VOLUME XV SLICE IV Jevons, Stanley to Joint (continued 10)

The book contains an intellectualist, static, determinist, abstractive trend. In Luke x. 25-28, eternal life depends upon loving God and man; here it consists in knowing the one true God and Christ whom He has sent. In the Synoptists, Jesus “grows in favour with God and man,” passes through true human experiences and trials, prays alone on the mountain-side, and dies with a cry of desolation; here the Logos’ watchword is “I am,” He has deliberately to stir up emotion in Himself, never prays for Himself, and in the garden and on the cross shows but power and self-possession. Here we find “ye cannot hear, cannot believe, because ye are not from God, not of My sheep” (viii. 47, x. 26); “the world cannot receive the spirit of truth” (xiv. 17). Yet the ethical current appears here also strongly: “he who doeth the truth, cometh to the light” (iii. 21), “if you love Me, keep My commandments” (xiv. 15). Libertarianism is here: “the light came, but men loved the darkness better than the light,” “ye will not come to Me” (iii. 19, v. 40); hence the appeal “abide in Me”—the branch can cease to be in Him the Vine (xv. 4, 2). Indeed even those first currents stand here for the deepest religious truths, the prevenience of God and man’s affinity to Him. “Not we loved God (first), but He (first) loved us”; “let us love Him, because He first loved us” (1 John iv. 10, 19); “no man can come to Me, unless the Father draw him” (vi. 44), a drawing which effects a hunger and thirst for Christ and God (iv. 14, vi. 35). Thus man’s spirit, ever largely but potential, can respond actively to the historic Jesus, because already touched and made hungry by the all-actual Spirit-God who made that soul akin unto Himself.

The book has an outer protective shell of acutely polemical and exclusive moods and insistences, whilst certain splendid Synoptic breadths and reconciliations are nowhere reached; but this is primarily because it is fighting, more consciously than they, for that inalienable ideal of all deepest religion, unity, even external and corporate, amongst all believers. The “Pneumatic” Gospel comes thus specially to emphasize certain central historical facts; and, the most explicitly institutional and sacramental of the four, to proclaim the most universalistic and developmental of all Biblical sayings. Here indeed Jesus will not pray for the world (xvii. 9); “ye shall die in your sins,” He insists to His opponents (viii. 44, 24); it is the Jews generally who appear throughout as such; nowhere is there a word as to forgiving our enemies; and the commandment of love is designated by Jesus as His, as new, and as binding the disciples to “love one another” within the community to which He gives His “example” (xv. 12, xiii. 34, 15). In the Synoptists, the disciples’ intolerance is rebuked (Mark ix. 38-41); Jesus’ opposition is everywhere restricted to the Pharisees and the worldly Sadducees; He ever longs for the conversion of Jerusalem; the great double commandment of love is proclaimed as already formulated in the Mosaic law (Mark xii. 28-34); the neighbour to be thus loved and served is simply any and every suffering fellow-man; and the pattern for such perfect love is found in a schismatical Samaritan (Luke x. 25-37). Yet the deepest strain here is more serenely universalist even than St Paul, for here Jesus says: “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should ... have everlasting life” (iii. 16). True, the great prologue passage (i. 9) probably reads “He was the true Light coming into the world, that enlighteneth every man,” so that the writer would everywhere concentrate his mind upon the grace attendant upon explicit knowledge of the incarnate, historic Christ. Yet Christian orthodoxy, which itself has, all but uniformly, understood this passage of the spiritual radiation throughout the world of the Word before His incarnation, has been aided towards such breadth as to the past by the Johannine outlook into the future. For, in contrast to the earliest Synoptic tradition, where the full Christian truth and its first form remain undistinguished, and where its earthly future appears restricted to that generation, in John the Eternal Life conception largely absorbs the attention away from all successiveness; Jesus’ earthly life does not limit the religion’s assimilation of further truth and experience: “I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now,” “the Father will give you another Helper, the spirit of truth, who will abide with you for ever” (xvi. 12, xiv. 15). This universalism is not simply spiritual; the external element, presupposed in the Synoptists as that of the Jewish church within which Jesus’ earthly life was spent, is here that of the now separate Christian community: He has other sheep not of this fold—them also He must bring, there will be one fold, one shepherd; and His seamless tunic, and Peter’s net which, holding every kind of fish, is not rent, are symbols of this visible unity. Ministerial gradations exist in this church; Jesus begins the feet-washing with Peter, who alone speaks and is spoken to; the beloved disciple outruns Peter to Jesus’ monument, yet waits to go in till Peter has done so first; and in the appendix the treble pastoral commission is to Peter alone: a Petrine pre-eminence which but echoes the Synoptists. And sacramentalism informs the great discourses concerning rebirth by water and the spirit, and feeding on the Living Bread, Jesus’ flesh and blood, and the narrative of the issue of blood and water from the dead Jesus’ side. Indeed so severe a stress is laid upon the explicitly Christian life and its specific means, that orthodoxy itself interprets the rebirth by water and spirit, and the eating the flesh and drinking the blood to which entrance into the Kingdom and possession of interior life are here exclusively attached, as often represented by a simple sincere desire and will for spiritual purification and a keen hunger and thirst for God’s aid, together with such cultual acts as such souls can know or find, even without any knowledge of the Christian rites. Thus there is many “a pedagogue to Christ,” and the Christian visible means and expressions are the culmination and measure of what, in various degrees and forms, accompanies every sincerely striving soul throughout all human history.

Origin and Authorship.—The question as to the book’s origin has lost its poignancy through the ever-increasing recognition of the book’s intrinsic character. Thus the recent defenders of the apostolic authorship, the Unitarian James Drummond (1903), the Anglican William Sanday (1905), the Roman Catholic Theodore Calmes (1904), can tell us, the first, that “the evangelist did not aim at an illustrative picture of what was most characteristic of Jesus”; the second, that “the author sank into his own consciousness and at last brought to light what he found there”; the third, that “the Gospel contains an entire theological system,” “history is seen through the intervening dogmatic development,” “the Samaritan woman is ... a personification,” “the behaviour of the Greeks is entirely natural in such a book.” We thus get at cross-purposes with this powerful, profound work. Only some such position as Abbé Loisy’s critical summing up (1903) brings out its specific greatness. “What the author was, his book, in spite of himself, tells us to some extent: a Christian of Judeo-Alexandrine formation; a believer without, apparently, any personal reminiscence of what had actually been the life, preaching and death of Jesus; a theologian far removed from every historical preoccupation, though he retains certain principal facts of tradition without which Christianity would evaporate into pure ideas; and a seer who has lived the Gospel which he propounds.” “To find his book beautiful and true, we need but take it as it is and understand it.” “The church, which has never discussed the literary problem of this Gospel, in nowise erred as to its worth.”

Several traditional positions have indeed been approximately maintained or reconquered against the critics. As to the Gospel’s date, critics have returned from 160-170 (Baur), 150 (Zeller), 130 (Keim), to 110-115 (Renan) and 80-110 (Harnack): since Irenaeus says its author lived into the times of Trajan (90-117), a date somewhere about 105 would satisfy tradition. As to the place, the critics accept proconsular Asia with practical unanimity, thus endorsing Irenaeus’s declaration that the Gospel was published in Ephesus. As to the author’s antecedents, critics have ceased to hold that he could not have been a Jew-Christian (so Bretschneider, 1820), and admit (so Schmiedel, (1901) that he must have been by birth a Jew of the Dispersion, or the son of Christian parents who had been such Jews. And as to the vivid accuracy of many of his topographical and social details, the predominant critical verdict now is that he betrays an eye-witness’s knowledge of the country between Sichem and Jordan and as to Jerusalem; he will have visited these places, say in 90, or may have lived in Jerusalem shortly before its fall. But the reasons against the author being John the Zebedean or any other eyewitness of Jesus’ earthly life have accumulated to a practical demonstration.

As to the external evidence for the book’s early date, we must remember that the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Book of Revelation, though admittedly earlier, are of the same school, and, with the great Pauline Epistles, show many preformations of Johannine phrases and ideas. Other slighter prolusions will have circulated in that Philonian centre Ephesus, before the great Gospel englobed and superseded them. Hence the precariousness of the proofs derived from more or less close parallels to Johannine passages in the apostolic fathers. Justin Martyr (163-167) certainly uses the Gospel; but his conception of Jesus’ life is so strictly Synoptic that he can hardly have accepted it as from an apostolic eyewitness. Papias of Hierapolis, in his Exposition of the Lord’s Sayings (145-160) appears nowhere to have mentioned it, and clearly distinguishes between “what Andrew, Peter, ... John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples spoke,” and “what Aristion and the presbyter John, the Lord’s disciples, say.” Thus Papias, as Eusebius about 314 insists, knew two Johns, and the apostle was to him a far-away figure; indeed early medieval chroniclers recount that Papias “in the second book of the Lord’s sayings” asserted that both the sons of Zebedee were “slain by Jews,” so that the apostle John would have died before 70. Irenaeus’s testimony is the earliest and admittedly the strongest we possess for the Zebedean authorship; yet, as Calmes admits, “it cannot be considered decisive.” In his work against the Heresies and in his letter to Florinus, about 185-191, he tells how he had himself known Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, and how Polycarp “used to recount his familiar intercourse with John and the others who had seen the Lord”; and explicitly identifies this John with the Zebedean and the evangelist. But Irenaeus was at most fifteen when thus frequenting Polycarp; writes thirty-five to fifty years later in Lyons, admitting that he noted down nothing at the time; and, since his mistaken description of Papias as “a hearer of John” the Zebedean was certainly reached by mistaking the presbyter for the apostle, his additional words “and a companion of Polycarp” point to this same mistaken identification having also operated in his mind with regard to Polycarp. In any case, the very real and important presbyter is completely unknown to Irenaeus, and his conclusion as to the book’s authorship resulted apparently from a comparison of its contents with Polycarp’s teaching. If the presbyter wrote Revelation and was Polycarp’s master, such a mistake could easily arise. Certainly Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, made a precisely similar mistake when about 190 he described the Philip “who rests in Hierapolis” as “one of the twelve apostles,” since Eusebius rightly identifies this Philip with the deacon of Acts xxi. A positive testimony for the critical conclusion is derived from the existence of a group of Asia Minor Christians who about 165 rejected the Gospel as not by John but by Cerinthus. The attribution is doubtless mistaken. But could Christians sufficiently numerous to deserve a long discussion by St Epiphanius in 374-377, who upheld the Synoptists, stoutly opposed the Gnostics and Montanists, and had escaped every special designation till the bishop nicknamed them the “Alogoi” (irrational rejectors of the Logos-Gospel), dare, in such a time and country, to hold such views, had the apostolic origin been incontestable? Surely not. The Alexandrian Clement, Tertullian, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome and Augustine only tell of the Zebedean what is traceable to stories told by Papias of others, to passages of Revelation and the Gospel, or to the assured fact of the long-lived Asian presbyter.

As to the internal evidence, if the Gospel typifies various imperfect or sinful attitudes in Nicodemus, the Samaritan woman and Thomas; if even the mother appears to symbolize faithful Israel: then, profoundly spiritual and forward-looking as it is, a type of the perfect disciple, not all unlike Clement’s perfect “Gnostic,” could hardly be omitted by it; and the precise details of this figure may well be only ideally, mystically true. The original work nowhere identifies this disciple with any particular historic figure. “He who saw” the lance-thrust “hath borne witness, and his witness is true,” is asserted (xix. 35) of the disciple. Yet “to see” is said also of intuitive faith, “whoso hath seen Me, hath seen the Father” (xiv. 9); and “true” appears also in “the true Light,” “the true Bread from heaven,” as characterizing the realities of the upper, alone fully true world, and equals “heavenly” (iii. 12); thus a “true witness” testifies to some heavenly reality, and appeals to the reader’s “pneumatic,” i.e. allegorical, understanding.

Only in the appendix do we find any deliberate identification with a particular historic person: “this is the disciple who witnessed to and who wrote these things” (24) refers doubtless to the whole previous work and to “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” identified here with an unnamed historic personage whose recent death had created a shock, evidently because he was the last of that apostolic generation which had so keenly expected the second coming (18-23). This man was so great that the writer strives to win his authority for this Gospel; and yet this man was not John the Zebedean, else why, now he is dead and gone, not proclaim the fact? If the dead man was John the presbyter—if this John had in youth just seen Jesus and the Zebedean, and in extreme old age had still seen and approved the Gospel—to attribute this Gospel to him, as is done here, would not violate the literary ethics of those times. Thus the heathen philosopher Iamblichus (d. c. 330) declares: “this was admirable” amongst the Neo-Pythagoreans “that they ascribed everything to Pythagoras; but few of them acknowledge their own works as their own” (de Pythag. vita, 198). And as to Christians, Tertullian about 210 tells how the presbyter who, in proconsular Asia, had “composed the Acts of Paul and Thecla” was convicted and deposed, for how could it be credible that Paul should confer upon women the power to “teach and baptize” as these Acts averred? The attribution as such, then, was not condemned.

The facts of the problem would all appear covered by the hypothesis that John the presbyter, the eleven being all dead, wrote the book of Revelation (its more ancient Christian portions) say in 69, and died at Ephesus say in 100; that the author of the Gospel wrote the first draft, here, say in 97; that this book, expanded by him, first circulated within a select Ephesian Christian circle; and that the Ephesian church officials added to it the appendix and published it in 110-120. But however different or more complicated may have been the actual origins, three points remain certain. The real situation that confronts us is not an unbroken tradition of apostolic eye-witnesses, incapable of re-statement with any hope of ecclesiastical acceptance, except by another apostolic eye-witness. On one side indeed there was the record, underlying the Synoptists, of at least two eye-witnesses, and the necessity of its preservation and transmission; but on the other side a profound double change had come over the Christian outlook and requirements. St Paul’s heroic labours (30-64) had gradually gained full recognition and separate organization for the universalist strain in our Lord’s teaching; and he who had never seen the earthly Jesus, but only the heavenly Christ, could even declare that Christ “though from the Jewish fathers according to the flesh” had died, “so that henceforth, even if we have known Christ according to the flesh, now we no further know Him thus,” “the Lord is the Spirit,” and “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” And the Jewish church, within which Christianity had first lived and moved, ceased to have a visible centre. Thus a super-spatial and super-temporal interpretation of that first markedly Jewish setting and apprehension of the Christian truth became as necessary as the attachment to the original contingencies. The Fourth Gospel, inexplicable without St Paul and the fall of Jerusalem, is fully understandable with them. The attribution of the book to an eye-witness nowhere resolves, it everywhere increases, the real difficulties; and by insisting upon having history in the same degree and way in John as in the Synoptists, we cease to get it sufficiently anywhere at all. And the Fourth Gospel’s true greatness lies well within the range of this its special character. In character it is profoundly “pneumatic”; Paul’s super-earthly Spirit-Christ here breathes and speaks, and invites a corresponding spiritual comprehension. And its greatness appears in its inexhaustibly deep teachings concerning Christ’s sheep and fold; the Father’s drawing of souls to Christ; the dependence of knowledge as to Christ’s doctrine upon the doing of God’s will; the fulfilling of the commandment of love, as the test of true discipleship; eternal life, begun even here and now; and God a Spirit, to be served in spirit and in truth.

Bibliography.—See also the independent discussion, under Revelation, Book of, of the authorship of that work. Among the immense literature of the subject, the following books will be found especially instructive by the classically trained reader: Origen’s commentary, finished (only to John xiii. 33) in 235-237 (best ed. by Preuschen, 1903). St Augustine’s Tractatus in Joannis Ev. et Ep., about 416. The Spanish Jesuit Juan Maldonatus’ Latin commentary, published 1596 (critical reprint, edited by Raich, 1874), a pathfinder on many obscure points, is still a model for tenacious penetration of Johannine ideas. Bretschneider’s short Probabilia de Evangelii ... Joannis Apostoli indole et origine (1820), the first systematic assault on the traditional attribution, remains unrefuted in its main contention. The best summing up and ripest fruit of the critical labour since then are Professor H. J. Holtzmann’s Handkommentar (2nd ed., 1893) and the respective sections in his Einleitung in d. N. T. (3rd ed., 1892) and his Lehrbuch der N. T. Theologie (1897), vol. 2. Professor C. E. Luthardt’s St John, Author of the Fourth Gospel (Eng. trans., with admirable bibliography by C. R. Gregory, 1875), still remains the best conservative statement. Among the few critically satisfactory French books, Abbé Loisy’s Le Quatrième évangile (1903) stands pre-eminent for delicate psychological analysis and continuous sense of the book’s closely knit unity; whilst Père Th. Calmes’ Évangile selon S. Jean (1904) indicates how numerous are the admissions as to the book’s character and the evidences for its authorship, made by intelligent Roman Catholic apologists with Rome’s explicit approbation. In England a considerably less docile conservatism has been predominant. Bp Lightfoot’s Essays on ... Supernatural Religion (1874-1877; collected 1889) are often masterly conservative interpretations of the external evidence; but they leave this evidence still inconclusive, and the formidable contrary internal evidence remains practically untouched. Much the same applies to Bp Westcott’s Gospel according to St John (1882), devotionally so attractive, and in textual criticism excellent. Dr James Drummond’s Inquiry into the Character and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (1903) does not, by its valuable survey of the external evidence, succeed in giving credibility to the eyewitness origin of such a book as this is admitted to be. Professor W. Sanday’s slighter Criticism of the Fourth Gospel (1905) is in a similar position. Professor P. W. Schmiedel’s article “John s. of Zebedee” in the Ency. Bib. (1901) is the work of a German of the advanced left. Dr E. A. Abbott’s laborious From Letter to Spirit (1903), Joannine Vocabulary (1904) and Grammar (1906) overflow with statistical details and ever acute, often fanciful, conjecture. Professor F. C. Burkitt’s The Gospel History (1906) vigorously sketches the book’s dominant characteristics and true function. E. F. Scott’s The Fourth Gospel (1906) gives a lucid, critical and religiously tempered account of the Gospel’s ideas, aims, affinities, difficulties and abiding significance.

(F. v. H.)

JOHN ALBERT (1459-1501), king of Poland, third son of Casimir IV. king of Poland and Elizabeth of Austria. As crown prince he distinguished himself by his brilliant victory over the Tatars at Kopersztyn in 1487. He succeeded his father in 1492. The loss of revenue consequent upon the secession of Lithuania placed John Albert at the mercy of the Polish Sejmiki or local diets, where the szlachta, or country gentry, made their subsidies dependent upon the king’s subservience. Primarily a warrior with a strong taste for heroic adventure, John Albert desired to pose as the champion of Christendom against the Turks. Circumstances seemed, moreover, to favour him. In his brother Wladislaus, who as king of Hungary and Bohemia possessed a dominant influence in Central Europe, he found a counterpoise to the machinations of the emperor Maximilian, who in 1492 had concluded an alliance against him with Ivan III. of Muscovy, while, as suzerain of Moldavia, John Albert was favourably situated for attacking the Turks. At the conference of Leutschau in 1494 the details of the expedition were arranged between the kings of Poland and Hungary and the elector Frederick of Brandenburg, with the co-operation of Stephen, hospodar of Moldavia, who had appealed to John Albert for assistance. In the course of 1496 John Albert with great difficulty collected an army of 80,000 men in Poland, but the crusade was deflected from its proper course by the sudden invasion of Galicia by the hospodar, who apparently—for the whole subject is still very obscure—had been misled by reports from Hungary that John Albert was bent upon placing his younger brother Sigismund on the throne of Moldavia. Be that as it may, the Poles entered Moldavia not as friends, but as foes, and, after the abortive siege of Suczawa, were compelled to retreat through the Bukowina to Sniatyn, harassed all the way by the forces of the hospodar. The insubordination of the szlachta seems to have been one cause of this disgraceful collapse, for John Albert confiscated hundreds of their estates after his return; in spite of which, to the end of his life he retained his extraordinary popularity. When the new grand master of the Teutonic order, Frederic of Saxony, refused to render homage to the Polish crown, John Albert compelled him to do so. His intention of still further humiliating the Teutonic order was frustrated by his sudden death in 1501. A valiant soldier and a man of much enlightenment, John Albert was a poor politician, recklessly sacrificing the future to the present.

See V. Czerny, The Reigns of John Albert and Alexander Jagiello (Pol.) (Cracow, 1882).

JOHN ANGELUS (d. 1244), emperor of Thessalonica. In 1232 he received the throne from his father Theodore, who, after a period of exile, had re-established his authority, but owing to his loss of eyesight resolved to make John the nominal sovereign. His reign is chiefly marked by the aggressions of the rival emperor of Nicaea, John Vatatzes, who laid siege to Thessalonica in 1243 and only withdrew upon John Angelus consenting to exchange the title “emperor” for the subordinate one of “despot.”

See G. Finlay, History of Greece, vol. iii. (1877).

JOHN FREDERICK I. (1503-1554), called the Magnanimous, elector of Saxony, was the elder son of the elector, John the Steadfast, and belonged to the Ernestine branch of the Wettin family. Born at Torgau on the 30th of June 1503 and educated as a Lutheran, he took some part in imperial politics and in the business of the league of Schmalkalden before he became elector by his father’s death in August 1532. His lands comprised the western part of Saxony, and included Thuringia, but in 1542 Coburg was surrendered to form an apanage for his brother, John Ernest (d. 1553). John Frederick, who was an ardent Lutheran and had a high regard for Luther, continued the religious policy of his father. In 1534 he assisted to make peace between the German king Ferdinand I. and Ulrich, duke of Württemberg, but his general attitude was one of vacillation between the emperor and his own impetuous colleague in the league of Schmalkalden, Philip, landgrave of Hesse. He was often at variance with Philip, whose bigamy he disliked, and his belief in the pacific intentions of Charles V. and his loyalty to the Empire prevented him from pursuing any definite policy for the defence of Protestantism. In 1541 his kinsman Maurice became duke of Saxony, and cast covetous eyes upon the electoral dignity. A cause of quarrel soon arose. In 1541 John Frederick forced Nicholas Amsdorf into the see of Naumburg in spite of the chapter, who had elected a Roman Catholic, Julius von Pflug; and about the same time he seized Wurzen, the property of the bishop of Meissen, whose see was under the joint protection of electoral and ducal Saxony. Maurice took up arms, and war was only averted by the efforts of Philip of Hesse and Luther. In 1542 the elector assisted to drive Henry, duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, from his duchy, but in spite of this his relations with Charles V. at the diet of Spires in 1544 were very amicable. This was, however, only a lull in the storm, and the emperor soon began to make preparations for attacking the league of Schmalkalden, and especially John Frederick and Philip of Hesse. The support, or at least the neutrality, of Maurice was won by the hope of the electoral dignity, and in July 1546 war broke out between Charles and the league. In September John Frederick was placed under the imperial ban, and in November Maurice invaded the electorate. Hastening from southern Germany the elector drove Maurice from the land, took his ally, Albert Alcibiades, prince of Bayreuth, prisoner at Rochlitz, and overran ducal Saxony. His progress, however, was checked by the advance of Charles V. Notwithstanding his valour he was wounded and taken prisoner at Mühlberg on the 24th of April 1547, and was condemned to death in order to induce Wittenberg to surrender. The sentence was not carried out, but by the capitulation of Wittenberg (May 1547) he renounced the electoral dignity and a part of his lands in favour of Maurice, steadfastly refusing however to make any concessions on religious matters, and remained in captivity until May 1552, when he returned to the Thuringian lands which his sons had been allowed to retain, his return being hailed with wild enthusiasm. During his imprisonment he had refused to accept the Interim, issued from Augsburg in May 1548, and had urged his sons to make no peace with Maurice. After his release the emperor had restored his dignities to him, and his assumption of the electoral arms and title prevented any arrangement with Maurice. However, after the death of this prince in July 1553, a treaty was made at Naumburg in February 1554 with his successor Augustus. John Frederick consented to the transfer of the electoral dignity, but retained for himself the title of “born elector,” and received some lands and a sum of money. He was thus the last Ernestine elector of Saxony. He died at Weimar on the 3rd of March 1554, having had three sons by his wife, Sibylla (d. 1554), daughter of John III., duke of Cleves, whom he had married in 1527, and was succeeded by his eldest son, John Frederick. The elector was a great hunter and a hard drinker, whose brave and dignified bearing in a time of misfortune won for him his surname of Magnanimous, and drew eulogies from Roger Ascham and Melanchthon. He founded the university of Jena and was a benefactor to that of Leipzig.

See Mentz, Johann Friedrich der Grossmütige (Jena, 1903); Rogge, Johann Friedrich der Grossmütige (Halle, 1902) and L. von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (Leipzig, 1882).

JOHN FREDERICK (1529-1595), called der Mittlere, duke of Saxony, was the eldest son of John Frederick, who had been deprived of the Saxon electorate by the emperor Charles V. in 1547. Born at Torgau on the 8th of January 1529, he received a good education, and when his father was imprisoned in 1547 undertook the government of the remnant of electoral Saxony which the emperor allowed the Ernestine branch of the Wettin family to keep. Released in 1552 John Frederick the elder died two years later, and his three sons ruled Ernestine Saxony together until 1557, when John Frederick was made sole ruler. This arrangement lasted until 1565, when John Frederick shared his lands with his surviving brother, John William (1530-1573), retaining for himself Gotha and Weimar. The duke was a strong, even a fanatical, Lutheran, but his religious views were gradually subordinated to the one idea of regaining the electoral dignity then held by Augustus I. To attain this end he lent a willing ear to the schemes of Wilhelm von Grumbach, who came to his court about 1557 and offered to regain the electoral dignity and even to acquire the Empire for his patron. In spite of repeated warnings from the emperor Ferdinand I., John Frederick continued to protect Grumbach, and in 1566 his obstinacy caused him to be placed under the imperial ban. Its execution was entrusted to Augustus who, aided by the duke’s brother, John William, marched against Gotha with a strong force. In consequence of a mutiny the town surrendered in April 1567, and John Frederick was delivered to the emperor Maximilian II. He was imprisoned in Vienna, his lands were given to his brother, and he remained in captivity until his death at Steyer on the 6th of May 1595. These years were mainly occupied with studying theology and in correspondence. John Frederick married firstly Agnes (d. 1555) daughter of Philip, landgrave of Hesse, and widow of Maurice, elector of Saxony, and secondly Elizabeth (d. 1594) daughter of Frederick III., elector palatine of the Rhine, by whom he left two sons, John Casimir (1564-1633) and John Ernest (1566-1638). Elizabeth shared her husband’s imprisonment for twenty-two years.

See A. Beck, Johann Friedrich der Mittlere, Herzog zu Sachsen (Vienna, 1858); and F. Ortloff, Geschichte der Grumbachischen Händel (Jena, 1868-1870).

JOHN GEORGE I. (1585-1656), elector of Saxony, second son of the elector Christian I., was born on the 5th of March 1585, succeeding to the electorate in June 1611 on the death of his elder brother, Christian II. The geographical position of electoral Saxony hardly less than her high standing among the German Protestants gave her ruler much importance during the Thirty Years’ War. At the beginning of his reign, however, the new elector took up a somewhat detached position. His personal allegiance to Lutheranism was sound, but he liked neither the growing strength of Brandenburg nor the increasing prestige of the Palatinate; the adherence of the other branches of the Saxon ruling house to Protestantism seemed to him to suggest that the head of electoral Saxony should throw his weight into the other scale, and he was prepared to favour the advances of the Habsburgs and the Roman Catholic party. Thus he was easily induced to vote for the election of Ferdinand, archduke of Styria, as emperor in August 1619, an action which nullified the anticipated opposition of the Protestant electors. The new emperor secured the help of John George for the impending campaign in Bohemia by promising that he should be undisturbed in his possession of certain ecclesiastical lands. Carrying out his share of the bargain by occupying Silesia and Lusatia, where he displayed much clemency, the Saxon elector had thus some part in driving Frederick V., elector palatine of the Rhine, from Bohemia and in crushing Protestantism in that country, the crown of which he himself had previously refused. Gradually, however, he was made uneasy by the obvious trend of the imperial policy towards the annihilation of Protestantism, and by a dread lest the ecclesiastical lands should be taken from him; and the issue of the edict of restitution in March 1629 put the coping-stone to his fears. Still, although clamouring vainly for the exemption of the electorate from the area covered by the edict, John George took no decided measures to break his alliance with the emperor. He did, indeed, in February 1631 call a meeting of Protestant princes at Leipzig, but in spite of the appeals of the preacher Matthias Hoë von Hohenegg (1580-1645) he contented himself with a formal protest. Meanwhile Gustavus Adolphus had landed in Germany, and the elector had refused to allow him to cross the Elbe at Wittenberg, thus hindering his attempt to relieve Magdeburg. But John George’s reluctance to join the Protestants disappeared when the imperial troops under Tilly began to ravage Saxony, and in September 1631 he concluded an alliance with the Swedish king. The Saxon troops were present at the battle of Breitenfeld, but were routed by the imperialists, the elector himself seeking safety in flight. Nevertheless he soon took the offensive. Marching into Bohemia the Saxons occupied Prague, but John George soon began to negotiate for peace and consequently his soldiers offered little resistance to Wallenstein, who drove them back into Saxony. However, for the present the efforts of Gustavus Adolphus prevented the elector from deserting him, but the position was changed by the death of the king at Lützen in 1632, and the refusal of Saxony to join the Protestant league under Swedish leadership. Still letting his troops fight in a desultory fashion against the imperialists, John George again negotiated for peace, and in May 1635 he concluded the important treaty of Prague with Ferdinand II. His reward was Lusatia and certain other additions of territory; the retention by his son Augustus of the archbishopric of Magdeburg; and some concessions with regard to the edict of restitution. Almost at once he declared war upon the Swedes, but in October 1636 he was beaten at Wittstock; and Saxony, ravaged impartially by both sides, was soon in a deplorable condition. At length in September 1645 the elector was compelled to agree to a truce with the Swedes, who, however, retained Leipzig; and as far as Saxony was concerned this ended the Thirty Years’ War. After the peace of Westphalia, which with regard to Saxony did little more than confirm the treaty of Prague, John George died on the 8th of October 1656. Although not without political acumen, he was not a great ruler; his character appears to have been harsh and unlovely, and he was addicted to drink. He was twice married, and in addition to his successor John George II. he left three sons, Augustus (1614-1680), Christian (d. 1691) and Maurice (d. 1681) who were all endowed with lands in Saxony, and who founded cadet branches of the Saxon house.

John George II. (1613-1680), elector of Saxony, was born on the 31st of May 1613. In 1657, just after his accession, he made an arrangement with his three brothers with the object of preventing disputes over their separate territories, and in 1664 he entered into friendly relations with Louis XIV. He received money from the French king, but the existence of a strong anti-French party in Saxony induced him occasionally to respond to the overtures of the emperor Leopold I. The elector’s primary interests were not in politics, but in music and art. He adorned Dresden, which under him became the musical centre of Germany; welcoming foreign musicians and others he gathered around him a large and splendid court, and his capital was the constant scene of musical and other festivals. His enormous expenditure compelled him in 1661 to grant greater control over monetary matters to the estates, a step which laid the foundation of the later system of finance in Saxony. John George died at Freiberg on the 22nd of August 1680.

John George III. (1647-1691), elector of Saxony, the only son of John George II., was born on the 20th of June 1647. He forsook the vacillating foreign policy of his father and in June 1683 joined an alliance against France. Having raised the first standing army in the electorate he helped to drive the Turks from Vienna in September 1680, leading his men with great gallantry; but disgusted with the attitude of the emperor Leopold I. after the victory, he returned at once to Saxony. However, he sent aid to Leopold in 1685. When Louis XIV.’s armies invaded Germany in September 1688 John George was one of the first to take up arms against the French, and after sharing in the capture of Mainz he was appointed commander-in-chief of the imperial forces. He had not, however, met with any notable success when he died at Tübingen on the 12th of September 1691. Like his father, he was very fond of music, but he appears to have been less extravagant than John George II. His wife was Anna Sophia, daughter of Frederick III. king of Denmark, and both his sons, John George and Frederick Augustus, became electors of Saxony, the latter also becoming king of Poland as Augustus II.

John George IV. (1668-1694), elector of Saxony, was born on the 18th of October 1668. At the beginning of his reign his chief adviser was Hans Adam von Schöning (1641-1696), who counselled a union between Saxony and Brandenburg and a more independent attitude towards the emperor. In accordance with this advice certain proposals were put before Leopold I. to which he refused to agree; and consequently the Saxon troops withdrew from the imperial army, a proceeding which led the chagrined emperor to seize and imprison Schöning in July 1692. Although John George was unable to procure his minister’s release, Leopold managed to allay the elector’s anger, and early in 1693 the Saxon soldiers rejoined the imperialists. This elector is chiefly celebrated for his passion for Magdalene Sibylle von Neidschütz (d. 1694), created in 1693 countess of Rochlitz, whom on his accession he publicly established as his mistress. John George left no legitimate issue when he died on the 27th of April 1694.

JOHN1 MAURICE OF NASSAU (1604-1679), surnamed the Brazilian, was the son of John the Younger, count of Nassau-Siegen-Dillenburg, and the grandson of John, the elder brother of William the Silent and the chief author of the Union of Utrecht. He distinguished himself in the campaigns of his cousin, the stadtholder Frederick Henry of Orange, and was by him recommended to the directors of the Dutch West India company in 1636 to be governor-general of the new dominion in Brazil recently conquered by the company. He landed at the Recife, the port of Pernambuco, and the chief stronghold of the Dutch, in January 1637. By a series of successful expeditions he gradually extended the Dutch possessions from Sergipe on the south to S. Luis de Maranham in the north. He likewise conquered the Portuguese possessions of St George del Mina and St Thomas on the west coast of Africa. With the assistance of the famous architect, Pieter Post of Haarlem, he transformed the Recife by building a new town adorned with splendid public edifices and gardens, which was called after his name Mauritstad. By his statesmanlike policy he brought the colony into a most flourishing condition and succeeded even in reconciling the Portuguese settlers to submit quietly to Dutch rule. His large schemes and lavish expenditure alarmed however the parsimonious directors of the West India company, but John Maurice refused to retain his post unless he was given a free hand, and he returned to Europe in July 1644. He was shortly afterwards appointed by Frederick Henry to the command of the cavalry in the States army, and he took part in the campaigns of 1645 and 1646. When the war was ended by the peace of Münster in January 1648, he accepted from the elector of Brandenburg the post of governor of Cleves, Mark and Ravensberg, and later also of Minden. His success in the Rhineland was as great as it had been in Brazil, and he proved himself a most able and wise ruler. At the end of 1652 he was appointed head of the order of St John and made a prince of the Empire. In 1664 he came back to Holland; when the war broke out with England supported by an invasion from the bishop of Münster, he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Dutch forces on land. Though hampered in his command by the restrictions of the states-general, he repelled the invasion, and the bishop, Christoph von Galen, was forced to conclude peace. His campaigning was not yet at an end, for in 1673 he was appointed by the stadtholder William III. to command the forces in Friesland and Groningen, and to defend the eastern frontier of the Provinces. In 1675 his health compelled him to give up active military service, and he spent his last years in his beloved Cleves, where he died on the 20th of December 1679. The house which he built at the Hague, named after him the Maurits-huis, now contains the splendid collections of pictures so well known to all admirers of Dutch art.

Bibliography.—Caspar Barlaeus, Rerum per octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum historia, sub praefectura illustrissimi comitis J. Mauritii Nassoviae (Amsterdam, 1647); L. Driessen, Leben des Fürsten Johann Moritz von Nassau (Berlin, 1849); D. Veegens, Leven van Jaan Maurits, Graaf van Nassau-Siegen (Haarlem, 1840).

1 This name is usually written Joan, the form used by the man himself in his signature—see the facsimile in Netscher’s Les Hollandais en Brésil.

JOHN O’ GROAT’S HOUSE, a spot on the north coast of Caithness, Scotland, 14 m. N. of Wick and 1¾ m. W. of Duncansby Head. It is the mythical site of an octagonal house said to have been erected early in the 16th century by one John Groot, a Dutchman who had migrated to the north of Scotland by permission of James IV. According to the legend, other members of the Groot family followed John, and acquired lands around Duncansby. When there were eight Groot families, disputes began to arise as to precedence at annual feasts. These squabbles John Groot is said to have settled by building an octagonal house which had eight entrances and eight tables, so that the head of each family could enter by his own door and sit at the head of his own table. Being but a few miles south of Dunnet Head, John o’ Groat’s is a colloquial term for the most northerly point of Scotland. The site of the traditional building is marked by an outline traced in turf. Descendants of the Groot family, now Groat, still live in the neighbourhood. The cowry-shell, Cypraea europaea, is locally known as “John o’ Groat’s bucky.”

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, an American educational institution at Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. Its trustees, chosen by Johns Hopkins (1794-1873), a successful Baltimore merchant, were incorporated on the 24th of August 1867 under a general act “for the promotion of education in the state of Maryland.” But nothing was actually done until after the death of Johns Hopkins (Dec. 24, 1873), when his fortune of $7,000,000 was equally divided between the projected university and a hospital, also to bear his name, and intended to be an auxiliary to the medical school of the university. The trustees of the university consulted with many prominent educationists, notably Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, Andrew D. White of Cornell, and James B. Angell of the university of Michigan; on the 30th of December 1874 they elected Daniel Coit Gilman (q.v.) president. The university was formally opened on the 3rd of October 1876, when an address was delivered by T. H. Huxley. The first year was largely given up to consultation among the newly chosen professors, among whom were—in Greek, B. L. Gildersleeve; in mathematics, J. J. Sylvester; in chemistry, Ira Remsen; in biology, Henry Newell Martin (1848-1896); in zoology, William Keith Brooks (1848-1908); and in physics, Henry Augustus Rowland (1848-1901). Prominent among later teachers were Arthur Cayley in mathematics, the Semitic scholar Paul Haupt (b. 1858), Granville Stanley Hall in psychology, Maurice Bloomfield in Sanskrit and comparative philology, James Rendel Harris in Biblical philology, James Wilson Bright in English philology, Herbert B. Adams in history, and Richard T. Ely (b. 1854) in economics. The university at once became a pioneer in the United States in teaching by means of seminary courses and laboratories, and it has been eminently successful in encouraging research, in scientific production, and in preparing its students to become instructors in other colleges and universities. It includes a college in which each of five parallel courses leads to the degree of Bachelor of Arts, but its reputation has been established chiefly by its other two departments, the graduate school and the medical school. The graduate school offers courses in philosophy and psychology, physics, chemistry and biology, historical and economic science, language and literature, and confers the degree of Doctor of Philosophy after at least three years’ residence. From its foundation the university had novel features and a liberal administration. Twenty annual fellowships of $500 each were opened to the graduates of any college. Petrography and laboratory psychology were among the new sciences fostered by the new university. Such eminent outsiders were secured for brief residence and lecture courses as J. R. Lowell, F. J. Child, Simon Newcomb, H. E. von Holst, F. A. Walker, William James, Sidney Lanier, James Bryce, E. A. Freeman, W. W. Goodwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace. President Gilman gave up his presidential duties on the 1st of September 1901, Ira Remsen1 succeeding him in the office. The medical department, inaugurated in 1893, is closely affiliated with the excellently equipped Johns Hopkins Hospital (opened in 1889), and is actually a graduate school, as it admits only students holding the bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. The degree of Doctor of Medicine is conferred after four years of successful study, and advanced courses are offered. The department’s greatest teachers have been William Osler (b. 1849) and William Henry Welch (b. 1850).

The buildings of the university were in 1901 an unpretentious group on crowded ground near the business centre of the city. In 1902 a new site was secured, containing about 125 acres amid pleasant surroundings in the northern suburbs, and new buildings were designed in accordance with a plan formed with a view to secure harmony and symmetry. In 1907 the library contained more than 133,000 bound volumes. Among the numerous publications issued by the university press are: American Journal of Mathematics, Studies in Historical and Political Science, Reprint of Economic Tracts, American Journal of Philology, Contributions to Assyriology and Semitic Philology, Modern Language Notes, American Chemical Journal, American Journal of Insanity, Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity, Reports of the Maryland Geological Survey, and Reports of the Maryland Weather Service. The institution is maintained chiefly with the proceeds of the endowment fund. It also receives aid from the state, and charges tuition fees. Its government is entrusted to a board of trustees, while the direction of affairs of a strictly academic nature is delegated to an academic council and to department boards. In 1907-1908 the regular faculty numbered 175, and there was an enrolment of 683 students, of whom 518 were in post-graduate courses.

On the history of the university see Daniel C. Gilman, The Launching of a University (New York, 1906), and the annual reports of the president.

1 Ira Remsen was born in New York City on the 10th of February 1846, graduated at the college of the City of New York in 1865, studied at the New York college of physicians and surgeons and at the university of Göttingen, was professor of chemistry at Williams College in 1872-1876, and in 1876 became professor cf chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. He published many textbooks of chemistry, organic and inorganic, which were republished in England and were translated abroad. In 1879 he founded the American Chemical Journal.

JOHNSON, ANDREW (1808-1875), seventeenth president of the United States, was born at Raleigh, North Carolina, on the 29th of December 1808. His parents were poor, and his father died when Andrew was four years old. At the age of ten he was apprenticed to a tailor, his spare hours being spent in acquiring the rudiments of an education. He learned to read from a book which contained selected orations of great British and American statesmen. The young tailor went to Laurens Court House, South Carolina, in 1824, to work at his trade, but returned to Raleigh in 1826 and soon afterward removed to Greeneville in the eastern part of Tennessee. He married during the same year Eliza McCardle (1810-1876), much his superior by birth and education, who taught him the common school branches of learning and was of great assistance in his later career. In East Tennessee most of the people were small farmers, while West Tennessee was a land of great slave plantations. Johnson began in politics to oppose the aristocratic element and became the spokesman and champion of the poorer and labouring classes. In 1828 he was elected an alderman of Greeneville and in 1830-1834 was mayor. In 1834, in the Tennessee constitutional convention he endeavoured to limit the influence of the slaveholders by basing representation in the state legislature on the white population alone. In 1835-1837 and 1839-1841 Johnson was a Democratic member of the state House of Representatives, and in 1841-1843 of the state Senate; in both houses he uniformly upheld the cause of the “common people,” and, in addition, opposed legislation for “internal improvements.” He soon was recognized as the political champion of East Tennessee. Though his favourite leaders became Whigs, Johnson remained a Democrat, and in 1840 canvassed the state for Van Buren for president.

In 1843 he was elected to the national House of Representatives and there remained for ten years until his district was gerrymandered by the Whigs and he lost his seat. But he at once offered himself as a candidate for governor and was elected and re-elected, and was then sent to the United States Senate, serving from 1857 to 1862. As governor (1853-1857) he proved to be able and non-partisan. He championed popular education and recommended the homestead policy to the national government, and from his sympathy with the working classes and his oft-avowed pride in his former calling he became known as the “mechanic governor.” In Congress he proved to be a tireless advocate of the claims of the poorer whites and an opponent of the aristocracy. He favoured the annexation of Texas, supported the Polk administration on the issues of the Mexican War and the Oregon boundary controversy, and though voting for the admission of free California demanded national protection for slavery. He also advocated the homestead law and low tariffs, opposed the policy of “internal improvements,” and was a zealous worker for budget economies. Though opposed to a monopoly of political power in the South by the great slaveholders, he deprecated anti-slavery agitation (even favouring denial of the right of petition on that subject) as threatening abolition or the dissolution of the Union, and went with his sectional leaders so far as to demand freedom of choice for the Territories, and protection for slavery where it existed—this even so late as 1860. He supported in 1860 the ultra-Democratic ticket of Breckinridge and Lane, but he did not identify the election of Lincoln with the ruin of the South, though he thought the North should give renewed guarantees to slavery. But he followed Jackson rather than Calhoun, and above everything else set his love of the Union, though believing the South to be grievously wronged. He was the only Southern member of Congress who opposed secession and refused to “go with his state” when it withdrew from the Union in 1861. In the judgment of a leading opponent (O. P. Morton) “perhaps no man in Congress exerted the same influence on the public sentiment of the North at the beginning of the war” as Johnson. During the war he suffered much for his loyalty to the Union. In March 1862 Lincoln made him military governor of the part of Tennessee captured from the Confederates, and after two years of autocratic rule (with much danger to himself) he succeeded in organizing a Union government for the state. In 1864, to secure the votes of the war Democrats and to please the border states that had remained in the Union, Johnson was nominated for vice-president on the ticket with Lincoln.

A month after the inauguration the murder of Lincoln left him president, with the great problem to solve of reconstruction of the Union. All his past career and utterances seemed to indicate that he would favour the harshest measures toward ex-Confederates, hence his acceptability to the most radical republicans. But, whether because he drew a distinction between the treason of individuals and of states, or was influenced by Seward, or simply, once in responsible position, separated Republican party politics from the question of constitutional interpretation, at least he speedily showed that he would be influenced by no acrimony, and adopted the lenient reconstruction policy of Lincoln. In this he had for some time the cordial support of his cabinet. During the summer of 1865 he set up provisional civil governments in all the seceded states except Texas, and within a few months all those states were reorganized and applying for readmission to the Union. The radical congress (Republican by a large majority) sharply opposed this plan of restoration, as they had opposed Lincoln’s plan: first, because the members of Congress from the Southern States (when readmitted) would almost certainly vote with the Democrats; secondly, because relatively few of the Confederates were punished; and thirdly, because the newly organized Southern States did not give political rights to the negroes. The question of the status of the negro proved the crux of the issue. Johnson was opposed to general or immediate negro suffrage. A bitter contest began in Feb. 1866, between the president and the Congress, which refused to admit representatives from the South and during 1866 passed over his veto a number of important measures, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau Act and the Civil Rights Act, and submitted to the States the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Johnson took a prominent and undignified part in the congressional campaign of 1866, in which his policies were voted down by the North. In 1867 Congress threw aside his work of restoration and proceeded with its own plan, the main features of which were the disfranchisement of ex-Confederates and the enfranchisement of negroes. On the 2nd of March 1867 Congress passed over the president’s veto the Tenure of Office Act, prohibiting the president from dismissing from office without the consent of the Senate any officer appointed by and with the advice and consent of that body, and in addition a section was inserted in the army appropriation bill of this session designed to subordinate the president to the Senate and the general-in-chief of the army in military matters. The president was thus deprived of practically all power. Stanton and other members of his cabinet and General Grant became hostile to him, the president attempted to remove Stanton without regard to the Tenure of Office Act, and, finally, to get rid of the president, Congress in 1868(February-May) made an attempt to impeach and remove him, his disregard of the Tenure of Office Act being the principal charge against him. The charges1 were in part quite trivial, and the evidence was ridiculously inadequate for the graver charges. A two-thirds majority was necessary for conviction; and the votes being 35 to 19 (7 Republicans and 12 Democrats voting in his favour on the crucial clauses) he was acquitted. The misguided animus of the impeachment as a piece of partisan politics was soon very generally admitted; and the importance of its failure, in securing the continued power and independence of the presidential element in the constitutional system, can hardly be over-estimated. The rest of his term as president was comparatively quiet and uneventful. In 1869 he retired into private life in Tennessee, and after several unsuccessful efforts was elected to the United States Senate, free of party trammels, in 1875, but died at Carter’s Station, Tenn., on the 31st of July 1875. The only speech he made was a skilful and temperate arraignment of President Grant’s policy towards the South.

President Johnson’s leading political principles were a reverence of Andrew Jackson, unlimited confidence in the people, and an intense veneration for the constitution. Throughout his life he remained in some respects a “backwoodsman.” He lacked the finish of systematic education. But his whole career sufficiently proves him to have been a man of extraordinary qualities. He did not rise above untoward circumstances by favour, nor—until after his election as senator—by fortunate and fortuitous connexion with great events, but by strength of native talents, persistent purpose, and an iron will. He had strong, rugged powers, was a close reasoner and a forcible speaker. Unfortunately his extemporaneous speeches were commonplace, in very bad taste, fervently intemperate and denunciatory; and though this was probably due largely to temperament and habits of stump-speaking formed in early life, it was attributed by his enemies to drink. Resorting to stimulants after illness, his marked excess in this respect on the occasion of his inauguration as vice-president undoubtedly did him harm with the public. Faults of personality were his great handicap. Though approachable and not without kindliness of manner, he seemed hard and inflexible; and while president, physical pain and domestic anxieties, added to the struggles of public life, combined to accentuate a naturally somewhat severe temperament. A lifelong Southern Democrat, he was forced to lead (nominally at least) a party of Northern Republicans, with whom he had no bond of sympathy save a common opposition to secession; and his ardent, aggressive convictions and character, above all his complete lack of tact, unfitted him to deal successfully with the passionate partisanship of Congress. The absolute integrity and unflinching courage that marked his career were always ungrudgingly admitted by his greatest enemies.

See L. Foster, The Life and Speeches of Andrew Johnson (1866); D. M. De Witt, The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (1903); C. E. Chadsey, The Struggle between President Johnson and Congress over Reconstruction (1896); and W. A. Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898). Also see W. A. Dunning’s paper “More Light on Andrew Johnson” (in the American Historical Review, April 1906), in which apparently conclusive evidence is presented to prove that Johnson’s first inaugural, a notable state paper, was written by the historian George Bancroft.

1 The charges centred in the president’s removal of Secretary Stanton, his ad interim appointment of Lorenzo Thomas, his campaign speeches in 1866, and the relation of these three things to the Tenure of Office Act. Of the eleven charges of impeachment the first was that Stanton’s removal was contrary to the Tenure of Office Act; the second, that the appointment of Thomas was a violation of the same law; the third, that the appointment violated the Constitution; the fourth, that Johnson conspired with Thomas “to hinder and prevent Edwin M. Stanton ... from holding ... office of secretary for the department of war”; the fifth, that Johnson had conspired with Thomas to “prevent and hinder the execution” of the Tenure of Office Act; the sixth, that he had conspired with Thomas “to seize, take and possess the property of the United States in the department of war,” in violation of the Tenure of Office Act; the seventh, that this action was “a high misdemeanour”; the eighth, that the appointment of Thomas was “with intent unlawfully to control the disbursements of the moneys appropriated for the military service and for the department of war”; the ninth, that he had instructed Major-General Emory, in command of the department of Washington, that an act of 1867 appropriating money for the army was unconstitutional; the tenth, that his speeches in 1866 constituted “a high misdemeanour in office”; and the eleventh, the “omnibus” article, that he had committed high misdemeanours in saying that the 39th Congress was not an authorized Congress, that its legislation was not binding upon him, and that it was incapable of proposing amendments. The actual trial began on the 30th of March (from the 5th of March it was adjourned to the 23rd, and on the 24th of March to the 30th). On the 16th of May, after sessions in which the Senate repeatedly reversed the rulings of the chief justice as to the admission of evidence, in which the president’s counsel showed that their case was excellently prepared and the prosecuting counsel appealed in general to political passions rather than to judicial impartiality, the eleventh article was voted on and impeachment failed by a single vote (35 to 19; 7 republicans and 12 democrats voting “Not guilty”) of the necessary two-thirds. After ten days’ interval, during which B. F. Butler of the prosecuting counsel attempted to prove that corruption had been practised on some of those voting “Not guilty,” on the 26th of May a vote was taken on the second and third articles with the same result as on the eleventh article. There was no vote on the other articles.

JOHNSON, BENJAMIN (c. 1665-1742), English actor, was first a scene painter, then acted in the provinces, and appeared in London in 1695 at Drury Lane after Betterton’s defection. He was the original Captain Driver in Oronooko (1696), Captain Fireball in Farquhar’s Sir Harry Wildair (1701), Sable in Steele’s Funeral (1702), &c.; as the First Gravedigger in Hamlet and in several characters in the plays of Ben Jonson he was particularly good. He succeeded, also, to Thomas Doggett’s rôles.

JOHNSON, EASTMAN (1824-1906), American artist, was born at Lovell, Maine, on the 29th of July 1824. He studied at Düsseldorf, Paris, Rome and The Hague, the last city being his home for four years. In 1860 he was elected to the National Academy of Design, New York. A distinguished portrait and genre painter, he made distinctively American themes his own, depicting the negro, fisherfolk and farm life with unusual interest. Such pictures as “Old Kentucky Home” (1867), “Husking Bee” (1876), “Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket” (1880), and his portrait group “The Funding Bill” (1881) achieved a national reputation. Among his sitters were many prominent men, including Daniel Webster; Presidents Hayes, Arthur, Cleveland and Harrison; William M. Evarts, Charles J. Folger; Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, James McCosh, Noah Porter and Sir Edward Archbald. He died in New York City on the 5th of April 1906.

JOHNSON, REVERDY (1796-1876), American political leader and jurist, was born at Annapolis, Maryland, on the 21st of May 1796. His father, John Johnson (1770-1824), was a distinguished lawyer, who served in both houses of the Maryland General Assembly, as attorney-general of the state (1806-1811), as a judge of the court of appeals (1811-1821), and as a chancellor of his state (1821-1824). Reverdy graduated from St John’s college in 1812. He then studied law in his father’s office, was admitted to the bar in 1815 and began to practise in Upper Marlborough, Prince George’s county. In 1817 he removed to Baltimore, where he became the professional associate of Luther Martin, William Pinkney and Roger B. Taney; with Thomas Harris he reported the decisions of the court of appeals in Harris and Johnson’s Reports (1820-1827); and in 1818 he was appointed chief commissioner of insolvent debtors. From 1821 to 1825 he was a state senator; from 1825 to 1845 he devoted himself to his practice; from 1845 to 1849, as a Whig, he was a member of the United States Senate; and from March 1849 to July 1850 he was attorney-general of the United States. In 1856 he became identified with the conservative wing of the Democratic party, and four years later supported Stephen A. Douglas for the presidency. In 1861 he was a delegate from Maryland to the peace convention at Washington; in 1861-1862 he was a member of the Maryland House of Delegates. After the capture of New Orleans he was commissioned by Lincoln to revise the decisions of the military commandant, General B. F. Butler, in regard to foreign governments, and reversed all those decisions to the entire satisfaction of the administration. In 1863 he again took his seat in the United States Senate. In 1868 he was appointed minister to Great Britain and soon after his arrival in England negotiated the Johnson-Clarendon treaty for the settlement of disputes arising out of the Civil War; this, however, the Senate refused to ratify, and he returned home on the accession of General U. S. Grant to the presidency. Again resuming his practice he was engaged by the government in the prosecution of Ku-Klux cases. He died on the 10th of February 1876 at Annapolis. He repudiated the doctrine of secession, and pleaded for compromise and conciliation. Opposed to the Reconstruction measures, he voted for them on the ground that it was better to accept than reject them, since they were probably the best that could be obtained. As a lawyer he was engaged during his later years in most of the especially important cases in the Supreme Court of the United States and in the courts of Maryland.

JOHNSON, RICHARD (1573-1659?), English romance writer, was baptized in London on the 24th of May 1573. His most famous romance is The Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom (1596?). The success of this book was so great that the author added a second and a third part in 1608 and 1616. His other stories include: The Nine Worthies of London (1592); The Pleasant Walks of Moorefields (1607); The Pleasant Conceites of Old Hobson (1607), the hero being a well-known haberdasher in the Poultry; The Most Pleasant History of Tom a Lincolne (1607); A Remembrance of ... Robert Earle of Salisbury (1612); Looke on Me, London (1613); The History of Tom Thumbe (1621). The Crown Garland of Golden Roses ... set forth in Many Pleasant new Songs and Sonnets (1612) was reprinted for the Percy Society (1842 and 1845).

JOHNSON, RICHARD MENTOR (1781-1850), ninth vice-president of the United States, was born at Bryant’s Station, Kentucky, on the 17th of October 1781. He was admitted to the bar in 1800, and became prominent as a lawyer and Democratic politician, serving in the Federal House of Representatives and in the Senate for many years. From 1837 to 1841 he was vice-president of the United States, to which position he was elected over Francis Granger, by the Senate, none of the four candidates for the vice-presidency having received a majority of the electoral votes. The opposition to Johnson within the party greatly increased during his term, and the Democratic national convention of 1840 adopted the unprecedented course of refusing to nominate anyone for the vice-presidency. In the ensuing election Johnson received most of the Democratic electoral votes, but was defeated by the Whig candidate, John Tyler. He died in Frankfort, Kentucky, on the 19th of November 1850.

JOHNSON, SAMUEL (1709-1784), English writer and lexicographer, was the son of Michael Johnson (1656-1731), bookseller and magistrate of Lichfield, who married in 1706 Sarah Ford (1669-1759). Michael’s abilities and attainments seem to have been considerable. He was so well acquainted with the contents of the volumes which he exposed for sale that the country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought him an oracle on points of learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for municipal office by taking the oaths to the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a Jacobite in heart. The social position of Samuel’s paternal grandfather, William Johnson, remains obscure; his mother was the daughter of Cornelius Ford, “a little Warwickshire Gent.”

At a house (now the Johnson Museum) in the Market Square, Lichfield, Samuel Johnson was born on the 18th of September 1709 and baptized on the same day at St Mary’s, Lichfield. In the child the physical, intellectual and moral peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were plainly discernible: great muscular strength accompanied by much awkwardness and many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper. He had inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous taint, and his parents were weak enough to believe that the royal touch would cure him. In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains and stroked and presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. Her hand was applied in vain. The boy’s features, which were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his malady. His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye; and he saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the force of his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such ease and rapidity that at every school (such as those at Lichfield and Stourbridge) to which he was sent he was soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he resided at home, and was left to his own devices. He learned much at this time, though his studies were without guidance and without plan. He ransacked his father’s shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, read what was interesting, and passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad would have acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way; but much that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. He read little Greek; for his proficiency in that language was not such that he could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence. But he had left school a good Latinist, and he soon acquired an extensive knowledge of Latin literature. He was peculiarly attracted by the works of the great restorers of learning. Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio volume of Petrarch’s works. The name excited his curiosity, and he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the diction and versification of his own Latin compositions show that he had paid at least as much attention to modern copies from the antique as to the original models.

While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was much better qualified to pore over books, and to talk about them, than to trade in them. His business declined; his debts increased; it was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It was out of his power to support his son at either university; but a wealthy neighbour offered assistance; and, in reliance on promises which proved to be of very little value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the young scholar presented himself to the rulers of that society, they were amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners than by the quantity of extensive and curious information which he had picked up during many months of desultory but not unprofitable study. On the first day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and one of the most learned among them declared that he had never known a freshman of equal attainments.

At Oxford Johnson resided barely over two years, possibly less. He was poor, even to raggedness; and his appearance excited a mirth and a pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He was driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church by the sneering looks which the members of that aristocratical society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some charitable person placed a new pair at his door; but he spurned them away in a fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for one-and-twenty, could have treated the academical authorities with more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendancy. In every mutiny against the discipline of the college he was the ringleader. Much was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities and acquirements. He had early made himself known by turning Pope’s “Messiah” into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly Virgilian; but the translation found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope himself.

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course of things, have become a Bachelor of Arts; but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of support on which he had relied had not been kept. His family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731 he was under the necessity of quitting the university without a degree. In the following winter his father died. The old man left but a pittance; and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the support of his widow. The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds.

His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound mind. Before the young man left the university, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been mad all his life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often been thought ground sufficient for absolving felons and for setting aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady’s shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord’s Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At another he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life; but he was afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion he found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of dejection; for his religion partook of his own character. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and discoloured by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul, and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him.

With such infirmities of body and of mind, he was left, at two-and-twenty, to fight his way through the world. He remained during about five years in the midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired others. He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family, who happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts, learning and knowledge of the world, did himself honour by patronizing the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners and squalid garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the neighbourhood to laughter or disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a translation, little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia. He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse; but subscriptions did not come in, and the volume never appeared.

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs Elizabeth Porter (1688-1752), widow of Harry Porter (d. 1734), whose daughter Lucy was born only six years after Johnson himself. To ordinary spectators the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish rouge from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the same room with a woman of real fashion, his Tetty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, graceful and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted; she had, however, a jointure of £600 and perhaps a little more; she came of a good family, and her son Jervis (d. 1763) commanded H.M.S. “Hercules.” The marriage, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved happier than might have been expected. The lover continued to be under the illusions of the wedding-day (July 9, 1735) till the lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument at Bromley he placed an inscription extolling the charms of her person and of her manners; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to mention her, he exclaimed with a tenderness half ludicrous, half pathetic, “Pretty creature!”

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more strenuously than he had hitherto done. He took a house at Edial near Lichfield and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away, and only three pupils came to his academy. The “faces” that Johnson habitually made (probably nervous contortions due to his disorder) may well have alarmed parents. Good scholar though he was, these twitchings had lost him usherships in 1735 and 1736. David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used, many years later, to throw the best company of London into convulsions of laughter by mimicking the master and his lady.

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age, determined to seek his fortune in London as a literary adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, three acts of his tragedy of Irene in manuscript, and two or three letters of introduction from his friend Walmesley. Never since literature became a calling in England had it been a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his residence in London. In the preceding generation a writer of eminent merit was sure to be munificently rewarded by the Government. The least that he could expect was a pension or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he might hope to be a member of parliament, a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. But literature had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the great, and had not yet begun to flourish under the patronage of the public. One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then considered as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles and ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an author whose reputation was established, and whose works were popular—such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons was in every library, such an author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater run than any drama since The Beggar’s Opera—was sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations and privations must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a name. One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for employment measured with a scornful eye that athletic though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, “You had better get a porter’s knot and carry trunks.” Nor was the advice bad, for a porter was likely to be as plentifully fed, and as comfortably lodged, as a poet.

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was able to form any literary connexion from which he could expect more than bread for the day which was passing over him. He never forgot the generosity with which Hervey, who was now residing in London, relieved his wants during this time of trial. “Harry Hervey,” said Johnson many years later, “was a vicious man; but he was very kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey, I shall love him.” At Hervey’s table Johnson sometimes enjoyed feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. But in general he dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpennyworth of meat and a pennyworth of bread at an alehouse near Drury Lane.

The effect of the privations and sufferings which he endured at this time was discernible to the last in his temper and his deportment. His manners had never been courtly. They now became almost savage. Being frequently under the necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness. Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and à la mode beef shops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled and the moisture broke out on his forehead. The affronts which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would have broken a mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to ferocity. Unhappily the insolence which, while it was defensive, was pardonable, and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness. He was repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken liberties with him. All the sufferers, however, were wise enough to abstain from talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed everywhere that he had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian Library.

About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in London he was fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from Edward Cave (q.v.) on the Gentleman’s Magazine. That periodical, just entering on the ninth year of its long existence, was the only one in the kingdom which then had what would now be called a large circulation. Johnson was engaged to write the speeches in the “Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput” (see Reporting), under which thin disguise the proceedings of parliament were published. He was generally furnished with notes, meagre indeed and inaccurate, of what had been said; but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence both for the ministry and for the opposition. He was himself a Tory, not from rational conviction—for his serious opinion was that one form of government was just as good or as bad as another—but from mere passion, such as inflamed the Capulets against the Montagues, or the Blues of the Roman circus against the Greens. In his infancy he had heard so much talk about the villainies of the Whigs, and the dangers of the Church, that he had become a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak. Before he was three he had insisted on being taken to hear Sacheverel preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had listened to the sermon with as much respect and probably with as much intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in the congregation. The work which had been begun in the nursery had been completed by the university. Oxford, when Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical place in England; and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobitical colleges in Oxford. The prejudices which he brought up to London were scarcely less absurd than those of his own Tom Tempest. Charles II. and James II. were two of the best kings that ever reigned. Laud was a prodigy of parts and learning over whose tomb Art and Genius still continued to weep. Hampden deserved no more honourable name than that of the “zealot of rebellion.” Even the ship-money Johnson would not pronounce to have been an unconstitutional impost. Under a government which allowed to the people an unprecedented liberty of speech and action, he fancied that he was a slave. He hated Dissenters and stock-jobbers, the excise and the army, septennial parliaments, and Continental connexions. He long had an aversion to the Scots, an aversion of which he could not remember the commencement, but which, he owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct of the nation during the Great Rebellion. It is easy to guess in what manner debates on great party questions were likely to be reported by a man whose judgment was so much disordered by party spirit. A show of fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the Magazine. But Johnson long afterwards owned that, though he had saved appearances, he had taken care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every passage which has lived, every passage which bears the marks of his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member of the opposition.

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure labours, he published a work which at once placed him high among the writers of his age. It is probable that what he had suffered during his first year in London had often reminded him of some parts of the satire in which Juvenal had described the misery and degradation of a needy man of letters, lodged among the pigeons’ nests in the tottering garrets which overhung the streets of Rome. Pope’s admirable imitations of Horace’s Satires and Epistles had recently appeared, were in every hand, and were by many readers thought superior to the originals. What Pope had done for Horace, Johnson aspired to do for Juvenal.

Johnson’s London appeared without his name in May 1738. He received only ten guineas for this stately and vigorous poem; but the sale was rapid and the success complete. A second edition was required within a week. Those small critics who are always desirous to lower established reputations ran about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist was superior to Pope in Pope’s own peculiar department of literature. It ought to be remembered, to the honour of Pope, that he joined heartily in the applause with which the appearance of a rival genius was welcomed. He made inquiries about the author of London. Such a man, he said, could not long be concealed. The name was soon discovered; and Pope, with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an academical degree and the mastership of a grammar school for the poor young poet. The attempt failed, and Johnson remained a bookseller’s hack.

It does not appear that these two men, the most eminent writer of the generation which was going out, and the most eminent writer of the generation which was coming in, ever saw each other. They lived in very different circles, one surrounded by dukes and earls, the other by starving pamphleteers and index-makers. Among Johnson’s associates at this time may be mentioned Boyse, who, when his shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin verses sitting up in bed with his arms through two holes in his blanket, who composed very respectable sacred poetry when he was sober, and who was at last run over by a hackney coach when he was drunk; Hoole, surnamed the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of attending to his measures, used to trace geometrical diagrams on the board where he sat cross-legged; and the penitent impostor, George Psalmanazar, who, after poring all day, in a humble lodging, on the folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers, indulged himself at night with literary and theological conversation at an alehouse in the City. But the most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time Johnson consorted was Richard Savage, an earl’s son, a shoemaker’s apprentice, who had seen life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue ribands in St James’s Square, and had lain with fifty pounds weight of irons on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate. This man had, after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and hopeless poverty. His pen had failed him. His patrons had been taken away by death, or estranged by the riotous profusion with which he squandered their bounty, and the ungrateful insolence with which he rejected their advice. He now lived by begging. He dined on venison and champagne whenever he had been so fortunate as to borrow a guinea. If his questing had been unsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hunger with some scraps of broken meat, and lay down to rest under the piazza of Covent Garden in warm weather, and, in cold weather, as near as he could get to the furnace of a glass house. Yet in his misery he was still an agreeable companion. He had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes about that gay and brilliant world from which he was now an outcast. He had observed the great men of both parties in hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders of opposition without the mask of patriotism, and had heard the prime minister roar with laughter and tell stories not over-decent. During some months Savage lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson; and then the friends parted, not without tears. Johnson remained in London to drudge for Cave. Savage went to the west of England, lived there as he had lived everywhere, and in 1743 died, penniless and heartbroken, in Bristol Gaol.

Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly excited about his extraordinary character and his not less extraordinary adventures, a life of him appeared widely different from the catchpenny lives of eminent men which were then a staple article of manufacture in Grub Street. The style was indeed deficient in ease and variety; and the writer was evidently too partial to the Latin element of our language. But the little work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece. No finer specimen of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead; and a discerning critic might have confidently predicted that the author was destined to be the founder of a new school of English eloquence.

The Life of Savage was anonymous; but it was well known in literary circles that Johnson was the writer. During the three years which followed, he produced no important work; but he was not, and indeed could not be, idle. The fame of his abilities and learning continued to grow. Warburton pronounced him a man of parts and genius; and the praise of Warburton was then no light thing. Such was Johnson’s reputation that, in 1747, several eminent booksellers combined to employ him in the arduous work of preparing a Dictionary of the English Language, in two folio volumes. The sum which they agreed to pay him was only fifteen hundred guineas; and out of this sum he had to pay several poor men of letters who assisted him in the humbler parts of his task.

The prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to the earl of Chesterfield. Chesterfield had long been celebrated for the politeness of his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, and the delicacy of his taste. He was acknowledged to be the finest speaker in the House of Lords. He had recently governed Ireland, at a momentous conjuncture, with eminent firmness, wisdom and humanity; and he had since become secretary of state. He received Johnson’s homage with the most winning affability, and requited it with a few guineas, bestowed doubtless in a very graceful manner, but was by no means desirous to see all his carpets blackened with the London mud, and his soups and wines thrown to right and left over the gowns of fine ladies and the waistcoats of fine gentlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who gave strange starts and uttered strange growls, who dressed like a scarecrow and ate like a cormorant. During some time Johnson continued to call on his patron, but, after being repeatedly told by the porter that his lordship was not at home, took the hint, and ceased to present himself at the inhospitable door.

Johnson had flattered himself that he should have completed his Dictionary by the end of 1750; but it was not till 1755 that he at length gave his huge volumes to the world. During the seven years which he passed in the drudgery of penning definitions and marking quotations for transcription, he sought for relaxation in literary labour of a more agreeable kind. In January 1749 he published The Vanity of Human Wishes, an excellent imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal, for which he received fifteen guineas.

A few days after the publication of this poem, his tragedy of Irene, begun many years before, was brought on the stage by his old pupil, David Garrick, now manager of Drury Lane Theatre. The relation between him and his old preceptor was of a very singular kind. They repelled each other strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly. Nature had made them of very different clay; and circumstances had fully brought out the natural peculiarities of both. Sudden prosperity had turned Garrick’s head. Continued adversity had soured Johnson’s temper. Johnson saw with more envy than became so great a man the villa, the plate, the china, the Brussels carpet, which the little mimic had got by repeating, with grimaces and gesticulations, what wiser men had written; and the exquisitely sensitive vanity of Garrick was galled by the thought that, while all the rest of the world was applauding him, he could obtain from one morose cynic, whose opinion it was impossible to despise, scarcely any compliment not acidulated with scorn. Yet the two Lichfield men had so many early recollections in common, and sympathized with each other on so many points on which they sympathized with nobody else in the vast population of the capital, that, though the master was often provoked by the monkey-like impertinence of the pupil, and the pupil by the bearish rudeness of the master, they remained friends till they were parted by death. Garrick now brought Irene out, with alterations sufficient to displease the author, yet not sufficient to make the piece pleasing to the audience. After nine representations the play was withdrawn. The poet however cleared by his benefit nights, and by the sale of the copyright of his tragedy, about three hundred pounds, then a great sum in his estimation.