62 JOHNSON. 



strangely enough, neither tells us when that great man 

 was born, nor how old he was when he died ; and his 

 'Memoirs of Frederick II. of Prussia/ written in 1756, 

 which but for a few passages (as where he speaks of the 

 old king's grenadiers being chosen to " propagate procreat- 

 ing," and of "providing heirs for their habiliments,") 

 might be read by any one, without ever suspecting who 

 was the author. It was his rare lot as a reviewer, to 

 write a criticism upon a work of Sir Isaac Newton ; his 

 ' Five Letters to Bentley,' having been published while 

 Johnson contributed to the * Gentleman's Magazine.' It 

 is certain that he treated this most venerable of all the 

 sons of men, respecting whom he was wont to say, that 

 had he lived in heathen times, he would have been 

 worshipped as a god, in no very different way from any 

 other author, whose writings chanced to come before him 

 in his critical capacity. Beside the passage which fol- 

 lows, the review consists of five short paragraphs, and one 

 is in these words, coming after a quotation. 



" Let it not be thought irreverence to this great name, 

 if I observe, that by matter evenly spread through infinite 

 space, he now finds it necessary to mean matter not 

 evenly spread ; matter not evenly spread will indeed 

 commence, but it will commence as soon as it exists ; 

 and in my opinion this puzzling question about matter, is 

 only how that could be that never could have been, or 

 what a man thinks on when he thinks of nothing/' Of 

 which petulance it is enough to remark, as might well 

 be supposed, that Newton being entirely right, his re- 

 viewer is wholly wrong. 



Of the Prefaces to his own or other men's works, it is 

 not necessary to speak in detail. The most ambitious is 





