I am not intending to write a life of Dr. Johnson. That has been done with wondrous fidelity and graphic skill by his _fidus Achates_, James Boswell; and Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi, in their supplemental Memoirs and Recollections of him, have thrown most interesting and valuable side-lights on his character. Boswell’s “Life of Dr. Johnson,” as every reader of English literature knows, was largely amplified, and most cruelly distorted, by John Wilson Croker, who, though himself a Tory of Tories, seems to have been unable to comprehend the character of the man who hated a Whig almost as much as he hated a Scotchman; and Mr. Croker was almost as cruelly punished for his offence by Macaulay, who cut his book into shreds in the _Edinburgh Review_. Still, in spite of its glaring sins, not certainly of omission, but of commission, Croker’s edition of Boswell will always be a work of value, for he entered on his task before the last of Dr. Johnson’s friends and acquaintances had passed away. Amongst these were Lord Stowell, who figures in Boswell as “Dr. Scott of Doctors’ Commons;” Mr. John Sidney Hawkins, and Miss Letitia Hawkins, the son and daughter of Sir John Hawkins; Mr. Fitzherbert (afterwards Lord St. Helen’s); Miss Monckton, the Lady Cork of the Regency, a “Queen of Society” under George IV. and William IV., and who lived into the reign of Victoria. He knew also Mrs. Thrale’s daughter, the venerable Lady Keith; and last, not least, the still more venerable Dr. Routh, President of Magdalen College, who had seen Dr. Johnson in the flesh at Oxford, and who lived to December, 1854. From these and from other sources he gathered much material which had not been available to Boswell, and had he been content with facts instead of probabilities and possibilities, he would doubtless have been proof and unassailable to Macaulay’s pen. For instance, there is not the shadow of a ground for supposing (as he does) that Dr. Johnson was “out in ’45” with the adherents of Charles Edward, except the fact that in that year his pen was idle; and he is still less justified in supposing that Dr. Johnson was a Roman Catholic because he advocated the _principle_ of pilgrimages, and prayers for the dead, and confession, as natural and right in themselves, and as distinct from their abuses; because there is not a single Roman Catholic tenet, except that of the divinely-appointed Primacy of the See of St. Peter, which has not at one time or another been supported and defended by some Protestant writer.