And yet Johnson's own writings and this
biography of him have changed places in relative importance so
completely that Carlyle predicted that the former would soon be reduced
to notes on the latter; and Macaulay said that the man who was known to
his contemporaries as a great writer was known to posterity as an
agreeable companion.
Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters so
common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, and
after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by poverty, and an
unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up to London, in
1737, where he supported himself for many years as a book-seller's hack.
Gradually his great learning and abilities, his ready social wit and
powers as a talker, caused his company to be sought at the tables of
those whom he called "the great." He was a clubbable man, and he drew
about him at the tavern a group of the most distinguished intellects of
the time: Edmund Burke, the orator and statesman; Oliver Goldsmith, Sir
Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter, and David Garrick, the great
actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's school, near Lichfield. Johnson
was the typical John Bull of the last century. His oddities, virtues,
and prejudices were thoroughly English.
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