Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales

All the usually received works of Dr. Johnson, together with Murphy's Essay on his Life and Genius, are comprised in this edition. In pursuance of our plan of brevity, we shall not here give a list of his minor and unacknowledged productions, but refer our readers to Boswell; a new, amended, and enlarged edition of whose interesting and picturesque Memoirs we purpose speedily to present to the public, after the style and manner of the present work.

One very important addition, however, we conceive that we have made, in publishing the whole of his sermons. It has been hitherto the practice to give one or two, with a cursory notice, that Johnson's theological knowledge was scanty, or unworthy of his general fame. We have acted under a very different impression; for though Johnson was not, nor pretended to be, a polemical or controversial divine, he well knew how to apply to the right regulation of our moral conduct the lessons of that Christianity which was not promulged for a sect, but for mankind; which sought not a distinctive garb in the philosopher's grove, nor secluded itself in the hermit's cell, but entered without reserve every walk of life, and sympathized with all the instinctive feelings of our common nature. This high privilege of our religion Johnson felt, and to the diffusion of its practical, not of its theoretical advantages, he applied the energies of his heart and mind; and with what success, we leave to every candid reader to pronounce.

In conclusion, we would express a hope that we shall not inaptly commence a series of OXFORD ENGLISH CLASSICS with the works of one whose writings have so enlarged and embellished the science of moral evidence, which has long constituted a characteristic feature in the literary discipline of this university. The science of mind and its progress, as recorded by history, or unfolded by biography, was Johnson's favourite study, and is still the main object of pursuit in the place whose system and institutions he so warmly praised, and to which he ever professed himself so deeply indebted. If the terseness of attic simplicity has been desiderated by some in the pages of Johnson, they undeniably display the depth of thought, the weight of argument, the insight into mind and morals, which are to be found in their native dignity only in the compositions of those older writers with whose spirit he was so richly imbued. In this place, then, where those models which Johnson admired and imitated are still upheld as the only sure guides to sound learning, his writings can never be laid aside unread and neglected.

OXFORD, JUNE 23, 1825.

[a] See a remark on this subject made by Johnson, with reference to the Spectator, and all other works of the same class, which describe manners. Boswell, ii. 218, and Prefatory Notice to Rambler, vol. i.

CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.

ESSAY on the Life and Genius of Dr. Johnson

POEMS.

London

The Vanity of Human Wishes

Prologue, spoken by Mr. Garrick, at the opening of the theatre-royal, Drury lane

Prefatory Notice to the tragedy of Irene

Prologue

Irene

Epilogue, by sir William Yonge

Prologue to the masque of Comus

Prologue to the comedy of the Good-natured Man

Prologue to the comedy of a Word to the Wise

Spring

Midsummer

Autumn

Winter

The Winter's Walk

To Miss ****, on her giving the author a gold and silk network purse, of her own weaving

To Miss ****, on her playing upon the harpsichord, in a room hung with flower-pieces of her own painting

Evening; an ode

To the same

To a friend

Stella in mourning

To Stella

Verses, written at the request of a gentleman, to whom a lady had given a sprig of myrtle

To lady Firebrace, at Bury assizes

To Lyce, an elderly lady

On the death of Mr. Robert Levet

Epitaph on Claude Phillips