Note 18 — I. TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON

Prayers and Meditations: composed by Samuel Johnson, LL.D., and published from his Manuscripts by George Straham, D.D., Prebendary of Rochester and Vicar of Islington in Middlesex, 1785. Dr. Birkbeck Hill suggests that Johnson could not have contemplated the publication of the work in its entirety, but the world is the better for the self revelation, notwithstanding Cowper’s remark in a letter to Newton (August 27, 1785), that “the publisher of it is neither much a friend to the cause of religion nor to the author’s memory; for by the specimen of it that has reached us, it seems to contain only such stuff as has a direct tendency to expose both to ridicule.”