VOLUME XV SLICE IV Jevons, Stanley to Joint (continued 11)

About a year after the representation of Irene, he began to publish a series of short essays on morals, manners and literature. This species of composition had been brought into fashion by the success of the Tatler, and by the still more brilliant success of the Spectator. A crowd of small writers had vainly attempted to rival Addison. The Lay Monastery, the Censor, the Freethinker, the Plain Dealer, the Champion, and other works of the same kind had had their short day. At length Johnson undertook the adventure in which so many aspirants had failed. In the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of the last number of the Spectator appeared the first number of the Rambler. From March 1750 to March 1752 this paper continued to come out every Tuesday and Saturday.

From the first the Rambler was enthusiastically admired by a few eminent men. Richardson, when only five numbers had appeared, pronounced it equal if not superior to the Spectator. Young and Hartley expressed their approbation not less warmly. In consequence probably of the good offices of Bubb Dodington, who was then the confidential adviser of Prince Frederick, two of his royal highness’s gentlemen carried a gracious message to the printing office, and ordered seven copies for Leicester House. But Johnson had had enough of the patronage of the great to last him all his life, and was not disposed to haunt any other door as he had haunted the door of Chesterfield.

By the public the Rambler was at first very coldly received. Though the price of a number was only twopence, the sale did not amount to five hundred. The profits were therefore very small. But as soon as the flying leaves were collected and reprinted they became popular. The author lived to see thirteen thousand copies spread over England alone. Separate editions were published for the Scotch and Irish markets. A large party pronounced the style perfect, so absolutely perfect that in some essays it would be impossible for the writer himself to alter a single word for the better. Another party, not less numerous, vehemently accused him of having corrupted the purity of the English tongue. The best critics admitted that his diction was too monotonous, too obviously artificial, and now and then turgid even to absurdity. But they did justice to the acuteness of his observations on morals and manners, to the constant precision and frequent brilliancy of his language, to the weighty and magnificent eloquence of many serious passages, and to the solemn yet pleasing humour of some of the lighter papers.

The last Rambler was written in a sad and gloomy hour. Mrs Johnson had been given over by the physicians. Three days later she died. She left her husband almost broken-hearted. Many people had been surprised to see a man of his genius and learning stooping to every drudgery, and denying himself almost every comfort, for the purpose of supplying a silly, affected old woman with superfluities, which she accepted with but little gratitude. But all his affection had been concentrated on her. He had neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. Her opinion of his writings was more important to him than the voice of the pit of Drury Lane Theatre, or the judgment of the Monthly Review. The chief support which had sustained him through the most arduous labour of his life was the hope that she would enjoy the fame and the profit which he anticipated from his Dictionary. She was gone; and in that vast labyrinth of streets, peopled by eight hundred thousand human beings, he was alone. Yet it was necessary for him to set himself, as he expressed it, doggedly to work. After three more laborious years, the Dictionary was at length complete.

It had been generally supposed that this great work would be dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished nobleman to whom the prospectus had been addressed. Lord Chesterfield well knew the value of such a compliment; and therefore, when the day of publication drew near, he exerted himself to soothe, by a show of zealous and at the same time of delicate and judicious kindness, the pride which he had so cruelly wounded. Since the Rambler had ceased to appear, the town had been entertained by a journal called the World, to which many men of high rank and fashion contributed. In two successive numbers of the World, the Dictionary was, to use the modern phrase, puffed with wonderful skill. The writings of Johnson were warmly praised. It was proposed that he should be invested with the authority of a dictator, nay, of a pope, over our language, and that his decisions about the meaning and the spelling of words should be received as final. His two folios, it was said, would of course be bought by everybody who could afford to buy them. It was soon known that these papers were written by Chesterfield. But the just resentment of Johnson was not to be so appeased. In a letter written with singular energy and dignity of thought and language, he repelled the tardy advances of his patron. The Dictionary came forth without a dedication. In the Preface the author truly declared that he owed nothing to the great, and described the difficulties with which he had been left to struggle so forcibly and pathetically that the ablest and most malevolent of all the enemies of his fame, Horne Tooke, never could read that passage without tears.

Johnson’s Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm such as no similar work has ever excited. It was indeed the first dictionary which could be read with pleasure. The definitions show so much acuteness of thought and command of language, and the passages quoted from poets, divines and philosophers are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may always be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages. The faults of the book resolve themselves, for the most part, into one great fault. Johnson was a wretched etymologist. He knew little or nothing of any Teutonic language except English, which indeed, as he wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic language; and thus he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius and Skinner.

The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson’s fame, added nothing to his pecuniary means. The fifteen hundred guineas which the booksellers had agreed to pay him had been advanced and spent before the last sheets issued from the press. It is painful to relate that twice in the course of the year which followed the publication of this great work he was arrested and carried to sponging-houses, and that he was twice indebted for his liberty to his excellent friend Richardson. It was still necessary for the man who had been formerly saluted by the highest authority as dictator of the English language to supply his wants by constant toil. He abridged his Dictionary. He proposed to bring out an edition of Shakespeare by subscription, and many subscribers sent in their names and laid down their money; but he soon found the task so little to his taste that he turned to more attractive employments. He contributed many papers to a new monthly journal, which was called the Literary Magazine. Few of these papers have much interest; but among them was one of the best things that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of reasoning and of satirical pleasantry, the review of Jenyns’ Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil.

In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first of a series of essays, entitled the Idler. During two years these essays continued to appear weekly. They were eagerly read, widely circulated, and indeed impudently pirated, while they were still in the original form, and had a large sale when collected into volumes. The Idler may be described as a second part of the Rambler, somewhat livelier and somewhat weaker than the first part.

While Johnson was busied with his Idlers, his mother, who had accomplished her ninetieth year, died at Lichfield. It was long since he had seen her, but he had not failed to contribute largely out of his small means to her comfort. In order to defray the charges of her funeral, and to pay some debts which she had left, he wrote a little book in a single week, and sent off the sheets to the press without reading them over. A hundred pounds were paid him for the copyright, and the purchasers had great cause to be pleased with their bargain, for the book was Rasselas, and it had a great success.

The plan of Rasselas might, however, have seemed to invite severe criticism. Johnson has frequently blamed Shakespeare for neglecting the proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to one age or nation the manners and opinions of another. Yet Shakespeare has not sinned in this way more grievously than Johnson. Rasselas and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be Abyssinians of the 18th century; for the Europe which Imlac describes is the Europe of the 18th century, and the inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of gravitation which Newton discovered and which was not fully received even at Cambridge till the 18th century. Johnson, not content with turning filthy savages, ignorant of their letters, and gorged with raw steaks cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as highly accomplished as Mrs Lennox or Mrs Sheridan, transferred the whole domestic system of England to Egypt. Into a land of harems, a land of polygamy, a land where women are married without ever being seen, he introduced the flirtations and jealousies of our ball-rooms. In a land where there is boundless liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the indissoluble compact. “A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home, and dream of each other. Such,” says Rasselas, “is the common process of marriage.” A writer who was guilty of such improprieties had little right to blame the poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, and represented Julio Romano as flourishing in the days of the Oracle of Delphi.

By such exertions as have been described Johnson supported himself till the year 1762. In that year a great change in his circumstances took place. He had from a child been an enemy of the reigning dynasty. His Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited with little disguise both in his works and in his conversation. Even in his massy and elaborate Dictionary he had, with a strange want of taste and judgment, inserted bitter and contumelious reflexions on the Whig party. The excise, which was a favourite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as a hateful tax. He had railed against the commissioners of excise in language so coarse that they had seriously thought of prosecuting him. He had with difficulty been prevented from holding up the lord privy seal by name as an example of the meaning of the word “renegade.” A pension he had defined as pay given to a state hireling to betray his country; a pensioner as a slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a master. It seemed unlikely that the author of these definitions would himself be pensioned. But that was a time of wonders. George III. had ascended the throne, and had, in the course of a few months, disgusted many of the old friends, and conciliated many of the old enemies of his house. The city was becoming mutinous; Oxford was becoming loyal. Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring; Somersets and Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands. The head of the treasury was now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no objection to Johnson’s Toryism. Bute wished to be thought a patron of men of letters; and Johnson was one of the most eminent and one of the most needy men of letters in Europe. A pension of three hundred a year was graciously offered, and with very little hesitation accepted.

This event produced a change in Johnson’s whole way of life. For the first time since his boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad urging him to the daily toil. He was at liberty, after thirty years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional indolence, to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up talking till four in the morning, without fearing either the printer’s devil or the sheriff’s officer.

One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to perform. He had received large subscriptions for his promised edition of Shakespeare; he had lived on those subscriptions during some years; and he could not without disgrace omit to perform his part of the contract. His friends repeatedly exhorted him to make an effort, and he repeatedly resolved to do so. But, notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolutions, month followed month, year followed year, and nothing was done. He prayed fervently against his idleness; he determined, as often as he received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze away and trifle away his time; but the spell under which he lay resisted prayer and sacrament. Happily for his honour, the charm which held him captive was at length broken by no gentle or friendly hand. He had been weak enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost which haunted a house in Cock Lane, and had actually gone himself, with some of his friends, at one in the morning, to St John’s Church, Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiving a communication from the perturbed spirit. But the spirit, though adjured with all solemnity, remained obstinately silent; and it soon appeared that a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing herself by making fools of so many philosophers. Churchill, who, confident in his powers, drunk with popularity, and burning with party spirit, was looking for some man of established fame and Tory politics to insult, celebrated the Cock Lane ghost in three cantos, nicknamed Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was which had been so long promised and so liberally paid for, and directly accused the great moralist of cheating. This terrible word proved effectual, and in October 1765 appeared, after a delay of nine years, the new edition of Shakespeare.

This publication saved Johnson’s character for honesty, but added nothing to the fame of his abilities and learning. The Preface, though it contains some good passages, is not in his best manner. The most valuable notes are those in which he had an opportunity of showing how attentively he had during many years observed human life and human nature. The best specimen is the note on the character of Polonius. Nothing so good is to be found even in Wilhelm Meister’s admirable examination of Hamlet. But here praise must end. It would be difficult to name a more slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great classic.1 Johnson had, in his prospectus, told the world that he was peculiarly fitted for the task which he had undertaken, because he had, as a lexicographer, been under the necessity of taking a wider view of the English language than any of his predecessors. But, unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very part of our literature with which it is especially desirable that an editor of Shakespeare should be conversant. In the two folio volumes of the English Dictionary there is not a single passage quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan age except Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Even from Ben the quotations are few. Johnson might easily in a few months have made himself well acquainted with every old play that was extant. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this was a necessary preparation for the work which he had undertaken. He would doubtless have admitted that it would be the height of absurdity in a man who was not familiar with the works of Aeschylus and Euripides to publish an edition of Sophocles. Yet he ventured to publish an edition of Shakespeare, without having ever in his life, as far as can be discovered, read a single scene of Massinger, Ford, Dekker, Webster, Marlow, Beaumont or Fletcher. His detractors were noisy and scurrilous. He had, however, acquitted himself of a debt which had long lain heavy on his conscience and he sank back into the repose from which the sting of satire had roused him. He long continued to live upon the fame which he had already won. He was honoured by the university of Oxford with a doctor’s degree, by the Royal Academy with a professorship, and by the king with an interview, in which his majesty most graciously expressed a hope that so excellent a writer would not cease to write. In the interval between 1765 and 1775 Johnson published only two or three political tracts.

But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was active. The influence exercised by his conversation, directly upon those with whom he lived, and indirectly on the whole literary world, was altogether without a parallel. His colloquial talents were indeed of the highest order. He had strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humour, immense knowledge of literature and of life, and an infinite store of curious anecdotes. As respected style, he spoke far better than he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from his lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely balanced period of the Rambler. But in his talk there were no pompous triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in -osity and -ation. All was simplicity, ease and vigour. He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis, of which the effect was rather increased than diminished by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit down to his desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in language so exact and so forcible that it might have been printed without the alteration of a word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on anybody who would start a subject: on a fellow-passenger in a stage coach, or on the person who sat at the same table with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed themselves into a club, which gradually became a formidable power in the commonwealth of letters. The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunkmaker and the pastrycook. Goldsmith was the representative of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political eloquence and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon the greatest historian and Sir William Jones the greatest linguist of the age. Garrick brought to the meetings his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his consummate knowledge of stage effect. Among the most constant attendants were two high-born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound together by friendship, but of widely different characters and habits—Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life, and Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his knowledge of the gay world, his fastidious taste and his sarcastic wit.

Among the members of this celebrated body was one to whom it has owed the greater part of its celebrity, yet who was regarded with little respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty obtained a seat among them. This was James Boswell (q.v.), a young Scots lawyer, heir to an honourable name and a fair estate. That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who were acquainted with him.

To a man of Johnson’s strong understanding and irritable temper, the silly egotism and adulation of Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to be questioned; and Boswell was eternally catechizing him on all kinds of subjects, and sometimes propounded such questions as, “What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a baby?” Johnson was a water-drinker and Boswell was a wine-bibber, and indeed little better than an habitual sot. It was impossible that there should be perfect harmony between two such companions. Indeed, the great man was sometimes provoked into fits of passion, in which he said things which the small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. Every quarrel, however, was soon made up. During twenty years the disciple continued to worship the master; the master continued to scold the disciple, to sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends ordinarily resided at a great distance from each other. Boswell practised in the Parliament House of Edinburgh, and could pay only occasional visits to London. During those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson, to discover all Johnson’s habits, to turn the conversation to subjects about which Johnson was likely to say something remarkable, and to fill quarto notebooks with minutes of what Johnson had said. In this way were gathered the materials out of which was afterwards constructed the most interesting biographical work in the world.

Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connexion less important indeed to his fame, but much more important to his happiness, than his connexion with Boswell. Henry Thrale, one of the most opulent brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound and cultivated understanding, rigid principles, and liberal spirit, was married to one of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women who are perpetually doing or saying what is not exactly right, but who, do or say what they may, are always agreeable. In 1765 the Thrales became acquainted with Johnson, and the acquaintance ripened fast into friendship. They were astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of his conversation. They were flattered by finding that a man so widely celebrated preferred their house to any other in London. Johnson soon had an apartment at the brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment at the villa of his friends on Streatham Common. A large part of every year he passed in those abodes, which must have seemed magnificent and luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in which he had generally been lodged. But his chief pleasures were derived from what the astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called “the endearing elegance of female friendship.” Mrs Thrale rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and if she sometimes provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper. When he was diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses. No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that womanly ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could devise, was wanting to his sick room. It would seem that a full half of Johnson’s life during about sixteen years was passed under the roof of the Thrales. He accompanied the family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to Brighton, once to Wales and once to Paris. But he had at the same time a house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the north of Fleet Street. In the garrets was his library, a large and miscellaneous collection of books, falling to pieces and begrimed with dust. On a lower floor he sometimes, but very rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner—a veal pie, or a leg of lamb and spinach, and a rice pudding. Nor was the dwelling uninhabited during his long absences. It was the home of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought together. At the head of the establishment Johnson had placed an old lady named Williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and her poverty. But, in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an asylum to another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs Desmoulins, whose family he had known many years before in Staffordshire. Room was found for the daughter of Mrs Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack doctor named Levett, who had a wide practice, but among the very poorest class, poured out Johnson’s tea in the morning and completed this strange menagerie. All these poor creatures were at constant war with each other, and with Johnson’s negro servant Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they transferred their hostilities from the servant to the master, complained that a better table was not kept for them, and railed or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make his escape to Streatham or to the Mitre Tavern. And yet he, who was generally the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, who was but too prompt to resent anything which looked like a slight on the part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron, bore patiently from mendicants, who, but for his bounty, must have gone to the workhouse, insults more provoking than those for which he had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs Williams and Mrs Desmoulins, Polly and Levett, continued to torment him and to live upon him.

The course of life which has been described was interrupted in Johnson’s sixty-fourth year by an important event. He had early read an account of the Hebrides, and had been much interested by learning that there was so near him a land peopled by a race which was still as rude and simple as in the Middle Ages. A wish to become intimately acquainted with a state of society so utterly unlike all that he had ever seen frequently crossed his mind. But it is not probable that his curiosity would have overcome his habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke, the mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell importuned him to attempt the adventure, and offered to be his squire. At length, in August 1773, Johnson crossed the Highland line, and plunged courageously into what was then considered, by most Englishmen, as a dreary and perilous wilderness. After wandering about two months through the Celtic region, sometimes in rude boats which did not protect him from the rain, and sometimes on small shaggy ponies which could hardly bear his weight, he returned to his old haunts with a mind full of new images and new theories. During the following year he employed himself in recording his adventures. About the beginning of 1775 his Journey to the Hebrides was published, and was, during some weeks, the chief subject of conversation in all circles in which any attention was paid to literature. His prejudice against the Scots had at length become little more than matter of jest; and whatever remained of the old feeling had been effectually removed by the kind and respectful hospitality with which he had been received in every part of Scotland. It was, of course, not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory should praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to the hedgerows and parks of England should not be struck by the bareness of Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even in censure Johnson’s tone is not unfriendly. The most enlightened Scotsmen, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well pleased. But some foolish and ignorant Scotsmen were moved to anger by a little unpalatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy, and assailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of their country with libels much more dishonourable to their country than anything that he had ever said or written. They published paragraphs in the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny pamphlets, five-shilling books. One scribbler abused Johnson for being blear-eyed, another for being a pensioner; a third informed the world that one of the doctor’s uncles had been convicted of felony in Scotland, and had found that there was in that country one tree capable of supporting the weight of an Englishman. Macpherson, whose Fingal had been treated in the Journey as an impudent forgery, threatened to take vengeance with a cane. The only effect of this threat was that Johnson reiterated the charge of forgery in the most contemptuous terms, and walked about, during some time, with a cudgel.

Of other assailants Johnson took no notice whatever. He had early resolved never to be drawn into controversy; and he adhered to his resolution with a steadfastness which is the more extraordinary because he was, both intellectually and morally, of the stuff of which controversialists are made. In conversation he was a singularly eager, acute and pertinacious disputant. When at a loss for good reasons, he had recourse to sophistry; and when heated by altercation, he made unsparing use of sarcasm and invective. But when he took his pen in his hand, his whole character seemed to be changed. A hundred bad writers misrepresented him and reviled him; but not one of the hundred could boast of having been thought by him worthy of a refutation, or even of a retort. One Scotsman, bent on vindicating the fame of Scots learning, defied him to the combat in a detestable Latin hexameter:—

“Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum.”

But Johnson took no notice of the challenge. He always maintained that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being beaten back as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall if there were only one battledore. No saying was oftener in his mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever written down but by himself.

Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the Journey to the Hebrides, Johnson did what none of his envious assailants could have done, and to a certain extent succeeded in writing himself down. The disputes between England and her American colonies had reached a point at which no amicable adjustment was possible. War was evidently impending; and the ministers seem to have thought that the eloquence of Johnson might with advantage be employed to inflame the nation against the opposition at home, and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic. He had already written two or three tracts in defence of the foreign and domestic policy of the government; and those tracts, though hardly worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon and Stockdale. But his Taxation no Tyranny was a pitiable failure. Even Boswell was forced to own that in this unfortunate piece he could detect no trace of his master’s powers. The general opinion was that the strong faculties which had produced the Dictionary and the Rambler were beginning to feel the effect of time and of disease, and that the old man would best consult his credit by writing no more. But this was a great mistake. Johnson had failed, not because his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote Rasselas in the evenings of a week, but because he had foolishly chosen, or suffered others to choose for him, a subject such as he would at no time have been competent to treat. He was in no sense a statesman. He never willingly read or thought or talked about affairs of state. He loved biography, literary history, the history of manners; but political history was positively distasteful to him. The question at issue between the colonies and the mother country was a question about which he had really nothing to say. Happily, Johnson soon had an opportunity of proving most signally that his failure was not to be ascribed to intellectual decay.

On Easter Eve 1777 some persons, deputed by a meeting which consisted of forty of the first booksellers in London, called upon him. Though he had some scruples about doing business at that season, he received his visitors with much civility. They came to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, from Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and to ask him to furnish short biographical prefaces. He readily undertook the task for which he was pre-eminently qualified. His knowledge of the literary history of England since the Restoration was unrivalled. That knowledge he had derived partly from books, and partly from sources which had long been closed: from old Grub Street traditions; from the talk of forgotten poetasters and pamphleteers, who had long been lying in parish vaults; from the recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who had conversed with the wits of Button, Cibber, who had mutilated the plays of two generations of dramatists, Orrery, who had been admitted to the society of Swift and Savage, who had rendered services of no very honourable kind to Pope. The biographer therefore sat down to his task with a mind full of matter. He had at first intended to give only a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or five pages to the greatest name. But the flood of anecdote and criticism overflowed the narrow channel. The work, which was originally meant to consist only of a few sheets, swelled into ten volumes—small volumes, it is true, and not closely printed. The first four appeared in 1779, the remaining six in 1781.

The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson’s works. The narratives are as entertaining as any novel. The remarks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and profound. The criticisms are often excellent, and, even when grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be studied. Savage’s Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had appeared in 1744. Whoever, after reading that life, will turn to the other lives will be struck by the difference of style. Since Johnson had been at ease in his circumstances he had written little and had talked much. When therefore he, after the lapse of years, resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had contracted while he was in the constant habit of elaborate composition was less perceptible than formerly, and his diction frequently had a colloquial ease which it had formerly wanted. The improvement may be discerned by a skilful critic in the Journey to the Hebrides, and in the Lives of the Poets is so obvious that it cannot escape the notice of the most careless reader. Among the Lives the best are perhaps those of Cowley, Dryden and Pope. The very worst is, beyond all doubt, that of Gray; the most controverted that of Milton.

This great work at once became popular. There was, indeed, much just and much unjust censure; but even those who were loudest in blame were attracted by the book in spite of themselves. Malone computed the gains of the publishers at five or six thousand pounds. But the writer was very poorly remunerated. Intending at first to write very short prefaces, he had stipulated for only two hundred guineas. The booksellers, when they saw how far his performance had surpassed his promise, added only another hundred. Indeed Johnson, though he did not despise or affect to despise money, and though his strong sense and long experience ought to have qualified him to protect his own interests, seems to have been singularly unskilful and unlucky in his literary bargains. He was generally reputed the first English writer of his time. Yet several writers of his time sold their copyrights for sums such as he never ventured to ask. To give a single instance, Robertson received £4500 for the History of Charles V.

Johnson was now in his seventy-second year. The infirmities of age were coming fast upon him. That inevitable event of which he never thought without horror was brought near to him; and his whole life was darkened by the shadow of death. The strange dependants to whom he had given shelter, and to whom, in spite of their faults, he was strongly attached by habit, dropped off one by one; and, in the silence of his home, he regretted even the noise of their scolding matches. The kind and generous Thrale was no more; and it was soon plain that the old Streatham intimacy could not be maintained upon the same footing. Mrs Thrale herself confessed that without her husband’s assistance she did not feel able to entertain Johnson as a constant inmate of her house. Free from the yoke of the brewer, she fell in love with a music master, high in his profession, from Brescia, named Gabriel Piozzi, in whom nobody but herself could discover anything to admire. The secret of this attachment was soon discovered by Fanny Burney, but Johnson at most only suspected it.

In September 1782 the place at Streatham was from motives of economy let to Lord Shelburne, and Mrs Thrale took a house at Brighton, whither Johnson accompanied her; they remained for six weeks on the old familiar footing. In March 1783 Boswell was glad to discover Johnson well looked after and staying with Mrs Thrale in Argyll Street, but in a bad state of health. Impatience of Johnson’s criticisms and infirmities had been steadily growing with Mrs Thrale since 1774. She now went to Bath with her daughters, partly to escape his supervision. Johnson was very ill in his lodgings during the summer, but he still corresponded affectionately with his “mistress” and received many favours from her. He retained the full use of his senses during the paralytic attack, and in July he was sufficiently recovered to renew his old club life and to meditate further journeys. In June 1784 he went with Boswell to Oxford for the last time. In September he was in Lichfield. On his return his health was rather worse; but he would submit to no dietary régime. His asthma tormented him day and night, and dropsical symptoms made their appearance. His wrath was excited in no measured terms against the re-marriage of his old friend Mrs Thrale, the news of which he heard this summer. The whole dispute seems, to-day, entirely uncalled-for, but the marriage aroused some of Johnson’s strongest prejudices. He wrote inconsiderately on the subject, but we must remember that he was at the time afflicted in body and mentally haunted by dread of impending change. Throughout all his troubles he had clung vehemently to life. The feeling described in that fine but gloomy paper which closes the series of his Idlers seemed to grow stronger in him as his last hour drew near. He fancied that he should be able to draw his breath more easily in a southern climate, and would probably have set out for Rome and Naples but for his fear of the expense of the journey. That expense, indeed, he had the means of defraying; for he had laid up about two thousand pounds, the fruit of labours which had made the fortune of several publishers. But he was unwilling to break in upon this hoard, and he seems to have wished even to keep its existence a secret. Some of his friends hoped that the Government might be induced to increase his pension to six hundred pounds a year, but this hope was disappointed, and he resolved to stand one English winter more.

That winter was his last. His legs grew weaker; his breath grew shorter; the fatal water gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, courageous against pain but timid against death, urged his surgeons to make deeper and deeper. Though the tender care which had mitigated his sufferings during months of sickness at Streatham was withdrawn, and though Boswell was absent, he was not left desolate. The ablest physicians and surgeons attended him, and refused to accept fees from him. Burke parted from him with deep emotion. Windham sat much in the sick-room. Frances Burney, whom the old man had cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at the door; while Langton, whose piety eminently qualified him to be an adviser and comforter at such a time, received the last pressure of his friend’s hand within. When at length the moment, dreaded through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away from Johnson’s mind. Windham’s servant, who sat up with him during his last night, declared that “no man could appear more collected, more devout or less terrified at the thoughts of the approaching minute.” At hour intervals, often of much pain, he was moved in bed and addressed himself vehemently to prayer. In the morning he was still able to give his blessing, but in the afternoon he became drowsy, and at a quarter past seven in the evening on the 13th of December 1784, in his seventy-sixth year, he passed away. He was laid, a week later, in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had been the historian—Cowley and Denham, Dryden and Congreve, Gay, Prior and Addison.

(M.)

Bibliography.—The splendid example of his style which Macaulay contributed in the article on Johnson to the 8th edition of this encyclopaedia has become classic, and has therefore been retained above with a few trifling modifications in those places in which his invincible love of the picturesque has drawn him demonstrably aside from the dull line of veracity. Macaulay, it must be noted, exaggerated persistently the poverty of Johnson’s pedigree, the squalor of his early married life, the grotesqueness of his entourage in Fleet Street, the decline and fall from complete virtue of Mrs Thrale, the novelty and success of the Dictionary, the complete failure of the Shakespeare and the political tracts. Yet this contribution is far more mellow than the article contributed on Johnson twenty-five years before to the Edinburgh Review in correction of Croker. Matthew Arnold, who edited six selected Lives of the poets, regarded it as one of Macaulay’s happiest and ripest efforts. It was written out of friendship for Adam Black, and “payment was not so much as mentioned.” The big reviews, especially the quarterlies, have always been the natural home of Johnsonian study. Sir Walter Scott, Croker, Hayward, Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle (whose famous Fraser article was reprinted in 1853) and Whitwell Elwin have done as much as anybody perhaps to sustain the zest for Johnsonian studies. Macaulay’s prediction that the interest in the man would supersede that in his “Works” seemed and seems likely enough to justify itself; but his theory that the man alone mattered and that a portrait painted by the hand of an inspired idiot was a true measure of the man has not worn better than the common run of literary propositions. Johnson’s prose is not extensively read. But the same is true of nearly all the great prose masters of the 18th century. As in the case of all great men, Johnson has suffered a good deal at the hands of his imitators and admirers. His prose, though not nearly so uniformly monotonous or polysyllabic as the parodists would have us believe, was at one time greatly overpraised. From the “Life of Savage” to the “Life of Pope” it developed a great deal, and in the main improved. To the last he sacrificed expression rather too much to style, and he was perhaps over conscious of the balanced epithet. But he contributed both dignity and dialectical force to the prose movement of his period.

The best edition of his works is still the Oxford edition of 1825 in 9 vols. At the present day, however, his periodical writings are neglected, and all that can be said to excite interest are, first the Lives of the Poets (best edition by Birkbeck Hill and H. S. Scott, 3 vols., 1905), and then the Letters, the Prayers and Meditations, and the Poems, to which may doubtfully be added the once idolized Rasselas. The Poems and Rasselas have been reprinted times without number. The others have been re-edited with scrupulous care for the Oxford University Press by the pious diligence of that most enthusiastic of all Johnsonians, Dr Birkbeck Hill. But the tendency at the present day is undoubtedly to prize Johnson’s personality and sayings more than any of his works. These are preserved to us in a body of biographical writing, the efficiency of which is unequalled in the whole range of literature. The chief constituents are Johnson’s own Letters and Account of his Life from his Birth to his Eleventh Year (1805), a fragment saved from papers burned in 1784 and not seen by Boswell; the life by his old but not very sympathetic friend and club-fellow, Sir John Hawkins (1787); Mrs Thrale-Piozzi’s Anecdotes (1785) and Letters; the Diary and Letters of Fanny Burney (D’Arblay) (1841); the shorter Lives of Arthur Murphy, T. Tyers, &c.; far above all, of course, the unique Life by James Boswell, first published in 1791, and subsequently encrusted with vast masses of Johnsoniana in the successive editions of Malone, Croker, Napier, Fitzgerald, Mowbray Morris (Globe), Birrell, Ingpen (copiously illustrated) and Dr Birkbeck Hill (the most exhaustive).

The sayings and Johnsoniana have been reprinted in very many and various forms. Valuable work has been done in Johnsonian genealogy and topography by Aleyn Lyell Reade in his Johnsonian Gleanings, &c., and in the Memorials of Old Staffordshire (ed. W. Beresford). The most excellent short Lives are those by F. Grant (Eng. Writers) and Sir Leslie Stephen (Eng. Men of Letters). Professor W. Raleigh’s essay (Stephen Lecture), Lord Rosebery’s estimate (1909), and Sir Leslie Stephen’s article in the Dictionary of National Biography, with bibliography and list of portraits, should be consulted. Johnson’s “Club” (“The Club”) still exists, and has contained ever since his time a large proportion of the public celebrities of its day. A “Johnson Club,” which has included many Johnson scholars and has published papers, was founded in 1885. Lichfield has taken an active part in the commemoration of Johnson since 1887, when Johnson’s birthplace was secured as a municipal museum, and Lichfield was the chief scene of the Bicentenary Celebrations of September 1909 (fully described in A. M. Broadley’s Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale, 1909), containing, together with new materials and portraits, an essay dealing with Macaulay’s treatment of the Johnson-Thrale episodes by T. Seccombe). Statues both of Johnson and Boswell are in the market-place at Lichfield. A statue was erected in St Paul’s in 1825, and there are commemorative tablets in Lichfield Cathedral, St Nicholas (Brighton), Uttoxeter, St Clement Danes (London), Gwaynynog and elsewhere.

(T. Se.)

1 This famous dictum of Macaulay, though endorsed by Lord Rosebery, has been energetically rebutted by Professor W. Raleigh and others, who recognize both sagacity and scholarship in Johnson’s Preface and Notes. Johnson’s wide grasp of the discourse and knowledge of human nature enable him in a hundred entangled passages to go straight to the dramatist’s meaning.—(T. Se.)

JOHNSON, SIR THOMAS (1664-1729), English merchant, was born in Liverpool in November 1664. He succeeded his father in 1689 as bailiff and in 1695 as mayor. From 1701 to 1723 he represented Liverpool in parliament, and he was knighted by Queen Anne in 1708. He effected the separation of Liverpool from the parish of Walton-on-the-Hill; from the Crown he obtained the grant to the corporation of the site of the old castle where he planned the town market; while the construction of the first floating dock (1708) and the building of St Peter’s and St George’s churches were due in great measure to his efforts. He was interested in the tobacco trade; in 1715 he conveyed 130 Jacobite prisoners to the American plantations. In 1723, having lost in speculation the fortune which he had inherited from his father, he went himself to Virginia as collector of customs on the Rappahannock river. He died in Jamaica in 1729. A Liverpool street is named Sir Thomas Buildings after him.

JOHNSON, THOMAS, English 18th-century wood-carver and furniture designer. Of excellent repute as a craftsman and an artist in wood, his original conceptions and his adaptations of other men’s ideas were remarkable for their extreme flamboyance, and for the merciless manner in which he overloaded them with thin and meretricious ornament. Perhaps his most inept design is that for a table in which a duck or goose is displacing water that falls upon a mandarin, seated, with his head on one side, upon the rail below. No local school of Italian rococo ever produced more extravagant absurdities. His clocks bore scythes and hour-glasses and flashing sunbeams, together with whirls and convolutions and floriated adornments without end. On the other hand, he occasionally produced a mirror frame or a mantelpiece which was simple and dignified. The art of artistic plagiarism has never been so well understood or so dexterously practised as by the 18th-century designers of English furniture, and Johnson appears to have so far exceeded his contemporaries that he must be called a barefaced thief. The three leading “motives” of the time—Chinese, Gothic and Louis Quatorze—were mixed up in his work in the most amazing manner; and he was exceedingly fond of introducing human figures, animals, birds and fishes in highly incongruous places. He appears to have defended his enormities on the ground that “all men vary in opinion, and a fault in the eye of one may be a beauty in that of another; ’tis a duty incumbent on an author to endeavour at pleasing every taste.” Johnson, who was in business at the “Golden Boy” in Grafton Street, Westminster, published a folio volume of Designs for Picture Frames, Candelabra, Ceilings, &c. (1758); and One Hundred and Fifty New Designs (1761).

JOHNSON, SIR WILLIAM (1715-1774), British soldier and American pioneer, was born in Smithtown, County Meath, Ireland, in 1715, the son of Christopher Johnson, a country gentleman. As a boy he was educated for a commercial career, but in 1738 he removed to America for the purpose of managing a tract of land in the Mohawk Valley, New York, belonging to his uncle, Admiral Sir Peter Warren (1703-1752). He established himself on the south bank of the Mohawk river, about 25 m. W. of Schenectady. Before 1743 he removed to the north side of the river. The new settlement prospered from the start, and a valuable trade was built up with the Indians, over whom Johnson exercised an immense influence. The Mohawks adopted him and elected him a sachem. In 1744 he was appointed by Governor George Clinton (d. 1761) superintendent of the affairs of the Six Nations (Iroquois). In 1746 he was made commissary of the province for Indian affairs, and was influential in enlisting and equipping the Six Nations for participation in the warfare with French Canada, two years later (1748) being placed in command of a line of outposts on the New York frontier. The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle put a stop to offensive operations, which he had begun. In May 1750 by royal appointment he became a member for life of the governor’s council, and in the same year he resigned the post of superintendent of Indian affairs. In 1754 he was one of the New York delegates to the inter-colonial convention at Albany, N.Y. In 1755 General Edward Braddock, the commander of the British forces in America, commissioned him major-general, in which capacity he directed the expedition against Crown Point, and in September defeated the French and Indians under Baron Ludwig A. Dieskau (1701-1767) at the battle of Lake George, where he himself was wounded. For this success he received the thanks of parliament, and was created a baronet (November 1755). From July 1756 until his death he was “sole superintendent of the Six Nations and other Northern Indians.” He took part in General James Abercrombie’s disastrous campaign against Ticonderoga (1758), and in 1759 he was second in command in General John Prideaux’s expedition against Fort Niagara, succeeding to the chief command on that officer’s death, and capturing the fort. In 1760 he was with General Jeffrey Amherst (1717-1797) at the capture of Montreal. As a reward for his services the king granted him a tract of 100,000 acres of land north of the Mohawk river. It was due to his influence that the Iroquois refused to join Pontiac in his conspiracy, and he was instrumental in arranging the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768. After the war Sir William retired to his estates, where, on the site of the present Johnstown, he built his residence, Johnson Hall, and lived in all the style of an English baron. He devoted himself to colonizing his extensive lands, and is said to have been the first to introduce sheep and blood horses into the province. He died at Johnstown, N.Y., on the 11th of July 1774. In 1739 Johnson had married Catherine Wisenberg, by whom he had three children. After her death he had various mistresses, including a niece of the Indian chief Hendrick, and Molly Brant, a sister of the famous chief Joseph Brant.

His son, Sir John Johnson (1742-1830), who was knighted in 1765 and succeeded to the baronetcy on his father’s death, took part in the French and Indian War and in the border warfare during the War of Independence, organizing a loyalist regiment known as the “Queen’s Royal Greens,” which he led at the battle of Oriskany and in the raids (1778 and 1780) on Cherry Valley and in the Mohawk Valley. He was also one of the officers of the force defeated by General John Sullivan in the engagement at Newtown (Elmira), N.Y., on the 29th of August 1779. He was made brigadier-general of provincial troops in 1782. His estates had been confiscated, and after the war he lived in Canada, where he held from 1791 until his death the office of superintendent-general of Indian affairs for British North America. He received £45,000 from the British government for his losses.

Sir William’s nephew, Guy Johnson (1740-1788), succeeded his uncle as superintendent of Indian affairs in 1774, and served in the French and Indian War and, on the British side, in the War of Independence.

See W. L. Stone, Life of Sir William Johnson (2 vols., 1865); W. E. Griffis, Sir William Johnson and the Six Nations (1891) in “Makers of America” series; Augustus C. Buell, Sir William Johnson (1903) in “Historic Lives Series”; and J. Watts De Peyster, “The Life of Sir John Johnson, Bart.,” in The Orderly Book of Sir John Johnson during the Oriskany Campaign, 1776-1777, annotated by William L. Stone (1882).

JOHNSTON, ALBERT SIDNEY (1803-1862), American Confederate general in the Civil War, was born at Washington, Mason county, Kentucky, on the 3rd of February 1803. He graduated from West Point in 1826, and served for eight years in the U.S. infantry as a company officer, adjutant, and staff officer. In 1834 he resigned his commission, emigrated in 1836 to Texas, then a republic, and joined its army as a private. His rise was very rapid, and before long he was serving as commander-in-chief in preference to General Felix Huston, with whom he fought a duel. From 1838 to 1840 he was Texan secretary for war, and in 1839 he led a successful expedition against the Cherokee Indians. From 1840 to the outbreak of the Mexican War he lived in retirement on his farm, but in 1846 he led a regiment of Texan volunteers in the field, and at Monterey, as a staff officer, he had three horses shot under him. In 1849 he returned to the United States army as major and paymaster, and in 1855 became colonel of the 2nd U.S. Cavalry (afterwards 5th), in which his lieut.-colonel was Robert E. Lee, and his majors were Hardee and Thomas. In 1857 he commanded the expedition sent against the Mormons, and performed his difficult and dangerous mission so successfully that the objects of the expedition were attained without bloodshed. He was rewarded with the brevet of brigadier-general. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 Johnston, then in command of the Pacific department, resigned his commission and made his way to Richmond, where Pres. Jefferson Davis, whom he had known at West Point, at once made him a full general in the Confederate army and assigned him to command the department of Kentucky. Here he had to guard a long and weak line from the Mississippi to the Alleghany Mountains, which was dangerously advanced on account of the political necessity of covering friendly country. The first serious advance of the Federals forced him back at once, and he was freely criticized and denounced for what, in ignorance of the facts, the Southern press and people regarded as a weak and irresolute defence. Johnston himself, who had entered upon the Civil War with the reputation of being the foremost soldier on either side, bore with fortitude the reproaches of his countrymen, and Davis loyally supported his old friend. Johnston then marched to join Beauregard at Corinth, Miss., and with the united forces took the offensive against Grant’s army at Pittsburg Landing. The battle of Shiloh (q.v.) took place on the 6th and 7th of April, 1862. The Federals were completely surprised, and Johnston was in the full tide of success when he fell mortally wounded. He died a few minutes afterwards. President Davis said, in his message to the Confederate Congress, “Without doing injustice to the living, it may safely be said that our loss is irreparable,” and the subsequent history of the war in the west went far to prove the truth of his eulogy.

His son, William Preston Johnston (1831-1899), who served on the staff of General Johnston and subsequently on that of President Davis, was a distinguished professor and president of Tulane University. His chief work is the Life of General Albert Sidney Johnston (1878), a most valuable and exhaustive biography.

JOHNSTON, ALEXANDER (1849-1889), American historian, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on the 29th of April 1849. He studied at the Polytechnic institute of Brooklyn, graduated at Rutgers College in 1870, and was admitted to the bar in 1875 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he taught in the Rutgers College grammar school from 1876 to 1879. He was principal of the Latin school of Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1879-1883, and was professor of jurisprudence and political economy in the College of New Jersey (Princeton University) from 1884 until his death in Princeton, N.J., on the 21st of July 1889. He wrote A History of American Politics (1881); The Genesis of a New England State—Connecticut (1883), in “Johns Hopkins University Studies”; A History of the United States for Schools (1886); Connecticut (1887) in the “American Commonwealths Series”; the article on the history of the United States for the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, reprinted as The United Stales: Its History and Constitution (1887); a chapter on the history of American political parties in the seventh volume of Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America, and many articles on the history of American politics in Lalor’s Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and Political History of the United States (1881-1884). These last articles, which like his other writings represent much original research and are excellent examples of Johnston’s rare talent for terse narrative and keen analysis and interpretation of facts, were republished in two volumes entitled American Political History 1763-1876 (1905-1906), edited by Professor J. A. Woodburn.

JOHNSTON, ALEXANDER KEITH (1804-1871), Scottish geographer, was born at Kirkhill near Edinburgh on the 28th of December 1804. After an education at the high school and the university of Edinburgh he was apprenticed to an engraver; and in 1826 joined his brother (afterwards Sir William Johnston, lord provost of Edinburgh) in a printing and engraving business, the well-known cartographical firm of W. and A. K. Johnston. His interest in geography had early developed, and his first important work was the National Atlas of general geography, which gained for him in 1843 the appointment of Geographer-Royal for Scotland. Johnston was the first to bring the study of physical geography into competent notice in England. His attention had been called to the subject by Humboldt; and after years of labour he published his magnificent Physical Atlas in 1848, followed by a second and enlarged edition in 1856. This, by means of maps with descriptive letterpress, illustrates the geology, hydrography, meteorology, botany, zoology, and ethnology of the globe. The rest of Johnston’s life was devoted to geography, his later years to its educational aspects especially. His services were recognized by the leading scientific societies of Europe and America. He died at Ben Rhydding, Yorkshire, on the 9th of July 1871. Johnston published a Dictionary of Geography in 1850, with many later editions; The Royal Atlas of Modern Geography, begun in 1855; an atlas of military geography to accompany Alison’s History of Europe in 1848 seq.; and a variety of other atlases and maps for educational or scientific purposes. His son of the same name (1844-1879) was also the author of various geographical works and papers; in 1873-1875 he was geographer to a commission for the survey of Paraguay; and he died in Africa while leading the Royal Geographical Society’s expedition to Lake Nyasa.

JOHNSTON, ARTHUR (1587-1641), Scottish physician and writer of Latin verse, was the son of an Aberdeenshire laird Johnston of Johnston and Caskieben, and on his mother’s side a grandson of the seventh Lord Forbes. It is probable that he began his university studies at one, or both, of the colleges at Aberdeen, but in 1608 he proceeded to Italy and graduated M.D. at Padua in 1610. Thereafter he resided at Sedan, in the company of the exiled Andrew Melville (q.v.), and in 1619 was in practice in Paris. He appears to have returned to England about the time of James I.’s death and to have been in Aberdeen about 1628. He met Laud in Edinburgh at the time of Charles I.’s Scottish coronation (1633) and was encouraged by him in his literary efforts, partly, it is said, for the undoing of Buchanan’s reputation as a Latin poet. He was appointed rector of King’s College, Aberdeen, in June 1637. Four years later he died at Oxford, on his way to London, whither Laud had invited him.

Johnston left more than ten works, all in Latin. On two of these, published in the same year, his reputation entirely rests: (a) his version of the Psalms (Psalmorum Davidis paraphrasis poetica et canticorum evangelicorum, Aberdeen, 1637), and (b) his anthology of contemporary Latin verse by Scottish poets (Deliciae poetarum scotorum hujus aevi illustrium, Amsterdam, 1637). He had published in 1633 a volume entitled Cantici Salomonis paraphrasis poetica, which, dedicated to Charles I., had brought him to the notice of Laud. The full version of the Psalms was the result of Laud’s encouragement. The book was for some time a strong rival of Buchanan’s work, though its good Latinity was not superior to that of the latter. The Deliciae, in two small thick volumes of 699 and 575 pages, was a patriotic effort in imitation of the various volumes (under a similar title) which had been popular on the Continent during the second decade of the century. The volumes are dedicated by Johnston to John Scot of Scotstarvet, at whose expense the collected works were published after Johnston’s death, at Middelburg (1642). Selections from his own poems occupy pages 439-647 of the first volume, divided into three sections, Parerga, Epigrammata and Musae Aulicae. He published a volume of epigrams at Aberdeen in 1632. In these pieces he shows himself at his best. His sacred poems, which had appeared in the Opera (1642), were reprinted by Lauder in his Poetarum Scotorum musae sacrae (1739). The earliest lives are by Lauder (u.s.) and Benson (in Psalmi Davidici, 1741). Ruddiman’s Vindication of Mr George Buchanan’s Paraphrase (1745) began a pamphlet controversy regarding the merits of the rival poets.

JOHNSTON, SIR HENRY HAMILTON (1858- ), British administrator and explorer, was born on the 12th of June 1858 at Kennington, London, and educated at Stockwell grammar school and King’s College, London. He was a student for four years in the painting schools of the Royal Academy. At the age of eighteen he began a series of travels in Europe and North Africa, chiefly as a student of painting, architecture and languages. In 1879-1880 he visited the then little known interior of Tunisia. He had also a strong bent towards zoology and comparative anatomy, and carried on work of this description at the Royal College of Surgeons, of whose Hunterian Collection he afterwards became one of the trustees. In 1882 he joined the earl of Mayo in an expedition to the southern part of Angola, a district then much traversed by Transvaal Boers. In 1883 Johnston visited H. M. Stanley on the Congo, and was enabled by that explorer to visit the river above Stanley Pool at a time when it was scarcely known to other Europeans than Stanley and De Brazza. These journeys attracted the attention of the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association, and the last-named in concert with the Royal Society conferred on Johnston the leadership of the scientific expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro which started from Zanzibar in April 1884. Johnston’s work in this region was also under the direction of Sir John Kirk, British consul at Zanzibar. While in the Kilimanjaro district Johnston concluded treaties with the chiefs of Moshi and Taveta (Taveita). These treaties or concessions were transferred to the merchants who founded the British East Africa Company, and in the final agreement with Germany Taveta fell to Great Britain. In October 1885 Johnston was appointed British vice-consul in Cameroon and in the Niger delta, and he became in 1887 acting consul for that region. A British protectorate over the Niger delta had been notified in June 1885, and between the date of his appointment and 1888, together with the consul E. H. Hewett, Johnston laid the foundations of the British administration in that part of the delta not reserved for the Royal Niger Company. His action in removing the turbulent chief Ja-ja (an ex-slave who had risen to considerable power in the palm-oil trade) occasioned considerable criticism but was approved by the Foreign Office. It led to the complete pacification of a region long disturbed by trade disputes. During these three years of residence in the Gulf of Guinea Johnston ascended the Cameroon Mountain, and made large collections of the flora and fauna of Cameroon for the British Museum.

In the spring of 1889 he was sent to Lisbon to negotiate an arrangement for the delimitation of the British and Portuguese spheres of influence in South-East Africa, but the scheme drawn up, though very like the later arrangement of those regions, was not given effect to at the time. On his return from Lisbon he was despatched to Mozambique as consul for Portuguese East Africa, and was further charged with a mission to Lake Nyasa to pacify that region, then in a disturbed state owing to the attacks of slave-trading Arabs on the stations of the African Lakes Trading Company—an unofficial war, in which Captain (afterwards Colonel Sir Frederick) Lugard and Mr (afterwards Sir Alfred) Sharpe distinguished themselves. Owing to the unexpected arrival on the scene of Major Serpa Pinto, Johnston was compelled to declare a British protectorate over the Nyasa region, being assisted in this work by John Buchanan (vice-consul), Sir Alfred Sharpe, Alfred Swann and others. A truce was arranged with the Arabs on Lake Nyasa, and within twelve months the British flag, by agreement with the natives, had been hoisted over a very large region which extended north of Lake Tanganyika to the vicinity of Uganda, to Katanga in the Congo Free State, the Shiré Highlands and the central Zambezi. Johnston’s scheme, in fact, was that known as the “Cape-to-Cairo,” a phrase which he had brought into use in an article in The Times in August 1888. According to his arrangement there would have been an all-British route from Alexandria to Cape Town. But by the Anglo-German agreement of the 1st of July 1890 the British sphere north of Tanganyika was abandoned to Germany, and the Cape-to-Cairo route broken by a wedge of German territory. Johnston returned to British Central Africa as commissioner and consul-general in 1891, and retained that post till 1896, in which year he was made a K.C.B. His health having suffered much from African fever, he was transferred to Tunis as consul-general (1897). In the autumn of 1899 Sir Harry Johnston was despatched to Uganda as special commissioner to reorganize the administration of that protectorate after the suppression of the mutiny of the Sudanese soldiers and the long war with Unyoro. His two years’ work in Uganda and a portion of what is now British East Africa were rewarded at the close of 1901 by a G.C.M.G. In the spring of the following year he retired from the consular service. After 1904 he interested himself greatly in the affairs of the Liberian republic, and negotiated various arrangements with that negro state by which order was brought into its finances, the frontier with France was delimited, and the development of the interior by means of roads was commenced. In 1903 he was defeated as Liberal candidate for parliament at a by-election at Rochester. He met with no better success at West Marylebone at the general election of 1906.

For his services to zoology he was awarded the gold medal of the Zoological Society in 1902, and in the same year was made an honorary doctor of science at Cambridge. He received the gold medal of the Royal Geographical and the Royal Scottish Geographical societies, and other medals for his artistic work from South Kensington and the Society of Arts. His pictures, chiefly dealing with African subjects, were frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy. He was the author of numerous books on Africa, including British Central Africa (1897); The Colonization of Africa (1899); The Uganda Protectorate (1902); Liberia (1906); George Grenfell and the Congo (1908). During his travels in the north-eastern part of the Congo Free State in 1900 he was instrumental in discovering and naming the okapi, a mammal nearly allied to the giraffe. His name has been connected with many other discoveries in the African fauna and flora.

JOHNSTON, JOSEPH EGGLESTON (1807-1891), American Confederate general in the Civil War, was born near Farmville, Prince Edward county, Virginia, on the 3rd of February 1807. His father, Peter Johnston (1763-1841), a Virginian of Scottish descent, served in the War of Independence, and afterwards became a distinguished jurist; his mother was a niece of Patrick Henry. He graduated at West Point, in the same class with Robert E. Lee, and was made brevet second lieutenant, 4th Artillery, in 1829. He served in the Black Hawk and Seminole wars, and left the army in 1837 to become a civil engineer, but a year afterwards he was reappointed to the army as first lieutenant, Topographical Engineers, and breveted captain for his conduct in the Seminole war. During the Mexican war he was twice severely wounded in a reconnaissance at Cerro Gordo, 1847, was engaged in the siege of Vera Cruz, the battles of Contreras, Churubusco, and Molino del Rey, the storming of Chapultepec, and the assault on the city of Mexico, and received three brevets for gallant and meritorious service. From 1853 to 1855 he was employed on Western river improvements, and in 1855 he became lieut.-colonel of the 1st U.S. Cavalry. In 1860 he was made quartermaster-general, with the rank of brigadier-general. In April 1861 he resigned from the United States army and entered the Confederate service. He was commissioned major-general of volunteers in the Army of Virginia, and assisted in organizing the volunteers. He was later appointed a general officer of the Confederacy, and assigned to the command of the Army of the Shenandoah, being opposed by the Federal army under Patterson. When McDowell advanced upon the Confederate forces under Beauregard at Manassas, Johnston moved from the Shenandoah Valley with great rapidity to Beauregard’s assistance. As senior officer he took command on the field, and at Bull Run (Manassas) (q.v.) won the first important Confederate victory. In August 1861 he was made one of the five full generals of the Confederacy, remaining in command of the main army in Virginia. He commanded in the battle of Fair Oaks (May 31, 1862), and was so severely wounded as to be incapacitated for several months. In March 1863, still troubled by his wound, he was assigned to the command of the south-west, and in May was ordered to take immediate command of all the Confederate forces in Mississippi, then threatened by Grant’s movement on Vicksburg. When Pemberton’s army was besieged in Vicksburg by Grant, Johnston used every effort to relieve it, but his force was inadequate. Later in 1863, when the battle of Chattanooga brought the Federals to the borders of Georgia, Johnston was assigned to command the Army of Tennessee at Dalton, and in the early days of May 1864 the combined armies of the North under Sherman advanced against his lines. For the main outlines of the famous campaign between Sherman and Johnston see American Civil War (§ 29). From the 9th of May to the 17th of July there were skirmishes, actions and combats almost daily. The great numerical superiority of the Federals enabled Sherman to press back the Confederates without a pitched battle, but the severity of the skirmishing may be judged from the casualties of the two armies (Sherman’s about 26,000 men, Johnston’s over 10,000), and the obstinate steadiness of Johnston by the fact that his opponent hardly progressed more than one mile a day. But a Fabian policy is never acceptable to an eager people, and when Johnston had been driven back to Atlanta he was superseded by Hood with orders to fight a battle. The wisdom of Johnston’s plan was soon abundantly clear, and the Confederate cause was already lost when Lee reinstated him on the 23rd of February 1865. With a handful of men he opposed Sherman’s march through the Carolinas, and at Bentonville, N.C., fought and almost won a most gallant and skilful battle against heavy odds. But the Union troops steadily advanced, growing in strength as they went, and a few days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Johnston advised President Davis that it was in his opinion wrong and useless to continue the conflict, and he was authorized to make terms with Sherman. The terms entered into between these generals, on the 18th of April, having been rejected by the United States government, another agreement was signed on the 26th of April, the new terms being similar to those of the surrender of Lee. After the close of the war Johnston engaged in civil pursuits. In 1874 he published a Narrative of Military Operations during the Civil War. In 1877 he was elected to represent the Richmond district of Virginia in Congress. In 1887 he was appointed by President Cleveland U.S. commissioner of railroads. Johnston was married in early life to Louisa (d. 1886), daughter of Louis M’Lane. He died at Washington, D.C., on the 21st of March 1891, leaving no children.

It was not the good fortune of Johnston to acquire the prestige which so much assisted Lee and Jackson, nor indeed did he possess the power of enforcing his will on others in the same degree, but his methods were exact, his strategy calm and balanced, and, if he showed himself less daring than his comrades, he was unsurpassed in steadiness. The duel of Sherman and Johnston is almost as personal a contest between two great captains as were the campaigns of Turenne and Montecucculi. To Montecucculi, indeed, both in his military character and in the incidents of his career, Joseph Johnston bears a striking resemblance.

See Hughes, General Johnston, in “Great Commanders Series” (1893).

JOHNSTONE, a police burgh of Renfrewshire, Scotland, on the Black Cart, 11 m. W. of Glasgow by the Glasgow & South-Western railway. Pop. (1901), 10,503. The leading industries include flax-spinning, cotton manufactures (with the introduction of which in 1781 the prosperity of the town began), paper-making, shoe-lace making, iron and brass foundries and engineering works. There are also coal mines and oil works in the vicinity. Elderslie, 1 m. E., is the reputed birthplace of Sir William Wallace, but it is doubtful if “Wallace’s Yew,” though of great age, and “Wallace’s Oak,” a fine old tree that perished in a storm in 1856, and the small castellated building (traditionally his house) which preceded the present mansion in the west end of the village, existed in his day.

JOHNSTOWN, a city and the county-seat of Fulton county, New York, U.S.A., on Cayadutta Creek, about 4 m. N. of the Mohawk river and about 48 m. N.W. of Albany. Pop. (1890), 7768; (1900), 10,130 (1653 foreign-born); (1905, state census), 9765; (1910) 10,447. It is served by the Fonda, Johnstown & Gloversville railroad, and by an electric line to Schenectady. The city has a Federal building, a Y.M.C.A. building, a city hall, and a Carnegie library (1902). The most interesting building is Johnson Hall, a fine old baronial mansion, built by Sir William Johnson in 1762 and his home until his death; his grave is just outside the present St John’s episcopal church. Originally the hall was flanked by two stone forts, one of which is still standing. In 1907 the hall was bought by the state and was placed in the custody of the Johnstown Historical Society, which maintains a museum here. In the hall Johnson established in 1766 a Masonic lodge, one of the oldest in the United States. Other buildings of historical interest are the Drumm House and the Fulton county court house, built by Sir William Johnson in 1763 and 1772 respectively, and the gaol (1772), at first used for all New York west of Schenectady county, and during the War of Independence as a civil and a military prison. The court house is said to be the oldest in the United States. Three miles south of the city is the Butler House, built in 1742 by Colonel John Butler (d. 1794), a prominent Tory leader during the War of Independence. A free school, said to have been the first in New York state, was established at Johnstown by Sir William Johnson in 1764. The city is (after Gloversville, 3 m. distant) the principal glove-making centre in the United States, the product being valued at $2,581,274 in 1905 and being 14.6% of the total value of this industry in the United States. The manufacture of gloves in commercial quantities was introduced into the United States and Johnstown in 1809 by Talmadge Edwards, who was buried there in the colonial cemetery. The value of the total factory product in 1905 was $4,543,272 (a decrease of 11.3% since 1900). Johnstown was settled about 1760 by a colony of Scots brought to America by Sir William Johnson, within whose extensive grant it was situated, and in whose honour, in 1771, it was named. A number of important conferences between the colonial authorities and the Iroquois Indians were held here, and on the 28th of October 1781, during the War of Independence, Colonel Marinus Willett (1740-1830) defeated here a force of British and Indians, whose leader, Walter Butler, a son of Colonel John Butler, and, with him, a participant in the Wyoming massacres, was mortally wounded near West Canada creek during the pursuit. Johnstown was incorporated as a village in 1808, and was chartered as a city in 1895.

JOHNSTOWN, a city of Cambria county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., at the confluence of the Conemaugh river and Stony creek, about 75 m. E. by S. of Pittsburg. Pop. (1890), 21,805; (1900), 35,936, of whom 7318 were foreign-born, 2017 being Hungarians, 1663 Germans, and 923 Austrians; (1910 census) 55,482. It is served by the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore & Ohio railways. The city lies about 1170 ft. above the sea, on level ground extending for some distance along the river, and nearly enclosed by high and precipitous hills. Among the public buildings and institutions are the Cambria free library (containing about 14,000 volumes in 1908), the city hall, a fine high school, and the Conemaugh Valley memorial hospital. Roxbury Park, about 3 m. from the city, is reached by electric lines. Coal, iron ore, fire clay and limestone abound in the vicinity, and the city has large plants for the manufacture of iron and steel. The total value of the factory product in 1905 was $28,891,806, an increase of 35.2% since 1900. A settlement was established here in 1791 by Joseph Jahns, in whose honour it was named, and the place was soon laid out as a town, but it was not incorporated as a city until 1889, the year of the disastrous Johnstown flood. In 1852 a dam (700 ft. long and 100 ft. high), intended to provide a storage reservoir for the Pennsylvania canal, had been built across the South Fork, a branch of the Conemaugh river, 12 m. above the city, but the Pennsylvania canal was subsequently abandoned, and in 1888 the dam was bought and repaired by the South Fork hunting and fishing club, and Conemaugh lake was formed. On the 31st of May 1889, during a heavy rainfall, the dam gave way and a mass of water 20 ft. or more in height at its head swept over Johnstown at a speed of about 20 m. an hour, almost completely destroying the city. The Pennsylvania railroad bridge withstood the strain, and against it the flood piled up a mass of wreckage many feet in height and several acres in area. On or in this confused mass many of the inhabitants were saved from drowning, only to be burned alive when it caught fire. Seven other towns and villages in the valley were also swept away, and the total loss of lives was 2000 or more. A relief fund of nearly $3,000,000 was raised, and the city was quickly rebuilt.

JOHOR (Johore is the local official, but incorrect spelling), an independent Malayan state at the southern end of the peninsula, stretching from 2° 40′ S. to Cape Romania (Ramūnya), the most southerly point on the mainland of Asia, and including all the small islands adjacent to the coast which lie to the south of parallel 2° 40′ S. It is bounded N. by the protected native state of Pahang, N.W. by the Negri Sembilan and the territory of Malacca, S. by the strait which divides Singapore island from the mainland, E. by the China Sea, and W. by the Straits of Malacca. The province of Mūar was placed under the administration of Johor by the British government as a temporary measure in 1877, and was still a portion of the sultan’s dominions in 1910. The coast-line measures about 250 m. The greatest length from N.W. to S.E. is 165 m., the greatest breadth from E. to W. 100 m. The area is estimated at about 9000 sq. m. The principal rivers are the Mūar, the most important waterway in the south of the peninsula; the Johor, up which river the old capital of the state was situated; the Endau, which marks the boundary with Pahang; and the Bātu Pāhat and Sĕdĕli, of comparative unimportance. Johor is less mountainous than any other state in the peninsula. The highest peak is Gūnong Lēdang, called Mt Ophir by Europeans, which measures some 4000 ft. in height. Like the rest of the peninsula, Johor is covered from end to end by one vast spread of forest, only broken here and there by clearings and settlements of insignificant area. The capital is Johor Bharu (pop. about 20,000), situated at the nearest point on the mainland to the island of Singapore. The fine palace built by the sultan Abubakar is the principal feature of the town. It is a kind of Oriental Monte Carlo, and is much resorted to from Singapore. The capital of the province of Mūar is Bandar Maharani, named after the wife of the sultan before he had assumed his final title. The climate of Johor is healthy and equable for a country situated so near to the equator; it is cooler than that of Singapore. The shade temperature varies from 98.5° F. to 68.2° F. The rainfall averages 97.28 in. per annum. No exact figures can be obtained as to the population of Johor, but the best estimates place it at about 200,000, of whom 150,000 are Chinese, 35,000 Malays, 15,000 Javanese. We are thus presented with the curious spectacle of a country under Malay rule in which the Chinese outnumber the people of the land by more than four to one. It is not possible to obtain any exact data on the subject of the revenue and expenditure of the state. The revenue, however, is probably about 750,000 dollars, and the expenditure under public service is comparatively small. The revenue is chiefly derived from the revenue farms for opium, spirits, gambling, &c., and from duty on pepper and gambier exported by the Chinese. The cultivation of these products forms the principal industry. Areca-nuts and copra are also exported in some quantities, more especially from Mūar. There is little mineral wealth of proved value.

History.—It is claimed that the Mahommedan empire of Johor was founded by the sultan of Malacca after his expulsion from his kingdom by the Portuguese in 1511. It is certain that Johor took an active part, only second to that of Achin, in the protracted war between the Portuguese and the Dutch for the possession of Malacca. Later we find Johor ruled by an officer of the sultan of Riouw (Rīau), bearing the title of Tumĕnggong, and owing feudal allegiance to his master in common with the Bĕndahāra of Pahang. In 1812, however, this officer seems to have thrown off the control of Riouw, and to have assumed the title of sultan, for one of his descendants, Sultan Husain, ceded the island of Singapore to the East India Company in 1819. In 1855 the then sultan, Ali, was deposed, and his principal chief, the Tumĕnggong, was given the supreme rule by the British. His son Tumĕnggong Abubakar proved to be a man of exceptional intelligence. He made numerous visits to Europe, took considerable interest in the government and development of his country, and was given by Queen Victoria the title of maharaja in 1879. On one of his visits to England he was made the defendant in a suit for breach of promise of marriage, but the plaintiff was non-suited, since it was decided that no action lay against a foreign sovereign in the English law courts. In 1885 he entered into a new agreement with the British government, and was allowed to assume the title of sultan of the state and territory of Johor. He was succeeded in 1895 by his son Sultan Ibrahīm. The government of Johor has been comparatively so free from abuses under its native rulers that it has never been found necessary to place it under the residential system in force in the other native states of the peninsula which are under British control, and on several occasions Abubakar used his influence with good effect on the side of law and order. The close proximity of Johor to Singapore has constantly subjected the rulers of the former state to the influence of European public opinion. None the less, the Malay is by nature but ill fitted for the drudgery which is necessary if proper attention is to be paid to the dull details whereby government is rendered good and efficient. Abubakar’s principal adviser, the Dāto ’Mĕntri, was a worthy servant of his able master. Subsequently, however, the reins of government came chiefly into the hands of a set of young men who lacked either experience or the serious devotion to dull duties which is the distinguishing mark of the English civil service. Mūar, in imitation of the British system, is ruled by a rāja of the house of Johor, who bears the title of resident.

(H. Cl.)

JOIGNY, a town of central France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Yonne, 18 m. N.N.W. of Auxerre by the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway. Pop. (1906), 4888. It is situated on the flank of the hill known as the Côte St Jacques on the right bank of the Yonne. Its streets are steep and narrow, and old houses with carved wooden façades are numerous. The church of St Jean (16th century), which once stood within the enceinte of the old castle, contains a representation (15th century) of the Holy Sepulchre in white marble. Other interesting buildings are the church of St André (12th, 16th and 17th centuries), of which the best feature is the Renaissance portal with its fine bas-reliefs; and the church of St Thibault (16th century), in which the stone crown suspended from the choir vaulting is chiefly noticeable. The Porte du Bois, a gateway with two massive flanking towers, is a relic of the 10th century castle; there is also a castle of the 16th and 17th centuries, in part demolished. The hôtel de ville (18th century) shelters the library; the law-court contains the sepulchral chapel of the Ferrands (16th century). The town is the seat of a sub-prefect and has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, and a communal college for boys. It is industrially unimportant, but the wine of the Côte St Jacques is much esteemed.

Joigny (Joviniacum) was probably of Roman origin. In the 10th century it became the seat of a countship dependent on that of Champagne, which after passing through several hands came in the 18th century into the possession of the family of Villeroi. A fragment of a ladder preserved in the church of St André commemorates the successful resistance offered by the town to the English in 1429.

JOINDER, in English law, a term used in several connexions.

Joinder of causes of action is the uniting in the same action several causes of action. Save in actions for the recovery of land and in actions by a trustee in bankruptcy a plaintiff may without leave join in one action, not several actions, but several “causes of action.” Claims by or against husband and wife may be joined with claims by or against either of them separately. Claims by or against an executor or administrator as such may be joined with claims by or against him personally, provided such claims are alleged to arise with reference to the estate of which the plaintiff or defendant sues or is sued as executor or administrator. Claims by plaintiffs jointly may be joined with claims by them or any of them separately against the same defendant.

Joinder in pleading is the joining by the parties on the point of matter issuing out of the allegations and pleas of the plaintiff and the defendant in a cause and the putting the cause upon trial.

Joinder of parties.—Where parties may jointly, severally or in the alternative bring separate actions in respect of or arising out of the same transaction or series of transactions they may, by Order XVI. of the rules of the supreme court, be joined in one action as plaintiffs.

JOINERY, one of the useful arts which contribute to the comfort and convenience of man. As the arts of joinery and carpentry are often followed by the same individual, it appears natural to conclude that the same principles are common to both, but a closer examination leads to a different conclusion. The art of carpentry is directed almost wholly to the support of weight or pressure, and therefore its principles must be sought in the mechanical sciences. In a building it includes all the rough timber work necessary for support, division or connexion, and its proper object is to give firmness and stability. The art of joinery has for its object the addition in a building of all the fixed woodwork necessary for convenience or ornament. The joiner’s works are in many cases of a complicated nature, and often require to be executed in an expensive material, therefore joinery requires much skill in that part of geometrical science which treats of the projection and description of lines, surfaces and solids, as well as an intimate knowledge of the structure and nature of wood. A man may be a good carpenter without being a joiner at all, but he cannot be a joiner without being competent, at least, to supervise all the operations required in carpentry. The rough labour of the carpenter renders him in some degree unfit to produce that accurate and neat workmanship which is expected from a modern joiner, but it is no less true that the habit of neatness and the great precision of the joiner make him a much slower workman than the man practised in works of carpentry. In carpentry framing owes its strength mainly to the form and position of its parts, but in joinery the strength of a frame depends to a larger extent upon the strength of the joinings. The importance of fitting the joints together as accurately as possible is therefore obvious. It is very desirable that a joiner shall be a quick workman, but it is still more so that he shall be a good one, and that he should join his materials with firmness and accuracy. It is also of the greatest importance that the work when thus put together shall be constructed of such sound and dry materials, and on such principles, that the whole shall bear the various changes of temperature and of moisture and dryness, so that the least possible shrinkage or swelling shall take place; but provision must be made so that, if swelling or shrinking does occur, no damage shall be done to the work.

In early times every part was rude, and jointed in the most artless manner. The first dawnings of the art of modern joinery appear in the thrones, stalls, pulpits and screens of early Gothic cathedrals and churches, but even in these it is indebted to the carver for everything that is worthy of regard. With the revival of classic art, however, great changes took place in every sort of construction. Forms began to be introduced in architecture which could not be executed at a moderate expense without the aid of new principles, and these principles were discovered and published by practical joiners. These authors, with their scanty geometrical knowledge, had but confused notions of these principles, and accordingly their descriptions are often obscure, and sometimes erroneous. The framed wainscot of small panels gave way to the large bolection moulded panelling. Doors which were formerly heavily framed and hung on massive posts or in jambs of cut stone, were now framed in light panels and hung in moulded dressings of wood. The scarcity of oak timber, and the expense of working it, subsequently led to the importation of fir timber from northern Europe, and this gradually superseded all other material save for special work.

Tools and Materials.—The joiner operates with saws, planes, chisels, gouges, hatchet, adze, gimlets and other boring instruments (aided and directed by chalked lines), gauges, squares, hammers, wallets, floor cramps and a great many other tools. His operations consist principally of sawing and planing in all their varieties, and of setting out and making joints of all kinds. There is likewise a great range of other operations—such as paring, gluing up, wedging, pinning, fixing, fitting and hanging—and many which depend on nailing and screwing, such as laying floors, boarding ceilings, wainscoting walls, bracketing, cradling, firring, and the like. In addition to the wood on which the joiner works, he requires also glue, white lead, nails, brads, screws and hinges, and accessorily he applies bolts, locks, bars and other fastenings, together with pulleys, lines, weights, holdfasts, wall hooks, &c. The joiner’s work for a house is for the most part prepared at the shop, where there should be convenience for doing everything in the best and readiest manner, so that little remains when the carcase is ready and the floors laid but to fit, fix and hang. The sashes, frames, doors, shutters, linings and soffits are all framed and put together, i.e. wedged up and cleaned off at the shop; the flooring is planed and prepared with rebated or grooved edges ready for laying, and the moulded work—the picture and dado rails, architraves, skirtings and panelling—is all got out at the shop. On a new building the joiner fits up a temporary workshop with benches, sawing stools and a stove for his glue pot. Here he adjusts the work for fitting up and makes any small portions that may still be required.