Two hundred years ago, on December 13, 1784, Samuel Johnson died in London, loved and venerated by those who knew him best and immortalized a few years later in James Boswell’s classical biography. Johnson’s greatness of spirit, mind, character, conduct, and art, his “great-souledness” or magnanimity, his piety and eloquence, are so overwhelmingly obvious and affecting to those who know his writings that it is often only with impatience that they can write about him (as opposed to quoting from him). When asked recently by Elton Trueblood who was “the greatest Englishman who ever lived,” Malcolm Muggeridge replied without hesitation, “Dr. Johnson”; the scholar H. W. Donner doubts “whether any critic after Aristotle has carried more weight” than Johnson; and many would be inclined to apply to Johnson himself the description that he gave to Sir Thomas More: “the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced.”
Newman remarked Johnson’s “great vigor and resource of intellect” united with “a rare common sense and a conscientious regard for veracity”; Chesterton, who wrote a fine play about him, said of Johnson that he is “immortal” because he “judged all things with a gigantic and detached common sense”; while C. S. Lewis says that there are three great, inimitable, unique, authoritative voices in the history of Western moral culture, which everyone deeply acquainted with it thinks he knows—those of Socrates, Jesus, and Johnson.
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