Swinfen had communicated his case,he was so much offended,that he was never afterwards fully reconciled to him.He indeed had good reason to be offended;for though Dr.Swinfen's motive was good,he inconsiderately betrayed a matter deeply interesting and of great delicacy,which had been entrusted to him in confidence;and exposed a complaint of his young friend and patient,which,in the superficial opinion of the generality of mankind,is attended with contempt and disgrace.
To Johnson,whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason,the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to be dreaded.Insanity,therefore,was the object of his most dismal apprehension;and he fancied himself seized by it,or approaching to it,at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary soundness and vigour of judgement.That his own diseased imagination should have so far deceived him,is strange;but it is stranger still that some of his friends should have given credit to his groundless opinion,when they had such undoubted proofs that it was totally fallacious;though it is by no means surprising that those who wish to depreciate him,should,since his death,have laid hold of this circumstance,and insisted upon it with very unfair aggravation.
The history of his mind as to religion is an important article.Ihave mentioned the early impressions made upon his tender imagination by his mother,who continued her pious care with assiduity,but,in his opinion,not with judgement.'Sunday (said he)was a heavy day to me when I was a boy.My mother confined me on that day,and made me read "The Whole Duty of Man,"from a great part of which I could derive no instruction.When,for instance,Ihad read the chapter on theft,which from my infancy I had been taught was wrong,I was no more convinced that theft was wrong than before;so there was no accession of knowledge.A boy should be introduced to such books,by having his attention directed to the arrangement,to the style,and other excellencies of composition;that the mind being thus engaged by an amusing variety of objects,may not grow weary.'
He communicated to me the following particulars upon the subject of his religious progress.'I fell into an inattention to religion,or an indifference about it,in my ninth year.The church at Lichfield,in which we had a seat,wanted reparation,so I was to go and find a seat in other churches;and having bad eyes,and being awkward about this,I used to go and read in the fields on Sunday.This habit continued till my fourteenth year;and still Ifind a great reluctance to go to church.I then became a sort of lax TALKER against religion,for I did not much THINK against it;and this lasted till I went to Oxford,where it would not be SUFFERED.When at Oxford,I took up Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are),and perhaps to laugh at it.But I found Law quite an overmatch for me;and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion,after I became capable of rational inquiry.'
From this time forward religion was the predominant object of his thoughts;though,with the just sentiments of a conscientious Christian,he lamented that his practice of its duties fell far short of what it ought to be.
The particular course of his reading while at Oxford,and during the time of vacation which he passed at home,cannot be traced.
Enough has been said of his irregular mode of study.He told me that from his earliest years he loved to read poetry,but hardly ever read any poem to an end;that he read Shakspeare at a period so early,that the speech of the ghost in Hamlet terrified him when he was alone;that Horace's Odes were the compositions in which he took most delight,and it was long before he liked his Epistles and Satires.He told me what he read SOLIDLY at Oxford was Greek;not the Grecian historians,but Homer and Euripides,and now and then a little Epigram;that the study of which he was the most fond was Metaphysicks,but he had not read much,even in that way.I always thought that he did himself injustice in his account of what he had read,and that he must have been speaking with reference to the vast portion of study which is possible,and to which a few scholars in the whole history of literature have attained;for when I once asked him whether a person,whose name I have now forgotten,studied hard,he answered 'No,Sir;I do not believe he studied hard.I never knew a man who studied hard.I conclude,indeed,from the effects,that some men have studied hard,as Bentley and Clarke.'Trying him by that criterion upon which he formed his judgement of others,we may be absolutely certain,both from his writings and his conversation,that his reading was very extensive.
Dr.Adam Smith,than whom few were better judges on this subject,once observed to me that 'Johnson knew more books than any man alive.'He had a peculiar facility in seizing at once what was valuable in any book,without submitting to the labour of perusing it from beginning to end.He had,from the irritability of his constitution,at all times,an impatience and hurry when he either read or wrote.A certain apprehension,arising from novelty,made him write his first exercise at College twice over;but he never took that trouble with any other composition;and we shall see that his most excellent works were struck off at a heat,with rapid exertion.