Johnson's Life and Genius.
��was willing to receive what numbers at the time believed to be true information : when he found that the whole was a forgery, he renounced all connection with the author *.
In March 1752, he felt a severe stroke of affliction in the death of his wife. The last number of the Rambler, as already men tioned, was on the I4th of that month. The loss of Mrs. Johnson was then approaching, and, probably, was the cause that put an end to those admirable periodical essays. It appears that she died on the 28th of March : in a memorandum, at the foot of the Prayers and Meditations, that is called her Dying Day 2 . She was buried at Bromley, under the care of Dr. Hawkesworth 3 . Johnson placed a Latin inscription on her tomb, in which he celebrated her beauty 4 . With the singularity of his prayers for
��poet; those of Milton of a little pedant.' Prior's Goldsmith, i. 233. The Literary Magazine for 1758 is not in the British Museum. John son did not write for it after 1757. Life, i. 307.
1 Person says that it was his
- opinion that the writer of the preface,
postscript and letter of contrition for W. Lauder was neither willingly un- deluded, nor forward in exposing the atrocity of those hideous interpola tions by which it had been vainly contrived to obscure the splendor of Milton's PARADISE LOST.' Person's Tracts, p. 379.
Mark Pattison went far beyond Person. ' Dr. Johnson,' he writes, 'conspired with one William Lauder to stamp out Milton's credit by prov ing him to be a wholesale plagiarist.' He calls them 'this pair of literary bandits.' On the next page he writes : ' Johnson, who was not concerned in the cheat, and was only guilty of indolence and party spirit, saved himself by sacrificing his com rade. He afterwards took ample revenge for the mortification of this exposure, in his Lives of the Poets, in
��which he employed all his vigorous powers and consummate skill to write down Milton.' Milton, by Mark Pattison, pp. 217-219. Both Person and Pattison must have known that Johnson in the postscript to Lander's pamphlet spoke of Mil ton as 'that poet whose works may possibly be read when every other monument of British greatness shall be obliterated,' and that he ends his Life of him by saying that 'his great works were performed under dis countenance and in blindness : but difficulties vanished at his touch ; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroick poems only because it is not the first.' Works, v. 271 ; vii. 142.
2 She died three days after the publication of the last Rambler, on March 17 O. S., 28 N. S. I do not know to what memorandum Murphy refers.
3 Hawkesworth lived at Bromley. Life, i. 241.
4 It was not till a few months before his death that he placed this inscription. ' Shall I ever be able
his
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