The eighteenth century was an age addicted to gossiping about its literary figures. This addiction was nowhere better demonstrated than by the countless reflections, sermons, poems, pamphlets, biographical sketches, and biographies about Samuel Johnson. The most productive phase of this activity commenced almost immediately after Johnson's death in December, 1784, and continued into the next century.

One item of Johnsoniana which seems to have been neglected, perhaps because Birkbeck Hill did not include it in his Johnsonian Miscellanies, is A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the Late Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., with Notes. This poem of three hundred and four lines was written by John Courtenay (1741-1816). First published in the spring of 1786 by Charles Dilly, the poem went through three editions in the same year. Its popularity was determined less by Courtenay's poetic talent than by public interest in the Johnsoniana that flooded the market. Courtenay's literary output, though scanty, was diverse; he wrote light verse, character sketches, and essays, including two controversial pieces in support of the French Revolution.1 It is apparent, however, that for him writing was hardly more than an avocation.

Despite his notoriety as a controversial member of Parliament, as a first-rate wit, and as an intimate friend of Boswell, Courtenay remains a shadowy figure. References to him occur often in the last volumes of Boswell's journal, but few of them are particularly revealing. Courtenay evidently never met Johnson; indeed, the anonymous author of A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson to His Four Friends: The Rev. Mr. Strahan. James Boswell, Esq. Mrs. Piozzi. J. Courtenay, Esq. M.P. (1786) censures Courtenay for writing about a man whom he did not know. Although a member of the Literary Club, Courtenay did not join this group until four years after Johnson died. He was proposed on 9 December 1788, by Sir Joshua Reynolds (Boswell seconded), and elected two weeks later, on 23 December, during the same meeting at which it was decided to erect a monument to Dr. Johnson in Westminster Abbey.2

If, then, Courtenay did not belong to the Johnson circle, he became, shortly after Johnson's death, a valued member of the Boswell circle. Courtenay must have met Boswell in the spring or early summer of 1785, about thirteen years after arriving in England from his native Ireland in the service of Viscount Townshend. Boswell's first reference to Courtenay occurs in his journal under 7 July 1785.3 It is clear from this entry that he had met Courtenay earlier, but subsequent references indicate that the acquaintance was a fresh one.

From the start Boswell enjoyed Courtenay's company. In the first place, Boswell appreciated Courtenay's talent in conversation. Although he seldom recorded specimens of Courtenay's talk, Boswell was generous in his praise of his wit. "Courtenay's wit," he wrote, "sparkles more than almost any man's."4 On 26 March 1788, Boswell described him as a "valuable addition" to a meeting of the Essex Head Club which he attended as Boswell's guest. "Indeed," Boswell continued, "his conversation is excellent; it has so much literature, wit, and at the same time manly sense, in it."5 An example of his "manly sense" that "struck home" to Boswell was Courtenay's remark that had Johnson been born to three thousand pounds a year his melancholy would have been at greater leisure to torment him.6

But there was a greater reason for Courtenay's intimacy with Boswell. The period following Johnson's death was for Boswell a time of intense anxiety. By 1786 Courtenay and Edmond Malone had become Boswell's closest confidants. Boswell relished the long walks and the dinners he took with Courtenay. Throughout his journal he confessed to the therapeutic value of Courtenay's company; "I am," he admitted, "quite another Man with M. C., Malone, Courtenay."7

Moreover, Boswell often solicited Courtenay's advice in various crises. Courtenay, together with Malone, helped him out of scrapes with Alexander Tytler and Lord Macdonald, induced him to lighten his published attacks on Mrs. Piozzi and helped make him aware of the merit of her edition of Johnson's correspondence, and advised him to cancel some questionable passages in the Life on William Gerard Hamilton. From time to time he also cautioned Boswell not to expect political preferment when he did not deserve it. It appears, too, that he took part in the prolonged deliberations over Johnson's monument in Westminster Abbey. Concerned that Boswell's drinking might impede his work on the Life, Courtenay made him promise to quit drinking from December 1790, to the following March, a promise which, as far as he was able, Boswell kept.8

Courtenay's high spirits and his ability to relieve Boswell's melancholy were all the more remarkable because Courtenay, with a wife and seven children to support, was poverty-stricken during most of this period. Boswell, lamenting the failure of the Whigs to provide financial assistance to one of the party's most active members, found Courtenay's "firmness of mind ... amazing" under such difficulties.9 No doubt Courtenay's resolve endeared him to Boswell, whose own financial and psychological problems were, of course, a great burden.

This is not to say that relations between the two men were always cordial. Courtenay was evidently a non-believer, and the two men often differed on religious matters. Boswell condemned Courtenay's "wild ravings" in favor of the French revolution, and once confessed his deep regret about quarreling with so close a friend on this subject.10 They also differed on the question of slavery, and Boswell good-naturedly chided Courtenay and William Windham as abolitionists in his poem, No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love (1791).11 It is clear, too, that as Boswell's depression grew, Courtenay's power to brighten his spirits waned considerably. Their friendship, nevertheless, seems to have ended on a happy note, for Boswell's final mention of Courtenay in his journal includes the remark that with Courtenay he had spent a "good day."12

Courtenay's Poetical Review, characterized by Donald A. Stauffer as an embodiment of the "vice-and-virtue philosophy" in biography, was one of the most spirited pieces of Johnsoniana to appear.13 The poem begins with disdain, but at line sixty-one reverses direction and becomes vigorously commendatory. Courtenay did not attempt to add fresh information about Johnson's life and career. Consequently, the unfavorable portion of the poem is a conventional catalog of Johnson's often publicized foibles and prejudices, just as the favorable section is in part a commonplace survey of his artistic achievement.

This contrast, as Stauffer remarks, renders Courtenay's praise more powerful.14 More important, the play between scorn and praise reflects the ambivalence which colors contemporary accounts of Johnson. We are now accustomed to the notion of great art as the product of a flawed life. But in the eighteenth century, an age largely devoted to the idea of discreet biography which concealed or minimized the subject's weaknesses, a man like Johnson presented formidable problems to the biographer and his readers. Although Courtenay merely versified material which other writers had discussed in much more detail, his poem is important because it synthesizes the conflicting attitudes towards Johnson which prevailed immediately after his death. Courtenay, like many others, saw in Johnson a powerful mixture of great virtues and vices; and though he is not impartial, he effects, through his honesty, an admirable balance between Johnson's strengths and weaknesses. The final forty lines of the Review constitute one of the most balanced of all contemporary tributes to Johnson as a human being.

For the most part, the commendatory section of the poem is an unsystematic tracing of Johnson's moral and literary merits. Courtenay's rhapsodizing on the Dictionary, the Rambler, and the Lives of the Poets is conventional. Clearly, he admired the wide scope of Johnson's learning and his ability to communicate his knowledge of men and manners in his writings. But his admiration occasionally betrays him; for instance, in describing the "brilliant school" through which Johnson's influence was perpetuated, he overestimated the extent to which Reynolds, Malone, Burney, Jones, Goldsmith, Steevens, Hawkesworth, and Boswell were indebted to Johnson's writings.15 Usually, however, he was on firmer ground. Courtenay was the only writer before Boswell to praise Johnson's Latin verse, a body of poetry virtually ignored by other contemporary biographers and memorialists.16 Furthermore, he employs footnotes skillfully. Though they impede the progress of the poem, they do support poetic statement with factual evidence and explain and amplify certain points made in the verses.

The clearest evidence for the care which Courtenay took with the Review can be found upon examination of his revisions. He made few substantial changes in the second edition, but the third edition contains important revisions. Courtenay added ten lines and five footnotes in the final version, and lightened some of the scorn in the first portion by substituting weaker phrases for stronger ones. He also enclosed lines seven through twenty in quotation marks to make it appear that the sentiment expressed therein was not his own, but a judgment he had heard elsewhere.

But the most significant revisions are concerned with organization. By transferring segments of certain verse paragraphs to others, he achieves a more unified portrait of Johnson. By means of such revision, he forms his general evaluation of Johnson's writing into one unit and his comments on individual works into another, where before they had been awkwardly interwoven.

Courtenay's Review did not go unnoticed at the time, though for obvious reasons it was given less attention by the reviewers than the more notorious Johnsoniana. Extracts from the poem were printed in several magazines. The reviewers were almost unanimous in damning the poem's inelegance, unevenness, and lack of harmony, but reserved praise for the sentiments and candor.17 Chesterfield's apologist in William Hayley's Two Dialogues; Containing a Comparative View of the Lives, Characters, and Writings of Philip, the Late Earl of Chesterfield, and Dr. Samuel Johnson (1787) protested that Courtenay was too kind to Johnson. The severest indictment of the Review came from the anonymous author of A Poetical Epistle from the Ghost of Dr. Johnson, mentioned earlier, who charged Courtenay with poor taste and with belaboring the obvious by proving that Johnson was "not quite destitute of brains."18

The greatest champion of the Review was, of course, Boswell. The Life is sprinkled with quotations from the third edition, 118 lines in all, mostly from Courtenay's commendatory verses. In view of the many published attacks on Johnson, Boswell must have appreciated Courtenay's sentiments all the more. Doubtless Courtenay's warm praise of the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides also found favor with Boswell.19 Perhaps Boswell's final and least partial judgment of the Review was expressed in his letter to James Abercrombie of Philadelphia dated 11 June 1792. He sent Abercrombie a copy of the poem, commenting that "though I except to several passages, you will find some very good writing."20

Courtenay's Review, together with several other little known memorabilia concerning Johnson, stimulated one of the most energetic and splenetic literary controversies of the late eighteenth century. In addition, the Review and pieces like it aroused a considerable amount of useful, if vitriolic, discussion about the art of biography.

University of Iowa

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

[1] See DNB.

[2] For the information about Courtenay's election, I am indebted to Professor James M. Osborn of Yale University. Boswell gives no precise date for Courtenay's entry into the Club. His first reference to Courtenay's membership occurs in his journal entry of 19 January 1790. See Private Papers of James Boswell, ed. Geoffrey Scott and Frederick A. Pottle (Privately Printed, 1928-1934), XVIII, 22. See also Boswell's letter to Edmond Malone dated 16 December 1790, Letters of James Boswell, ed. C. B. Tinker (Oxford, 1924), II, 409-410. Courtenay and other intimates of Boswell were called "The Gang" by Philip Metcalfe. See Private Papers, XVII, 52, 55; XVIII, 15.

[3] Private Papers, XVI, 106.

[4] Ibid., XVII, 80. For additional testimony to Courtenay's reputation as a wit, see Thraliana, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Oxford, 1951), I, 486, and James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone (London, 1860), 287-288.

[5] Private Papers, XVII, 86.

[6] Ibid., pp. 76-77.

[7] Ibid., XVI, 178. "M. C." is Mrs. Rudd.

[8] See Boswell's letters to Malone, Letters, II, 405, 427, and Private Papers, XVIII, 100. Courtenay became alarmed over Boswell's deepening melancholy, as seen in this passage from his letter to Malone of 22 February 1791: "Poor Boswell is very low, & desperate & ... melancholy mad, feels no spring, no pleasure in existence, & is so perceptibly altered for the worse that it is remarked everywhere. I try all I can to revivify him, but he [turns?] so tiresomely & tediously—for the same cursed trite commonplace topics, about death &c.—that we grow old, and when we are old, we are not young—that I despair of effecting a cure. Doctors Warren and Devaynes very kindly interest themselves about him, but you wd be of more service to him than anyone." Quoted from a MS at Yale University Library by James Osborn, "Edmond Malone and Dr. Johnson," Johnson, Boswell and Their Circle: Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell in Honour of His Eighty-fourth Birthday (Oxford, 1965), p. 16.[9] Letters, II, 428, 425. Boswell tried to negotiate loans for Courtenay, and made a successful application to Reynolds. See Private Papers, XVII, 85-86, 101-102; XVIII, 120.

[10] Private Papers, XVIII, 171, 178, 184.

[11] See Frank Brady, Boswell's Political Career (New Haven, 1965), p. 169, and Frederick A. Pottle, The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. (Oxford, 1929), p. 147.

[12] Private Papers, XVIII, 271. This entry is dated 31 March 1794, not long before the journal ends and some thirteen months before Boswell's death.

[13] The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England (Princeton, 1941), p. 345.

[14] Ibid., p. 346.

[15] W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., in The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, 1941), pp. 135-138, argues against the notion that Johnson's friends formed such a "school."

[16] Boswell praised Courtenay's "just and discriminative eulogy" on Johnson's Latin poems, and quoted it. See Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, revised L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934-1950), I, 62.

[17] See European Magazine, IX (April 1786), 266; Gentleman's Magazine, LVI (May 1786), 415; Monthly Review, LXXV (September 1786), 229.

[18] It should be noted that the attack on Courtenay in this poem is the mildest of the four. The famous caricaturist, Sayer, included Courtenay in a poetic attack on Mrs. Piozzi appended to his print, Frontispiece to the 2nd Edition of Johnson's Letters, published 7 April 1788. See James L. Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) (Oxford, 1952), p. 329.

[19] Boswell quoted Courtenay's compliment in Life, II, 268.

[20] Letters, II, 444.

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