the command of virtue;' and Nos. 44 and 100 by Mrs. Elizabeth Carter.
Posterity will be astonished when they are told, upon the authority of Johnson himself, that many of these discourses, which we should suppose had been laboured with all the slow attention of literary leisure, were written in haste as the moment pressed, without even being read over by him before they were printed[1]. It can be accounted for only in this way; that by reading and meditation, and a very close inspection of life, he had accumulated a great fund of miscellaneous knowledge, which, by a peculiar promptitude of mind, was ever ready at his call, and which he had constantly accustomed himself to clothe in the most apt and energetick expression. Sir Joshua Reynolds once asked him by what
- ↑ Dr. Birch says:—'The proprietor of the Rambler, Cave, told me that copy was seldom sent to the press till late in the night before the day of publication.' Croker's Boswell, p. 121, note. See Post, April 12, 1776, and beginning of 1781.
Johnson carefully revised the Ramblers for the collected edition. The editor of the Oxford edition of Johnson's Works states (ii. x), that ' the alterations exceeded six thousand.' The following passage from the last number affords a good instance of this revision.
First edition.
'I have never complied with temporary curiosity, nor furnished my readers with abilities to discuss the topic of the day; I have seldom exemplified my assertions by living characters; from my papers therefore no man could hope either censures of his enemies or praises of himself, and they only could be expected to peruse them, whose passions left them leisure for the contemplation of abstracted truth, and whom virtue could please by her native dignity without the assistance of modish ornaments.' Gent. Mag. xxii. 117.
Revised Edition.
'I have never complied with temporary curiosity, nor enabled my readers to discuss the topic of the day ; I have rarely exemplified my assertions by living characters ; in my papers no man could look for censures of his enemies, or praises of himself; and they only were expected to peruse them, whose passions left them leisure for abstracted truth, and whom virtue could please by its naked dignity.' Johnson's Works, iii. 462.
