346 A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Johnson
placed there, than Rowley's Poems were in the chest in a tower of the church of Bristol x .
Night was his time for composition. Indeed he literally turned night into day, nodes vigilabat ad ipsum mane ; but not like Tigellius in Horace 2 . Perhaps he never was a good sleeper, and (while all the rest of the world was in bed) he chose his lamp, in
the words of Milton,
' In midnight hour, Were seen in some high lonely tower 3 /
He wrote and lived perhaps at one time only from day to day, and (according to vulgar expression) from sheet to sheet. Dr. Cheyne 4 reprobates the practice of turning night into day, as pernicious to mind and body. Jortin has something to say on the vigils of a learned man, in his Life of Erasmus. ' As he would not sleep when he could, nothing but opium could procure him repose.' There is cause to believe, he would not have written unless under the pressure of necessity. Magister artis ingenique largitor venter ', says Persius 5 . He wrote to live, and luckily for mankind lived a great many years to write. All his pieces are promised for a new edition of his works under the inspection of Sir John Hawkins, one of his executors, who has undertaken to be his biographer. Johnson's high tory prin ciples in church and state were well known. But neither his Prophecy of the Hanover Horse, lately maliciously reprinted 6 ,
1 Life, iii. 50. 141) 'resolves itself into an invective
2 Satires, i. 3. 17. Steevens denies against a standing army, a ridicule of that ' night was Johnson's time for the balance of power, complaints of composition.' Ante, ii. 328. the inactivity of the British lion, and
3 ' Or let my lamp at midnight that the Hanover horse was suffered
hour to suck his blood.' Hawkins, p. 72.
Be seen in some high lonely It was reprinted in 1775. About a
tower.' year later Boswell mentioned the
II Penseroso, 1. 85. republication to Johnson. 'To my
4 Life, i. 65. Fielding writes his surprise, he had not yet heard of it. name Cheney, which shows how it He requested me to go directly and was pronounced. ' The learned Dr. get it for him, which I did. He Cheney used to call drinking punch looked at it and laughed, and seemed pouring liquid fire down your throat.' to be much diverted with the feeble Tom Jones, Bk. xi. ch. 8. efforts of his unknown adversary,
5 Prologus, 1. 10. who, I hope, is alive to read this
6 M armor Norfolciense (Life, i. account. Now (said he) here is
nor
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