 25–28.
2. master: Plutarch, Moralia, 780c.
3. geometry: The king was Ptolemy I; see Proclus, In primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii (1560), Book 2, ch. 4, p. 39.
4. now especially: I.e. at Easter.
No. 8. Saturday, 14 April 1750.
1. Juv: Juvenal, xiii. 208–10.
2. vacavi: Lucan, Pharsalia, X. 185–6.
3. crime to think: Aquinas, Summa, I—II, Q.74, a.8; Q.108, a.3.
4. τéρπον: Pythagoras, Aurea Carmina, 11. 40–4.
5. MILTON: John Milton, Paradise Lost, v. 117–19.
No. 9. Tuesday, 17 April 1750.
1. MART: Martial, X. xlvii. 12.
2. upon him thus: Joseph Addison, Cato, II. vi. 48–50.
3. at sea: A reference to actions in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). In 1747 two French fleets convoying merchantmen to the colonies had been successfully attacked; these victories were a consequence of the policy of Admiral Edward Vernon, who in the 1740s had established the Western Squadron, commanded by Admiral George Anson.
No. 13. Tuesday, 1 May 1750.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, I. xviii. 38.
2. not to speak: Quintus Curtius, History of Alexander, IV. vi. 5–6.
3. virtually the same: This was said of Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough; cf. [Nathaniel Hooke], An Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough (1742), p. 222, for an expression of her friendship for Anne. In ‘De l’Amitié’, Montaigne describes his friendship with La Boëtie as one in which ‘souls are mingled and confounded in so universal a blending that they efface the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found’ (Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, tr. M. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), pp. 211–12).
No. 14. Saturday, 5 May 1750.
1. HOR: Horace, Satires, I. iii. 18–19.
2. procured him: John Milton to Emeric Bigot, 24 March 1656/57 (The Works of John Milton, vol. 12 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), p. 84).
3. in their work: Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica, II. 24. 4.
4. attainable: Francis Bacon, Historia Naturalis, in Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis and Heath (1857), ii. 38.
5. disgrace: ‘From the first time that the Impressions of Religion setled deeply in his Mind, He used great caution to conceal it:… for he said he was
afraid, he should at some time or other, do some enormous thing, which if he were look’t on as a very Religious Man, might cast a reproach on the profession of it, and give great advantages to impious Men, to blaspheme the name of God…’ (Gilbert Burnet, Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, Kt. (1682), pp. 141–2).
No. 16. Saturday, 12 May 1750.
1. Juv: Juvenal, X. 9–10.
2. a late paper: Rambler No. 10.
3. Ditis: Virgil, Æneid, vi. 126–7. A favourite quotation of Johnson’s: cf. Rambler No. 155 and Adventurer No. 34.
4.profit of their works: Pope and Swift, Miscellanies (1727), ‘Preface’.
No. 17. Tuesday, 15 May 1750.
1. LUCAN: Lucan, Pharsalia, ix. 582–3.
2.ROWE: N. Rowe, Lucan’s Pharsalia (1718), ix. 1000–1003, p. 385; capitalization altered.
3. thou shalt die: A commonplace, but see e.g. Herodotus, ii. 78.
4. end of life: Greek Anthology, ix. 366.
5. τινός: Epictetus, Enchiridion, c. 21; cf. also Rambler No. 2, note 6.
6. trunci: Lucan, Pharsalia, ix. 14.
7. life is short: Hippocrates, Aphorisms, I. i.
No. 18. Saturday, 19 May 1750.
1. HOR: Horace, Odes, III. xxiv. 17–23.
2. on the other: An allusion to the celebrated sentiment ‘Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni’, ‘the victorious side enjoyed the favour of the gods, but the defeated enjoyed that of Cato’; Lucan, Pharsalia, i. 128.
No. 22. Saturday, 2 June 1750.
1. HOR: Horace, Ars Poetica, 11. 409–11.
2. merriment: ‘And unquenchable laughter arose among the blessed gods, as they saw Hephaestus puffing through the palace’; Homer, Iliad, i. 599–600.
No. 23. Tuesday, 5 June 1750.
1. HOR: Horace, Epistles, II. ii. 61–2.
2. younger Pliny: ‘Praeterea suae quisque inventioni favet, et quasi fortissimum amplectitur, cum ab alio dictum est quod ipse praevidit’; ‘Moreover, everyone favours his own powers of invention, and will be most persuaded by what matches his own conclusion’; Pliny, Epistles, i. 20. 13.
3. physiognomy: See Spectator No. 1,1 March 1711.
No. 24. Saturday, 9 June 1750.
1. PERSIUS: Persius, Satires, iv. 23.
2. Lacedemon: ‘Know thyself’ (Greek Anthology, ix. 366); cf. Johnson’s poem of the same title (Samuel Johnson: The Complete English Poems, ed. J. D. Fleeman (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 146) which Johnson had composed on 12 December 1772, after revising and enlarging the Dictionary, and also the epigraph to Bonnell Thornton’s imitation of The Rambler in Appendix III.
3. deep researches: Mrs Thrale states that the character of Gelidus was based on that of John Colson, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.
4. dramatick reputation: See Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. B. Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1905), ii. 61–2 (Garth) and ii. 226 (Congreve). Congreve’s alleged negligence of his achievements as a dramatist stems from Voltaire’s account of his meeting with the aged playwright, then ‘almost at death’s door’: ‘he had one failing, which was that he did not rank high enough his first profession, that of a writer, which had made his reputation and his fortune. He spoke of his works as trifles beneath him, and in our first conversation he told me to think of him as a gentleman who lived very simply. I answered him that if he had had the misfortune of being just a gentleman like any other I would never have come to see him, and I was very shocked at such misplaced vanity’ (Voltaire, Letters on England, tr. L. Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), pp. 99–100). For sensitive and informed commentary relating to the issues raised by this celebrated anecdote, see two recent articles by D. F. McKenzie: ‘Mea Culpa: Voltaire’s Retraction of his Comments Critical of Congreve’, Review of English Studies (RES), 49 (1998), pp. 461–65 and ‘Richard van Bleeck’s Painting of William Congreve as Contemplative’ (1715), RES, 51 (2000), pp. 41–61.
No. 25. Tuesday, 12 June 1750.
1. VIRGIL: Virgil, Æneid, v. 231. Dryden had also used this well-known tag in a footnote to the second edition of his Conquest of Granada, Part I (1670), II. iii.
2. right path: ‘Virtus est medium vitiorum et utrimque reductum,’ ‘virtue is found between vices, and shuns extremes’ (Horace, Epistles, I. xviii. 9). This is also, of course, an Aristotelian idea of virtue: see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II. 6.
3. Infantes barbati: The tag is ambiguous, being capable of meaning both ‘bearded children’ and ‘dumb philosophers’.
No. 28. Saturday, 23 June 1750.
1. SENECA: Seneca, Thyestes, 11. 401–3.
2. COWLEY: From Abraham Cowley’s ‘Of Solitude’.
3. late essay: Rambler No. 24.
4. sincerity: Cf. Bacon, who in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ admires ‘the wisest and most politic [princes] that ever reigned’ for their practice of joining ‘to themselves some of their servants, whom both themselves have called friends, and allowed others likewise to call them in the same manner, using the word which is received between private men’ (Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 139).
5. his death: Alfonso de Valdés (1490–1532), Latin secretary to Charles V. Johnson probably learnt of the anecdote from Izaak Walton’s life of Herbert, where the resolution is more pithily expressed as ‘there ought to be a vacancy of time, betwixt fighting and dying’ (Izaak Walton, Lives, ed. G. Saintsbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 312–13).
6. ourselves: William Chillingworth, sermon IV, sects. 12 and 15, in Nine Sermons (1664), pp. 52–3.
7. and be still: Psalm 4:4.
8. to himself: Johnson refers to the Senecan epigraph of this paper.
9. Pontanus: Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503), Italian humanist, statesman and man of letters. The quotation (which Johnson slightly misquotes) is to be found in Sir Thomas Pope Blount’s Censura Celebriorum Authorum (1690), p. 354.
No. 29. Tuesday, 26 June 1750.
1. HOR: Horace, Odes, III. xxix. 29–32.
2. dismission: Act of dispersal or dismissal.
3. never surprised: A reference to the Horatian maxim ‘nil admirari’ (Horace, Epistles, I. vi. I ).
4. old Cornaro: Luigi Cornaro (c. 1467–1566); see his La Vita Sobria (1558), p. 25.
5. send strength: ‘Be satisfied with thus much, that your present strength is sufficient for any present trial; and when a greater comes, God hath promised to give you more strength when you shall have need of more’ (Jeremy Taylor, The Worthy Communicant (1660), ch. 2, sect. 3, p. 153).
No. 31. Tuesday, 3 July 1750.
1. OVID: Ovid, Amores, II. iv. 1–2.
2. one of the philosophers: Lochagus the Spartan, as reported in Plutarch, Moralia, 225F. Compare also Rambler No. 32 below, and the portrait of the affected Stoic in Rasselas, ch. 18 (Rasselas and Other Tales, ed. Gwin J. Kolb (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 74–6).
3. were confuted: This was said of Julius Libri, who rejected Galileo’s theories out of hand.
4. persue: From John Dryden, The Indian Emperor (1665), IV. iii. 3.
5. fugitque: This is not in fact in Virgil, but in Ovid, Metamorphoses, iv. 461.
6. to find it: Johnson is here misquoting from memory. In the ‘Preface’ to Tyrannick Love (1670), Dryden in fact says: ‘Some foole… had charg’d me in the Indian Emperour with nonsence in these words, And follow fate which does too fast pursue; which was borrow’d from Virgil in the XIth of his Æneids, Eludit gyro inferior, sequiturque sequentem. I quote not these to prove that I never writ Nonsence, but onely to show that they are so unfortunate as not to have found it’ (The Works of John Dryden, vol. X, ed. M. Novak (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), p. 113).
7. character: Celsus, De Medicina, VIII. iv. 4.
No. 32. Saturday, 7 July 1750.
1. PYTHAG: Pythagoras, Aurea Carmina, ii. 17–19.
2. Zeno: Zeno of Citium (
c. 335–c. 263 BC), founder of the school of Stoic philosophy, which taught a doctrine of detachment from the outside world.
3. an evil: It was said in fact of Dionysius, who suffered from ophthalmia, not gout; cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives, vii. 37. c. 1.
4. ferendum est: Ovid, Heroides, v. 7.
5. repair it: Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne (1611–75), vicomte de Turenne and a French military commander during the reign of Louis XIV. The advice was given by the duc de Weymar, the guiding principles of whose conduct Turenne recalled in these words: ‘ce Général… ne s’enorgueillissoit point de ses succès; que, lorsqu’il avoit du malheur, il ne songeoit pas tant à se plaindre, qu’à s’en relever; qu’il aimoit mieux se laisser blâmer injustement, que de s’excuser aux dépens de ses amis qui avoient manqué dans l’action; qu’il étoit plus occupé à réparer ses fautes, qu’à perdre son tems en apologies…; ‘this general… did not allow himself to be puffed up with pride on account of his successes; when he suffered a setback, he did not dream of complaining, but rather set about remedying the situation; he would rather bear unjust criticism, than exculpate himself at the expense of friends whose conduct had fallen short; and he was busier in remedying his defects, than in wasting his time in apologies;…’ (Andrew Ramsay, Histoire du Vicomte de Turenne (La Haye, 1736), i, pp. 108–9).
Selected Essays (Penguin Classics) Page 65