Johnson takes a gloomy pleasure in exposing the falsity of hopes he once had shared.
There is an almost tragic satisfaction in things said so tellingly in the right combination
of the right words. Such verse appeals to exactness and experience, not to imagination.
In the month before his death Johnson wrote a version of Horace which has an
18th-century plain elegance of diction, but also image and rhythm:
The snow dissolv’d no more is seen
The fields, and woods, behold, are green,
The changing year renews the plain,
The rivers know their banks again,
The spritely nymph and naked grace
The mazy dance together trace.
The changing year’s successive plan
Proclaims mortality to man.
Rough winter’s blasts to spring give way,
Spring yields to summer’s sovereign ray,
Then summer sinks in autumn’s reign,
And winter chills the world again.
Her losses soon the moon supplies,
But wretched man, when once he lies
Where Priam and his sons are laid,
Is naught but ashes and a shade ...THE AGE OF JOHNSON 215Dr Samuel Johnson, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, c.1775,
aged about 66. Not long returned from Scotland, Johnson
bends back a book in order to bring a page close to his
good eye. He objected to this portrait: ‘I will not be
blinking Sam’.