called upon me to range this accumulation of elegance and wisdom into an alphabetical
series, I soon discovered that the bulk of my volumes would fright away the student, and
was forced to depart from my scheme of including all that was pleasing or useful in
English literature, and reduce my transcripts very often to clusters of words in which
scarcely any meaning is retained: thus to the weariness of copying, I was condemned to
add the vexation of expunging.
Johnson’s Preface shows that he believed in regularity but knew very well that words
change their sounds and their senses, and that therefore his work, inevitably imper-
fect, would also become obsolete: ‘I am not so lost in lexicography, as to forget that
words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.’
Johnson’s London and The Vanity of Human Wishes are ‘imitations’, or modern
applications, of satires by the Roman poet Juvenal. Like Swift, Johnson was an
enemy of illusion, and his poems survey the folly of human ambition. In his prayers
he often reproaches himself for sloth. He had hoped to do the Dictionary in three
years, knowing the French Academy had taken forty years. But ‘Such is design, while
it is yet at a distance from execution.’ ‘On the Death of Dr Levet’, a tribute to an
inmate of Johnson’s house, a physician who attended the poor, begins: ‘Condemned
to hope’s delusive mine, / As on we toil from day to day, / By sudden blasts, or
slow decline, / Our social comforts drop away.’The Vanity of Human Wishes
accordingly warns the ambitious student that in ‘hope’s delusive mine’ there is no
gold:
Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor melancholy’s phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee:
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from letters, to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail.
See nations slowly wise, and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust.214 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790
Johnson’s Dictionary: some sample definitions
ENTHUSIASM. n. A vain belief of private revelation; a vain confidence of divine favour or
communication. Enthusiasm is founded neither on reason nor divine revelation, but rises from the
conceits of a warmed or overweening brain. —Locke.
TORY. n. One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy
of the church of England, opposed to a whig. The knight is more a tory in the country than the
town, because it more advances his interest. —Addison.
WHIG. n. 2. The name of a faction. Whoever has a true value for church and state, should avoid
the extremes of whig for the sake of the former, and the extremes of tory on the account of the
latter. —Swift.
WIT. n. 1. The powers of the mind; the mental faculties; the intellects. This is the original
signification. 2. Imagination; quickness of fancy. 3. Sentiments produced by quickness of fancy.- A man of fancy. 5. A man of genius. 6. Sense; judgment. 7. In the plural. Sound mind;
intellect not crazed. 8. Contrivance; stratagem; power of expedients.