JOHNSON 



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JOHNSON CITY 



and during this time became colonel of a 

 regiment that fought in the War of 1812. 

 Johnson distinguished himself in the Battle of 

 the Thames where, it is said, he shot the Indian 

 chief, Tecumseh. In the Democratic conven- 

 tion that nominated Van Buren for the Presi- 

 dency, Johnson was selected as candidate for 

 the Vice-Presidency. When the electoral votes 

 were counted, however, it was discovered that 

 the choice of Vice-President was prevented by 

 the action of the Virginia electors, who had 

 voted for William Smith of Alabama. The 

 election was accordingly thrown to the Senate, 

 which gave Johnson a majority vote. In 1844 

 he was an unsuccessful candiate for the Demo- 

 cratic nomination for the Presidency. 



JOHNSON, SAMUEL (1709-1784), an English 

 writer of the eighteenth century, one of the 

 most striking and original personages not only 

 of his age but of the whole period of English 

 literature. He wrote no masterpiece, either in 

 prose or in poetry, 

 and his famous 

 Diet i o n ary , 

 though of value 

 as the first im- 

 portant attempt 

 at an English 

 lexicon, is now 

 regarded as 

 literary curiosity. 

 It was Johnson's 

 astonishing per- 

 sonality, more 

 than his literary achievements, that made him 

 the dominant figure of his time and has kept 

 his name alive. 



Thanks to a remarkable biography, written 

 by an obscure barrister named James Boswell 

 (which see), the world has come to know the 

 life and character of Johnson in every detail. 

 In that famous Life is pictured a large, awk- 

 ward man, vulgar in appearance and uncouth 

 in manner, with his face scarred with the 

 marks of disease, who tells his hostess to stop 

 talking nonsense, who calls a distinguished 

 guest a "vile Whig," who leans back at the 

 table to "blow out his breath like a whale" 

 and who abuses everybody that disagrees with 

 him. Yet, to use the words of Carlyle, he was 

 a "mass of genuine manhood, a man who would 

 starve before he bartered away his inde- 

 pendence and who was loved and honored by 

 all who knew him." 



Johnson was the son of a poor bookseller of 

 Lichfield, in Staffordshire. He was born with 



SAMUEL JOHNSON 



a tendency to scrofula, and when a child of 

 three was taken on a futile joflrney to London 

 by his parents to be healed with the "royal 

 touch" of Queen Anne. His constant reading 

 of his father's books proved a more important 

 education than his regular schooling. He en- 

 tered Oxford in 1728, but his extreme poverty 

 compelled him to leave the university after a 

 little more than two years. In 1735 he mar- 

 ried a woman old enough to be his mother, 

 whom he loved devotedly, and with her dowry 

 of 800 (about $4,000) they started a private 

 school in Lichfield. 



This proved a failure, and he journeyed to 

 London to begin life as a writer. Years of 

 poverty and discouragement followed, but he 

 slowly won a name for himself, and when in 

 1762 George III granted him a yearly pension 

 of 300, or about $1,500, life brightened for 

 him. With Joshua Reynolds, a renowned art- 

 ist, he founded the famous Literary Club, 

 where he out-talked the greatest literary men 

 and artists of the day. One who wishes to read 

 these celebrated conversations will find them 

 recorded in Boswell's Life. 



Johnson became a regular contributor to the 

 Gentleman's Magazine in 1738, the year in 

 which he published his first poem, London. 

 The best of his poetic works, The Vanity of 

 Human Wishes, appeared in 1749, and soon 

 after his tragedy, Irene, was produced at the 

 Drury Lane Theater. The success of Addison's 

 Spectator encouraged him to begin the Rambler 

 (1750-1752) and the Idler (1758), but his 

 heavy, ponderous style prevented his periodi- 

 cals from becoming popular. Goldsmith said 

 that Johnson would make "little fishes talk 

 like whales." 



Meantime he had begun work on the Dic- 

 tionary oj the English Language, which, after 

 eight years of toil, he issued in 1755. Humor 

 and prejudice appear frequently in this re- 

 markable work, as shown in his definition of 

 oats "a grain given in England to horses, and 

 in Scotland to the people." His only novel, 

 Rasselas, which was published in 1759, was 

 written to provide money for his mother's 

 funeral. In 1775 he wrote a description of a 

 journey to Scotland and the Hebrides, made 

 in company with Boswell; three years before 

 his death he completed his last literary under- 

 taking, Lives of the Poets, the most readable 

 of his works. 



JOHNSON CITY, TENN V a town in Wash- 

 ington County, in the extreme northeastern 

 section of the state, of some note as a summer 



