SOURCE: "'Casts a Kind of Glory Round It': Metaphor and The Life of Johnson," in Boswell: Citizen of the World, Man of Letters, edited by Irma S. Lustig, pp. 158-83. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

[In this essay, Yarrow analyzes Boswell's use of metaphor in the Life of Johnson, claiming that it reveals Boswell's effort to originate metaphors and maximize their use.]

The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor. This power cannot be acquired; it is a mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.

Aristotle, The Poetics

The Life of Johnson is a great sprawling masterpiece of biographical information and observation, unexpectedly engaging and lifelike. Critics, almost unanimous in their assessment of the work's enduring value, have taken great pains to account for both its vividness and its longevity—the "life," the "liveliness," the "living quality" of the Life of Johnson. Boswell's dramatic presentation of Johnson has been particularly praised, but his framing of Johnson's conversation, his deliberate inclusion of competing levels of discourse, and his presentation of secondary characters, himself among them, have also elicited comment. What has received scant attention, however, is the role of figurative language in the book. Specifically, the way in which metaphor is used to intensify the presentation of Johnson has passed unremarked. I use metaphor here in its largest sense, the sense that Hugh Blair refers to in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres: "the word metaphor is sometimes used … for the application of a term in any figurative signification, whether the figure be founded on resemblance, or on some other relation, which two objects bear one another.… Aristotle, in his Poetics, uses metaphor in this extended sense, for any figurative meaning imposed upon a word."¹ Close attention to the use of tropes in the Life of Johnson reveals Boswell's unflagging effort to originate, incorporate, and encourage the use of metaphor in the book. One might go as far as to say that his design there was to maximize metaphor.

Boswell had been interested in metaphor since the time he was a young man. Metaphor was, for him, a function of wit. Like the green and silver suit he wore in Holland, it was a way to be "fine" (Boswell in Holland 131). Throughout his journals we find Boswell collecting metaphors he likes, preserving his successes, experimenting with language:

How easily and cleverly do I write just now! I am really pleased with myself; words come skipping to me like lambs upon Moffat Hill; and I turn my periods smoothly and imperceptibly like a skilful wheel-wright turning tops in a turning-loom. There's fancy! There's simile! (London Journal 187)

Satire is like a nettle. If you touch it gently and timidly, it will sting you. But if you come boldly up and seize it firmly, it is crushed and becomes quite harmless. (Defence 79)

It is wonderful how he will dwell on a trifle sometimes, like an ox in warm weather running after a fly—if that ever happens, which I am not quite sure. (Ominous Years 95)

The gardens were like those of Babylon. The lady was like a Peruvian princess. I mean, all was like romance. (Boswell in Extremes 98)

More extensive quotation would reveal Boswell's almost consuming interest and pride in making metaphors. "My simile of the hares (my metaphor, rather)," he writes self-consciously in his London Journal, "is pretty well" (76). Throughout his journals, Boswell is often thinking about metaphors and, more often than not, thinking about using them in some way. Seizing on a good idea, he writes, "Upon some occasion when my imagination is warmer and my expression more fluent I may expand it. It is a bud which would have an excellent appearance if fully and beautifully blown" Defence 32). The telling word here is "appearance." For Boswell, the ornamental rather than the explanatory aspect of comparisons predominates.

Some of the felicitous metaphors in his journals are effectively recycled into his Hypochondriack essays. For example, this paragraph from his March 1783 essay, "On Diaries," concludes with three particularly successful ones.

But it is a work of very great labour and difficulty to keep a journal of life, occupied in various pursuits, mingled with concomitant speculations and reflections, in so much, that I do not think it possible to do it unless one has a perculiar talent for abridging. I have tried it in that way, when it has been my good fortune to live in a multiplicity of instructive and entertaining scenes, and I have thought my notes like portable soup, of which a little bit by being dissolved in water will make a good large dish; for their substance by being expanded in words would fill a volume. Sometimes it occurred to me that a man should not live more than he can record, as a farmer should not have a larger crop than he can gather in. And I have regretted that there is no invention for getting an immediate and exact transcript of the mind, like that instrument by which a copy of a letter is at once taken off.²

Many of the metaphors in Boswell's journals never find their way into any other of his writings.³ This absence is significant, for it shows a development in Boswell's attitude toward his work, a growing sense of appropriateness in the use or abandonment of metaphors from his journals. He comes to understand that not everything that is good is fitting. The following passage from Boswell for the Defence, dated 10 April 1772, is excluded from the Life of Johnson. It is as starkly eloquent and heartfelt as almost anything else in Boswell, an authentic poetry of honest feeling, but, as Boswell himself recognized, it belongs more properly in a biography of James Boswell than in the biography of Samuel Johnson.

I dined at General Oglethorpe's.… Mr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith and nobody else were the company. I felt a completion of happiness. I just sat and hugged myself in my own mind. Here I am in London, at the house of General Oglethorpe, who introduced himself to me just because I had distinguished myself; and here is Mr. Johnson whose character is so vast; here is Dr. Goldsmith, sodistinguished in literature. Words cannot describe our feelings. The finer parts are lost, as the down upon a plum; the radiance of light cannot be painted. (Defence 104)

A similar example can be seen in the transformation of the following entry from the journal for 29 May 1783 to its appearance eight years later in the Life of Johnson.

I said he [Bennett Langton] was the reverse of the insect which is first snail and then butterfly, for he was first butterfly then snail. JOHNSON. 'Who said this of him?' BOSWELL. 'I say it now.' JOHNSON. 'It is very well said.' BOSWELL. 'I say very good things sometimes.' (Applause 151)

By the time this passage gets to the Life of Johnson Boswell clarifies the meaning of the metaphor and turns the focus away from himself and onto Johnson:

'He has reversed the Pythagorean discipline, by being first talkative, and then silent. He reverses the course of Nature too: he was first the gay butterfly, and then the creeping worm.' Johnson laughed loud and long at this expansion and illustration of what he himself had told me [my emphasis]. (Life 3: 261)⁴

A comparison of metaphoric passages in the Life of Johnson with those in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) and in Boswell's private journals reveals this subordination of Boswell and his increased attentiveness to the presentation of Johnson. The following two instances of Boswell devising metaphors to describe his rough treatment by social companions clearly illustrate the point:

I shall make no remark on her grace's speech. I indeed felt it as rather too severe; but when I recollected that my punishment was inflicted by so dignified a beauty, I had the kind of consolation which a man would feel who is strangled by a silken cord. (5: 359)

BOSWELL. 'I said to-day to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you tossed me sometimes—I don't care how often, or how high he tosses me, when only friends are present, for then I fall upon soft ground; but I do not like falling on stones, which is the case when enemies are present.—I think this is a pretty good image, Sir.' JOHNSON. 'Sir, it is one of the happiest I have ever heard.' (3: 338)

In the second example, Boswell uses himself to illustrate qualities in Johnson. Johnson's comment underscores his capacity for kindness after severity, the point of the larger passage. In the first instance, there is no illumination of Johnson. The "silken cord" metaphor merely demonstrates Boswell's cleverness.

A similar development from The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides to the Life of Johnson can be seen in the following passages which, as canine metaphors, are strikingly similar, but from one to the other show a significant change in tone and intention.

A ludicrous, yet just image presented itself to my mind, which I expressed to the company. I compared myself to a dog who has got hold of a large piece of meat, and runs away with it to a corner, where he may devour it in peace, without any fear of others taking it away from him. 'In London, Reynolds, Beauclerk, and all of them, are contending who shall enjoy Dr. Johnson's conversation. We are feasting upon it, undisturbed, at Dunvegan.' (5: 215)

He kept it [his book] wrapt up in the tablecloth in his lap during the time of dinner, from an avidity to have one entertainment in readiness when he should have finished another; resembling (if I may use so coarse a simile) a dog who holds a bone in his paws in reserve, while he eats something else which has been thrown to him. (3: 285)

The "ludicrous, yet just image," evident in and perhaps even characteristic of The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, disappears or is transformed in the Life of Johnson. In the passage from the Life of Johnson, Boswell's dog image is inspired by Mrs. Knowles's immediately preceding comment that Johnson "gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it" (3: 284-85). Boswell, it should be noted, acknowledges the danger inherent in such a comparison in his appeal to the readers' indulgence: "if I may use so coarse a simile." The focus of attention in the first passage is on Boswell, the maker of the metaphor; in the second, it is on the tenor of the metaphor, Johnson.

One can see further examples of the transformation of the "ludicrous, yet just image" to the "just and fitting image" if one focuses on the metaphors for Johnson himself that Boswell presents in these two works. The following examples are not exhaustive lists by any means, but they are sufficient to suggest the strategy Boswell employs. To make Johnson live in the reader's mind, Boswell attempts to locate Johnson's virtues and idiosyncrasies in specific pictoral images, objective correlatives, if you will, through the use of metaphor. Two vivid instances are Percy's metaphor for Johnson's conversation, which he compares to a statue from antiquity "where every vein and muscle is distinct and bold" (3: 317), and Tom Tyers's description of Johnson himself as a ghost that will not speak unless first spoken to (3: 307; 5: 73). As these examples illustrate, not all the metaphors for Johnson in the Life of Johnson are Boswell's, but Boswell's incorporation of metaphors by others is part of his strategy to present a textured, metaphoric picture of Johnson.

We learn in the Life of Johnson that Johnson blows out his breath "like a Whale"⁵ (1: 486), laughs "like a rhinoceros" (Tom Davies, 2: 378), tosses and gores people like a bull (2: 66), is like an ox (2: 79), seems a bear (Baretti, 2: 66; Mrs. Boswell, 2: 269 n. 1; Lord Auchinleck, 2: 347-48; 5: 384), and has qualities of a lion (Cuthbert Shaw, 2: 32; William Strahan, 2: 107; 2: 138; 4: 107). We are told that his judgment is "like a mighty gladiator" combating "those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him" (2: 106), and that the force of his wit was such that, like a sharp sword, he was "through your body in an instant" (2: 365).

To particularize Johnson's temperament and intellect, natural phenomena are invoked. Boswell tells us that Johnson is a tempest (3: 273; 3: 275; 3: 290; 3: 385), the wind (1: 486), a cloud (2: 324, 3: 315), the ocean (Orme, 2: 300), a tree (3: 260; 4: 1), a garden (3: 183), a fountain (2: 144; 3: 268), a fire (3: 190), and a star (3: 221). Boswell even suggests that Johnson is one of "two great continents" (2: 80).

The last class of metaphors for Johnson in the Life of Johnson may be termed "literary" in that they are either allusions or refer to Johnson's contributionto belles lettres. Johnson is called "the infant Hercules of toryism (1: 38),⁶ Ajax (4: 109), Goliath (2: 63), Gargantua (3: 255-56), even Socrates (5: 21).⁷ Johnson is "the English Juvenal" (1: 118), the "Colossus of Literature" (4: 158), the great CHAM of literature" (Tobias Smollett, 1: 348, 1: 349 n. 5), "the Caliban of literature" (Gilbert Cowper [sic]⁸, 2: 129), and finally the "MONARCH OF LITERATURE" (3: 82).

These metaphors suggest the immense stature and the intense presence of Johnson. Goldsmith calls him "the big man" (2: 14); the Reverend Dr. Blair calls him "The Giant" (1: 396). Johnson is gigantic, larger than life, one of the elemental forces in the world. How could he not be, not seem so, associated by Boswell as he is with heroes, the great beasts, nature itself?

We also see this association (albeit less full) with nature, great beasts, heroes, and so forth, in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, yet there it is a cruder, less subtle, less assured use of metaphor.

Let it however be observed, that the sayings themselves are generally great; that, though he might be an ordinary composer at times, he was for the most part a Handel. (5: 18)

There was a stratum of common clay under the rock of marble. (5: 20)

He stalked like a giant among the luxuriant thistles and nettles. (5: 55)

Besides, so great a mind as his cannot be moved by inferior objects: an elephant does not run or skip like lesser animals. (5: 111)

Dr. Johnson sat high on the stern like a magnificent Triton. (5: 162)

Boswell runs afoul of some of the faults of metaphor Hugh Blair enumerates in chapter 15 of his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Reversing Boswell's own formulation, one might say that the images are "just, yet ludicrous." Imagining the sixty-four-year-old Johnson sitting in a small boat as a Triton (with the head and trunk of a man and the tail of a fish) is ludicrous enough; "magnificent" Triton makes the case too strongly. An elephant has the size but lacks the dignity of the great beast; furthermore, the image of an elephant skipping imparts a certain hilarity to what is presented as a serious idea. It should be noted, moreover, that the metaphor does not clearly illuminate the idea. The association of giant and thistles (not to mention common clay and marble) works against the intended awe of the image; "luxuriant" thistles is perhaps intentionally humorous, but the humor is misconceived here. The fault of the first metaphor is better illustrated in the context of the whole passage, which praises Johnson but simultaneously qualifies that praise.

The Messiah, played upon the Canterbury organ, is more sublime than when played upon an inferior instrument: but very slight musick will seem grand, when conveyed to the ear through that majestick medium. While therefore Dr. Johnson's sayings are read, let his manner be taken along with them. Let it however be observed, that the sayings themselves are generally great; that, though he might be an ordinary composer at times, he was for the most part a Handel. (5: 18)

By the time Boswell writes the Life of Johnson, his interest has shifted properly from metaphor (the display of wit) and the metaphor-maker (himself) to-Johnson, the biographical subject. It was difficult for the naturally ebullient James Boswell to suppress himself completely, to disappear into his text, but in the Life of Johnson he attempts to foreground his subject and subordinate himself in the interests of presenting Johnson's character.⁹ Boswell's investment is not in using metaphors for their own sake, much less his own sake, but in making Johnson metaphoric. Boswell realizes that it is only through particulars, and metaphors supply those particulars, that Johnson can truly be seen¹⁰: "Only by the minutest detail, by endless particularities which bear vividly all the character of the whole, and, as they spring up from a wonderful depth, give some feeling of that depth—only in such a manner would it have been in some degree possible to give a representation of this remarkable personality; for the spring can be apprehended only while it is flowing."¹¹

One might guess that Boswell was the author of the foregoing quotation, but it comes from Goethe, a writer not normally linked to Boswell. The philosophies of representation through particulars in the Life of Johnson and Dichtung und Wahrheit are surprisingly similar. But for the actualization of pictoral presentation through small detail, one must turn to a writer like William Blake. Blake's aphorism on prudence ("Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity")¹² is a particularly striking example of just the kind of vivid particularization Boswell is after. "Johnson" is a similar abstract concept which needs to be made vivid through detail: his ill-fitting wig, his ravenous appetite, his orange peels, Hodge his cat. All particularize the portrait, color in the abstract outline, finalize "the Flemish picture" (3: 191).

To make Johnson live, Boswell must think metaphorically and present Johnson imagistically, enshroud him in a metaphoric nimbus. Otherwise he, too, would slip away into abstraction, the way Nekayah and Pekuah, Rasselas and Imlac, do. Rasselas, a work Boswell loved, represents the danger of relying wholly on largely abstract speech to present character. The characters in Rasselas are often indistinguishable.¹³ Boswell fights against this propensity in the Life of Johnson. The weapon he uses is the visual detail. "The minute diversities in every thing," he exiaims, "are wonderful" (3: 163).

Boswell, Goethe, and Blake all understand that metaphor is a primary mode of transmitting those "minute particulars." Johnson's metaphors—"a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on its hinder legs" (1: 463); "a great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life" (3: 253); "a vow is a horrible thing, it is a snare for sin" (3: 357)—crystallize Johnson's thought; Boswell's metaphors crystallize Johnson: "I compared him at this time to a warm West-Indian climate, where you have a bright sun, quick vegetation, luxuriant foliage, luscious fruits; but where the same heat sometimes produces thunder, lightning, and earthquakes, in a terrible degree" (3: 299-300). This distinction between metaphor that crystallizes the abstract (and thus particularizes the author of the thought) and metaphor that crystallizes the concrete object or person is crucial. Both, Boswell realizes, are necessary for the presentation and full realization of Johnson in the Life of Johnson. Hence Boswell's insistence on the display of Johnson's conversational imagery (Johnson's metaphors) as well as his insistence on a metaphoric description of Johnson himself (Boswell's and others' metaphors).

Johnson needed to be crystallized metaphorically because the picture of Johnson for most readers, Boswell recognized, was an abstract one. Johnson, associated with the process of clear thought, personified Man Thinking. His thoughts, aspresented in his literary works, defined him. He was the poet of "London," the author of Rasselas, the authoritative critic of the English poets. His contemporaries, James Clifford tells us, termed him "Dictionary Johnson."¹⁴ This association of Johnson with his productions is most strongly seen, perhaps, in the public's identification of Johnson with "The Rambler," the eponymous author of his most famous essays. In The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides Boswell frequently refers to Johnson as "The Rambler."

Not finding a letter here that I expected, I felt a momentary impatience to be at home. Transient clouds darkened my imagination, and in those clouds I saw events from which I shrunk; but a sentence or two of the Rambler's conversation gave me firmness, and I considered that I was upon an expedition for which I had wished for years, and the recollection of which would be a treasure to me for life. (5: 128)

Our bad accommodation here made me uneasy, and almost fretful. Dr. Johnson was calm. I said, he was so from vanity.—Johnson. 'No, sir, it is from philosophy.'—It pleased me to see that the Rambler could practice so well his own lessons. (5: 146)

I awaked at noon, with a severe head-ach [sic]. I was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid of a reproof from Dr. Johnson. I thought it very inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the Rambler. (5: 258)

It is significant that Boswell's practice of substituting the epithet "The Rambler" for Johnson's name largely stops by the time he writes the Life of Johnson. The change represents Boswell's clearer, more particularized, vision of Johnson and results in an improved strategy for presenting him. Boswell has come to understand that to call Johnson "Dictionary" or the "Rambler" is to think of him only in terms of scholarship and knowledge, rationality and wisdom. Consequently, through physical descriptions, particularizing touches, pictorial adverbs appended to conversation, but above all with metaphor, he presents Johnson-the-man as opposed to Johnson-the-mind.

The tendency of the Life of Johnson to be abstract, through its preponderance of abstract discussion, is continually chatlenged by Boswell's insistence that the work be concrete. Bombarding the reader with continual specific visual metaphors for Johnson, exhibiting Johnson's metaphoric abilities in his conversation and writings, prodding, encouraging, and challenging Johnson to be himself metaphoric, and embedding metaphors in the text through the use of interpolated poems, letters, and diary extracts, thwart the possibility of viewing Johnson abstractly. When the conversation in the Life of Johnson is on the verge of being unrelievedly abstract, Boswell will "enliven"¹⁵ the text with metaphor, or, as in the following instance, relieves the reader's tedium with a characteristically Johnsonian device, revealing the metaphor hidden in the cliché, and producing a characteristically Boswellian response, calling forth metaphor in others, in this case Edward Gibbon: "BOSWELL. 'Well now, let us take the common phrase, Placehunters. I thought they had hunted without regard to anything, just as their huntsmen, the Minister, leads, looking only to the prey.' J. [Gibbon]. 'But taking your metaphor, you know that in hunting there are few so desperately keen as to follow without reserve. Some do not choose to leap ditches and hedges and risk their necks, or gallop over steeps, or even to dirty themselves in bog and mire'" (3: 234-35).

When we think back on the Life of Johnson, the image that remains is of the physical Johnson speaking. So vivid is that picture that we remember not just his wit, wisdom, and good sense but often the context of his words. One line ("I refute it thus") can summon up a whole scene: "After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, i refute it thus"' (1: 471). Johnson's passion for empirical truth is here linked to the indelible visual image of his agitated and repeated assault on the small boulder, "till he rebounded from it." This might be termed the dramatic presentation of Johnson through metaphor, in which Johnson himself takes on metaphorical qualities. As William Siebenschuh writes, "Boswell's dramatic images of Johnson are almost always metaphors that automatically link personal qualities and visual images in our minds" (389).

Johnson, on the other hand, is not particularly interested in details and is not naturally metaphoric. A typical and characteristic expression of his position may be found in his "Life of Cowley": "Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness."¹⁶ He tells Boswell, "he always laboured when he said a good thing" (3: 260, 5: 77), by which he sometimes means a striking idea, a comment of luminous clarity which breaks a verbal deadlock, as in the following exchanges:

'I think (said Hicky,) gentility and morality are inseparable.' BOSWELL. 'By no means, Sir. The genteelest characters are often the most immoral. Does not Lord Chesterfield give precepts for uniting wickedness and the graces? A man, indeed, is not genteel when he gets drunk; but most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly: he may cheat at cards genteelly.' Hicky. 'I do not think that is genteel.' BOSWELL. 'Sir, it may not be like a gentleman, but it may be genteel. JOHNSON. 'You are meaning two different things. One means exteriour grace, the other honour. It is certain that a man may be very immoral with exteriour grace.' (2: 340-41)

MISS SEWARD. 'There is one mode of the fear of death, which is certainly absurd; and that is the dread of annihilation, which is only a pleasing sleep without a dream.' JOHNSON.… 'The lady confounds annihilation, which is nothing, with the apprehension of it, which is dreadful. It is in the apprehension of it that the horrour of annihilation consists.' (3: 295-96)

More often, however, a "good thing" means to Johnson a striking phrase, an image, a metaphor, often a function of conversational wit, but never at the expense of the idea: Johnson's definition of patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel" (2: 348), his characterization of Wilkes as "the phoenix of convivial felicity" (3: 183), or his comment on the characters in Evelina: "Such a fine varnish of low politeness!"¹⁷

Johnson thinks grandly and abstractly. He thinks in ideas. "There is no position," he suggests, "however false in its universality, which is not true of some particular man" (3: 42). A poet like Blake, on the other hand, presents a model of a different kind of mind, a mind that seems to think in images. One might posit two poles, one extreme inhabited by highly imagistic works—The Book of Revelation, Traherne's Centuries of Meditations, Smart's "Jubilate Agno," Rimbaud's prose poems "A Season in Hell" and 'The Illuminations," Woolf's The Waves, Marinetti's Futurist manifestoes, Cela's Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son, or the lady Lord Kames knew "who talked for two hours at a time and not a word plain but all figure" (Applause 38)—and at the other end works which embody Johnson's sense of the word "notion," an abstract concept, an image of which cannot be formed in the mind, the "exceeding dry and hard" (3: 173) style of Lord Monboddo, certain works of philosophy. The two poles define a continuum along which writers might be placed according to their inclination toward literal or figurative language, marking their "notional" or metaphoric habits of mind, thinking in ideas or thinking in images. Comparing a few aphorisms from Johnson's conversation in the Life of Johnson and from the "Proverbs of Hell" section of Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" illustrates the difference:

JOHNSON: The happiness of society depends on virtue. (3: 293)

BLAKE: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. (35)

JOHNSON: A man would never undertake great things, could he be amused with small. (3: 242)

BLAKE: The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow. (36)

JOHNSON: All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle. (2: 435)

BLAKE: The cut worm forgives the plow. (35)

For Blake, the ideas are embodied in the image. For Johnson the idea is all. Metaphors are literally an afterthought:

'Mudge's Sermons' are good, but not practical. He grasps more than he can hold; he takes more corn than he can make into meal. (4: 98)

Sir, that is the blundering ceconomy of narrow understanding. It is stopping one hole in a sieve. (3: 300)

They have no object for hope. Their condition cannot be better. It is rowing without a port. (3: 255)

For Johnson, metaphors don't exist independently of their explanations. But whether the metaphor is affixed to an idea as a postscript, as in the examples above, or precedes the conceptual exposition, as in the examples below, it is always clearly in the service of the idea which called it into being:

Their learning is like bread in a besieged town: every man gets a little but no man gets a full meal. (2: 363)

Greek, Sir, is like lace; every man gets as much of it as he can. (4: 23)

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away.¹⁸

These a posteriori explanations also serve to limit and define the termsof the metaphoric comparisons which begin surprisingly, provocatively, even shockingly, but then decline into common sense. Johnson in his use of them is being "striking," though the distance of two hundred years renders them more unusual to our ears than they would have been to his audience. Blake, on the other hand, was not adverse to shocking his readers, not averse to leaving uncircumscribed the terms of his metaphors. The Blakean version of a Johnsonian idea might have' been something like this: "Sorrow is the rust of the Soul."¹⁹

For Blake, the explanatory tags would have been irrelevant; for Johnson, they are the metaphors' raison d'etre. Metaphor is subordinated to the idea which it exemplifies. The idea, conveying the meaning, is of primary importance. In this, Johnson was typical of his century. As 1. A. Richards pointed out, the eighteenth century believed that "figures are a mere embellishment or added beauty and that the plain meaning, the tenor, is what alone really matters."²⁰ Scott George elaborates this idea: "The metaphorical principle was supposed to be, not one of the constitutive modes of language, but something adventitious and ornamental. According to this view, metaphor is simply an added 'trick' of language, the kind of thing one does when he wants to leave the path of ordinary linguistic usage, for some reason or another. It is a device the writer can take or leave alone. No matter which he does, the real idea he is trying to impart remains the same. Metaphor only dresses it up a bit."²¹ Yet within this sense of metaphor as ornament, there are two distinct uses—explanation and embellishment—which Hugh Blair makes clear. "All comparisons whatever may be reduced under two heads, explaining and embellishing. For when a writer likens the object of which he treats to any other thing, it always is or at least always should be, with a view to either make us understand that object more distinctly, or to dress it up and adorn it" (182).

Though both Boswell and Johnson relish metaphors, they approach them in a different way. Boswell sees metaphors primarily as "embellishing"; Johnson primarily as "explaining." Both take delight in being metaphoric, but Boswell's delight is often the exercise of a sensuous imagination whereas Johnson's is more typically a virtuoso athleticism of the mind. Exploiting the potential of metaphors to awaken striking connections in the mind is what Johnson means when he asks that metaphors be used with "propriety." Used in that way, "metaphorical expression … is a great excellence in style" (Life 3: 174). He criticizes Swift because "The rogue never hazards a metaphor."²² As Johnson reads his own words in the journals Boswell shows him, he is delighted when he sees "that his conversation teemed with point and imagery" (3: 260). He takes Lord Loughborough²³ to task for being conversationally dull. "I never heard any thing from him in company that was at all striking" (4: 179). One must be "striking" in company. After all, Johnson reminds us, it is in conversation that we discover what our "real abilities are" (4: 179). Yet constant conversational striving is wearying. Goldsmith, he says, "was not an agreeable companion for he talked always for fame" (3: 247). Burke "is not so agreeable as the variety of his knowledge would otherwise make him, because he talks partly from ostentation" (3: 247). Johnson comments to Boswell that one speaks "Either to instruct and entertain, which is a benevolent motive; or for distinction, which is a selfish motive" (4: 223).

Understanding this caution, Johnson still wants to be "striking," and we see this desire for preeminence throughout the Life of Johnson, which is, among other things, testimony to his success in this regard. That he is within its pages a "striking" figure is unarguable, whether one thinks of Johnson's separation ofthe two fighting dogs by "striking" their heads together (5: 329, 2: 299) or his winning over his antagonists in argument by "striking" them down intellectually or rhetorically. After all, "He could, when he chose it, be the greatest sophist that ever wielded a weapon in the schools of declamation; but he indulged this only in conversation; for he owned he sometimes talked for victory" (5: 17). Johnson employs metaphor often to create an impression, to be intellectually striking. Using metaphor is an aggressive demonstration of his powers; it is part of his conversational arsenal. As he tells Boswell, "A man cannot strike till he has his weapons" (3: 316).

Despite Johnson's theoretical and practical interest in metaphors (clearly illustrated not just by the ample evidence in the Life of Johnson but by the Lives of the Poets and Rasselas as well),²⁴ Johnson's writing has been criticized precisely for a deficiency in this regard. A characteristic example, echoed by many earlier writers, is W. K. Wimsatt's criticism of Johnson as an "exceptionally general and abstract" writer. This characterization has been challenged by a number of writers in the twentieth century who set out to correct the impression "that neoclassical prose and poetry, especially Johnson's, are devoid of imagery in their pursuit of general truths." Cecil Emden's "Dr. Johnson and Imagery," Donald Greene's essay "'Pictures to the Mind': Johnson and Imagery," and O. F. Christie's study Johnson the Essayist are notable examples,²⁵ but we even have the contemporary, albeit idiosyncratic, opinion of Lord Monboddo, who disapproved of "the richness of Johnson's language, and of his frequent use of metaphorical expressions" (3: 174). The case for Johnson as an imagistic prose writer, persuasively argued by Emden, Greene, and Christie, is well summed up in Christie's words: "It is in 'imagery' that Johnson excels, in picturesqueness of phrase, in apt and concentrated and vivid expressions. This is Johnson's predominant quality, in which, as a prose writer, he has never since been surpassed" (57). Even Wimsatt in Philosophic Words admits to this quality in Johnson: "Johnson's assimilation of scientific images to the prevailing abstraction of his style is so thorough, or to put it an opposite way, his realization of the imagery latent in even the most abstract philosophic word is so keen, that a very accurate degree of metaphoric interaction between abstract and ordinarily almost imageless words often occurs in his writing."²⁶

Comprehensive analyses of Johnson's conversation, as separate from his prose and poetry, are rare, however. In addition, Johnson's comment that he "laboured when he said a good thing" (3: 260) has not been taken sufficiently into account. About Johnson's conversation, William Vesterman suggests that "Johnson tends to move the terms of argument from the abstract to the simple, the commonplace, and the concrete, while his literary manner moves from a proposition expressed abstractly to the ramifications and complexities of it without leaving the level of the abstract."²⁷ While it is true that a significant portion of Johnson's conversation is grounded in "the commonplace and the concrete" and is often picturesquely imagistic, a larger portion is not particularly metaphoric at all. The second group of the following quotations is no less memorable or quotable than the first group, but the charm of the quotations does not depend upon metaphor.

Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull.²⁸(1: 444)

Sometimes things may be made darker by definition. (3: 245)

Were it not for imagination, Sir,… a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess. (3: 341)

Taking away her Greek, she was as ignorant as a butterfly. (Johnson & Burney, 62 n. 2)

No, no, always fly at the eagle! down with Mrs. Montagu herself! (Ibid. 71)

In conversation you never get a system. (2: 361)

No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures. (4: 316)

All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it. (3: 291)

Questioning is not the mode of conversation among gentlemen. (2: 472)

Madam, you are here, not for the love of virtue, but the fear of vice. (2: 435)

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. (3: 167)

Johnson is, however, characteristically metaphoric in his conversation when he is describing a man or his work:

Garrick's conversation is gay and grotesque. It is a dish of all sorts, but all good things. There is no solid meat in it: there is a want of sentiment in it. (2: 464)

One species of wit he [Foote] has in an eminent degree, that of escape. You drive him into a corner with both hands; but he's gone, Sir, when you think you have got him—like an animal that jumps over your head. (3: 69)

"Goldsmith was a plant that flowered late" (3: 167); "Huggins has ball without powder, and Warton powder without ball" (4: 7); Gray's Odes are "forced plants raised in a hot-bed" (4: 13). Burke's "stream of mind is perpetual" (2: 450). When asked whether Derrick or Smart is the better poet, Johnson responds, "Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea" (4: 192-93). And of Boswell himself, Johnson, inspired by events before him, brands his companion indelibly:

I teized him with fanciful apprehensions of unhappiness. A moth having fluttered round a candle, and burnt itself, he laid hold of this little incident to admonish me; saying, with a sly look, and in a solemn but quiet tone, "That creature was its own tormentor, and I believe its name was BOSWELL.' (1: 470)

When we had landed, Dr. Johnson said, 'Boswell is now all alive. He is like Antaeus; he gets new vigour whenever he touches the ground.' (5: 309)

The other exceptional instance of "metaphorical exuberance in Johnson's discourse"²⁹ can be found in Mrs. Thrale's diary, Thraliana, where a radically different picture of Johnson is presented from the one we get in the Life of Johnson, and even from what we get in her Anecdotes, five-ninths of which is made of "227 separate fragments, taken from the matrix of the Thraliana, recombined, altered, and mixed with new matter."³⁰ The Johnson presented in Thraliana is aman of indefatigable conversational exuberance, of invigorating metaphoric ebullition. In the course of just the opening pages of her second volume Johnson calls money "Poyson" because "a small Quantity would often produce fatal Effects" (168); terms expense "a kind of Game wherein the Skilful Player catches and keeps what the unskilful suffers to slip out of his Hands" (168); suggests Murphy "displays more knowledge than he really has; like Gamesters who can play for more Money than they are worth" (169); says of Lady Cotton: "one no more thanks her for being sweet than one thanks a Honeycomb; it is her Nature and she cannot help it" (169); characterizes Lady Catherine Wynne "as like sower small beer" (169); compares Lady Macdonald to a dead nettle, for "were she alive She would sting" (169); and likens Mrs. Thrale to a rattlesnake, "for many have felt your Venom, few have escap'd your Attractions, and all the World knows you have the Rattle" (169). Of Peter King's mind he comments, "It is a Mind in which nothing has grown up of itself & where whatever has been transplanted—has degenerated" (169). Of Ralph Plumbe he quips, "Such people are like Cork'd Bottles you may put them into Water, if you will, & under Water, but they get no fuller" (170). A whimpering wife is like a "creaking door" (170). "Life is a Pill which cannot be swallowed without gilding" (180). "Ignorance to a rich man is like fat to a sick Sheep, it only serves to call the Rooks about him" (171). These examples are among many others.

Like Boswell, Mrs. Thrale was enamored of ana, and Thraliana began as a collection of ana—a miscellany of anecdotes, bons mots, witticisms, puns—whatever struck her fancy and memory. "It is many years since Doctor Samuel Johnson advised me to get a little Book and write in it all the little Anecdotes which might come to my Knowledge, all the Observations I might make or hear, all the Verses never likely to be published, and in fine ev'ry thing which struck me at the Time" (1). Thus, in Mrs. Thrale's section on Johnson, we have Johnson concentrated, condensed. Yet what accounts for the tour de force of his metaphors in Thraliana? One possible explanation is that Johnson plays to his audience, that he is metaphoric in mixed company and abstract in the company of men. The evidence in Thraliana above is substantiated in the Life of Johnson, where, as the conversations are predominately more male, they are proportionately less metaphoric.

Well aware of this, Boswell makes every effort in the Life of Johnson to compensate for that part of Johnson's conversation that is unembellished, unadorned by metaphor, as in the following examples. In the first quotation, Boswell revivifies and expands the dead metaphor in Johnson's criticism of Lord Bute. In the second, he picks up a buried metaphor ("calls forth all my powers") in Johnson's comment about Burke and presents its implications, makes it explicit:

'Lord Bute … took down too fast, without building up something new.' BOSWELL. 'Because, Sir, he found a rotten building. The political coach was drawn by a set of bad horses: it was necessary to change them.' JOHNSON. "But he should have changed them one by one." (2: 356)

And once, when Johnson was ill, and unable to exert himself as much as usual without fatigue, Mr. Burke having been mentioned, he said, 'That fellow calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me.' So much was he accustomed to consider conversation as a contest, and such was his notion of Burke as an opponent. (2: 450)

When Johnson is abstract, Boswell forces him into metaphor.

JOHNSON. 'Sir, as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration—judgement, to estimate things at their true value.' I still insisted that admiration was more pleasing than judgement, as love is more pleasing than friendship. The feeling of friendship is like that of being comfortably filled with roast beef; love, like being enlivened with champagne.

JOHNSON. 'No, Sir; admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne; judgement and friendship like being enlivened." (2: 360)

At those times when Johnson is explicitly metaphoric, Boswell is more metaphoric.

A gentleman attacked Garrick for being vain. JOHNSON. 'No wonder, Sir, that he is vain; a man who is perpetually flattered in every mode that can be conceived. So many bellows have blown the fire, that one wonders he is not by this time become a cinder.' BOSWELL. 'And such bellows too. Lord Mansfield with his cheeks like to burst: Lord Chatham like an Aeolus. I have read such notes from them to him, as were enough to turn his head.' JOHNSON. "True. When he who every body else flatters, flatters me, I then am truly happy' (2: 227)

In the following instance Boswell expands Johnson's commonplace ("the tide of life"), not in the actual dialogue but in the text itself:

When I expressed a wish to know more about Mr. Ballow, Johnson said, 'Sir, I have seen him but once these twenty years. The tide of life has driven us different ways.' I was sorry at the time to hear this; but whoever quits the creeks of private connections, and fairly gets into the great ocean of London, will, by imperceptible degrees, unavoidably experience such cessations of acquaintance. (3: 22)

One has the sense that in these rhythmic phrases Boswell's design is not just to make the text metaphoric, but to make himself Johnsonian. Almost from the time he first met Johnson he had been advising himself to "Be Johnson." The progress and extent to which Boswell makes himself "Johnson" in the Life of Johnson is of great thematic importance in coming to terms with the literary structure of the text. The preceding passage thus presents a wonderful dovetailing of Boswell's two motives in the Life of Johnson: through specific metaphor to make Johnson live and through imitation to take on the qualities of his subject and idol.

Boswell is so aware of the need for metaphor in the Life of Johnson that, as even a cursory reading reveals, he fills it with examples from letters, poems, and selections from works by Johnson himself. He amasses instances of metaphors for Johnson by other persons, of others playing his role by setting up a conceit for Johnson to develop, and of still others who take part in expanding Johnson's images. Mrs. Thrale, Reynolds, Scott, Paoli, and, in this final example, Mr. John Spottiswoode the younger, are among those who aggressively or unwittingly goad Johnson into metaphor:

JOHNSON. 'Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of company has repressed. It only puts in motion what has been locked up in frost. But this maybe good, or it may be bad.' SPOTTISWOODE. 'So, Sir, wine is a key which opens a box; but this box may be either full or empty.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, Sir, conversation is the key: wine is a pick lock, which forces open the box and injures it.' (3: 327)

All the examples above suggest a dialectic at work, the mutual creation of metaphor. Part of the delight in reading the Life of Johnson is watching the formation of these collaborative tropes, the synthesis of antithetical minds. A particularly pure example of this can be seen in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides:

Johnson. 'No, Sir; I never heard Burke make a good joke in my life.'—Boswell. 'But, sir, you will allow he is a hawk.'—Dr. Johnson, thinking that I meant this of his joking, said, 'No, sir, he is not the hawk there. He is the beetle in the mire.'—l still adhered to my metaphor,—'But he soars as the hawk.'—Johnson. 'Yes, sir, but he catches nothing.' (5: 213)

It is as if we are watching two comics indulging in a kind of intellectual vaudeville. Rhythmically the interchanges of Boswell and Johnson are indistinguishable from the rhythm of the classic comedy routine. The straight man's exasperation with his comic sidekick is familiar to devotees of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Gleason and Carney, Rowan and Martin, or, as Gordon Turnbull has suggested to me, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

I will not be baited with what and why; what is this, what is that? why is a cow's tail long? why is a fox's tail bushy? …

Why, Sir, you are so good, that I venture to trouble you. Sir, my being so good is no reason why you should be so ill. (3: 268)

The exchanges of Boswell and Johnson often culminate in these exasperated Johnsonian "punchlines." The "Yes, sir," "No, sir," "Why, sir" formulations punctuate the dialogue in exactly the same way as the parenthetical "Mr. Bones" interjection does in the vaudeville skit. It is no coincidence that the author of Waiting for Godot left unfinished at his death a play about Samuel Johnson. Samuel Beckett recognized the comic dialectic at the heart of the Life of Johnson.

This comic dialectic is also the grandest in the book, the one that pits Boswell, the champion of Fielding, passion, and wine, against Johnson, the defender of Richardson, reason, and tea. Though this antithesis is provocative, it is ultimately superficial. Boswell is Johnson's antithesis in only a comic sense. In a more profound sense they are part and parcel of each other. Boswell is not being sentimental when he says that in the presence of Johnson he felt "elevated as if brought into another state of being" (2: 427). And Johnson is not being hyperbolic when he says, "Sir, if I were to lose Boswell, it would be a limb amputated" (4: 82 n. 3).

There are other dialectics at work in the Life of Johnson. William Dowling in Language and Logos in Boswell's Life of Johnson has discussed the competing worlds of the book, its levels of language, text, letters, prayers, talk … and its versions of Johnson, "the idealized and disembodied Johnson whom his readers imagine as a force behind the moral writings and the rough and uncouth Johnson whom they encounter in the actual surroundings of drawing room and tavern."

In Dowling's words: "[the] principle of structure that guides my interpretation … is the principle of antithesis, or antithetical relations among the plurality of worlds contained in the Life. For it is not simply that the Life is a work radically discontinuous in its structure, or that its very discontinuities point unwaveringly to a plurality of worlds rather than a single world identical with its narrator's consciousness, but that these worlds exist in subversive or antagonistic relation to one another.³¹

Yet a dialectical relationship is as potentially synthetic as it is antithetical. In some sense the dialectical structures small and large throughout the Life of Johnson can be seen as the tenors and vehicles of a larger metaphoric relationship. The small specific metaphors throughout the text all point to the large metaphor which is the text. One might say, echoing Max Black, that Boswell and Johnson are the two terms in an "interaction metaphor."³² Boswell "filters and transforms" (289) our view of Johnson just as the presence of Johnson filters and transforms our view of Boswell. The dialectical tension between Johnson and Boswell, between the tendency of the book to be abstract and its insistence on being concrete, is ultimately resolved in the happy synthesis of parts that is the work itself.

The Life of Johnson presents, simultaneously, two great truths, two ways of seeing the world—the world through concrete image and the world through abstract idea. We see Johnson through the lens of Boswell and we see Boswell behind the screen image of Johnson, not alternately but simultaneously. This curious double vision is in part owing to the texture of metaphor in the book, Johnson's metaphors and Boswell's. But more important, it is due to the oxymoron of language itself, its spirit of abstraction and the will to metaphor.

If one stands back from the Life of Johnson, far enough away to be unable to discern the specific metaphors so carefully sewn into the fabric of the text, one half-glimpses the central metaphor of the work, Boswell's undying insight. What the Life of Johnson ultimately teaches us is that life is conversation, that the real vitality of living is not in action or production, but in communication, the social impulse as embodied in the meetings of the Literary Club or the late night chats with Johnson in Bolt Court; that as much as life is conversation, solitude and silence are death. Boswell's innate sense that required him to keep journals, to preserve conversation, to "embalm" himself for posterity, was the life force surging through him. The Life of Johnson asks that we oppose insulation, isolation, the ineffable loneliness of absolute silence with social discourse, intimate talk, the sheer implacability of speech itself.

Addison said, "A noble Metaphor, when it is placed to an Advantage, casts a kind of Glory round it, and darts a Lustre through a whole Sentence."³³ The Life of Johnson is such a noble metaphor and, as such, endures as a work of great art.

Titles and Abbreviations

Unless otherwise noted, references in the text and notes of this volume to James Boswell's manuscripts are cited by the letter and number assigned to them in the Catalogue of the Papers of James Boswell at Yale University, ed. Marion S. Pottle, Claude Colleer Abbott, and Frederick A. Pottle, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993).

Applause: Boswell: The Applause of the Jury, 17821785, ed. Irma S. Lustig and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill and London: Heinemann, 1981).

Boswell in Extremes: Boswell in Extremes, 1776-1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).

Boswell in Holland: Boswell in Holland, 1763-1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill and London: Heinemann, 1952).

Defence: Boswell for the Defence, 1769-1774, ed. William K. Wimsatt Jr. and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959; London: Heinemann, 1960).

Great Biographer. Boswell: The Great Biographer, 1789-1795, ed. Marlies K. Danziger and Frank Brady (New York: McGraw-Hill and London: Heinemann, 1989).

Life: James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Together with Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934-64).

London Journal (LJ): Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950; London: Heinemann, 1951).

New Light on Boswell: New Light on Boswell. Critical and Historical Essays on the Occasion of the Bicentenary of the Life of Johnson, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Ominous Years: Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774-1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill and London: Heinemann, 1963).

Notes

¹ Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783; New York, 1826), 158-59.

²The Hypochondriack: Being the Seventy Essays by the celebrated biographer, James Boswell, appearing in the London Magazine, from November, 1777, to August, 1783, and here first Reprinted, ed. Margery Bailey, 2 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1928), 2: 259.

³ See, for example, Ominous Years 133, 135; Boswell in Extremes 87, 158; Applause 108, 152, 229, 230; Great Biographer 86.

⁴ Because quotations in this essay are primarily from the Life of Johnson, citations to it will be made hereafter without title and by volume and page only, unless clarity demands otherwise. Volume 5 alludes to Boswell's published Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, printed together with the Hill-Powell Life (see Cue Titles).

⁵ "The sentences that follow, about blowing out his breath like a whale, as if he had made the argument of his opponents fly like chaff before the wind, first appear in the third edition." R. W. Chapman, "Boswell's Revises of the Life of Johnson," in Johnson & Boswell Revised by Themselves and Others: Three Essays by David Nichol Smith, R. W. Chapman and L. F. Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 35.

⁶ For Johnson as Hercules see also Life 1: 224, 3: 242, 5: 19.

⁷ Garrick calls him Diogenes (Defence 118).

⁸ John Gilbert Cooper, miscellaneous author.

⁹ See Ralph W. Rader's "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell's Johnson," in Essays in Eighteenth Century Biography, ed. Philip B. Daghlian (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968), 3-42.

¹⁰ William Siebenschuh, "Boswell makes his version of Johnson accessible to our imagination visually by hundreds of brilliant dramatic and descriptive touches; verbally, in the great conversational records; and dramatically, in the famous 'set pieces.'" "Dr. Johnson and Hodge the Cat: Small Moments and Great Pleasures in the Life," in Fresh Reflections on Samuel Johnson: Essays in Criticism, ed. Prem Nath (Troy, N.Y.: Whitston Publishing, 1987), 388.

¹¹The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit], trans. John Oxenford, 2 vols. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1974), 1: 244.

¹² "Proverbs of Hell," in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1970), 35.

¹³Rasselas "is a story that hangs motionless, suspended in debate by characters whose voices are virtually indistinguishable, and who sometimes forget which side of an argument they have taken." Steven Lynn, "Sexual Difference and Johnson's Brain," in Nath, 125.

¹⁴ James L. Clifford, Dictionary Johnson: Samuel Johnson's Middle Years (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979), vii.

¹⁵ See Shenstone's letter of 9 February 1760 to Graves, quoted by Boswell. "I have lately been reading one or two volumes of The Rambler; who, excepting against some few hardnesses in his manner, and the want of more examples to enliven, is one of the most nervous, most perspicuous, most concise, most harmonious prose writers I know" (Life 2: 452-53).

¹⁶Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1: 21.

¹⁷Dr. Johnson & Fanny Burney: Being the Johnsonian Passages From the Works of Mme. D 'Arblay, introduction and notes by Chauncey Brewster Tinker (London: Andrew Melrose, 1912), 32.

¹⁸The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols. 3-5 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), 3: 258.

¹⁹ For this form in Blake compare "Exuberance is Beauty," "Opposition is true Friendship," "Energy is Eternal Delight" (Poetry and Prose of William Blake 37, 41, 34).

²⁰The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936; New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 100.

²¹The Eighteenth Century Philosophy of Metaphor (Nashville: Joint University Libraries, 1945), 6.

²² Note the use of the word hazard here. The use of metaphor implies a risk, yet hints at reward. Herbert Read, English Prose Style (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), 24.

²³ Alexander Wedderburn. The Hill-Powell edition of the Life of Johnson cites Mrs. Piozzi's identification of him in her annotated 1816 edition (4: 179). Boswell identifies him only as "another law-Lord" (4: 178).

²⁴ See W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977). "Johnson's ordinary speech teemed with images, apt, pithy, and surprising. In his critical writings he repeatedly regrets the relative lack of original and forceful imagery in the poetry of his own time, and he uses the term 'image' more frequently and favorably than any other critic before the twentieth century" (285).

²⁵ W. K. Wimsatt, The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), 96; David Passler, Time, Form and Style in Boswell's Life of Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 135 n.; Cecil S. Emden, "Dr. Johnson and Imagery," Review of English Studies, n. s., 1(1950): 23-38; Donald J. Greene, "Pictures to the Mind': Johnson and Imagery," in Johnson, Boswell and Their Circle: Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell in Honour of His Eighty-Fourth Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 137-58; 0. F. Christie, Johnson the Essayist: His Opinions, Morals, and Manners: A Study (1924; New York: Haskell House, 1966).

²⁶Philosophic Words: A Study of Style and Meaning in the Rambler and the Dictionary of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 66.

²⁷The Stylistic Life of Samuel Johnson (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 14.

²⁸ If one accepts Paul Korshin's recent argument ("Johnson's Conversation in Boswell's Life of Johnson," in New Light on Boswell, 174-93) that this is a well-known and well-worn metaphor, a "proverbial statement" (176), we see a characteristic example of the way in which Johnson revivifies old metaphors. Johnson takes the cliché "to milk the bull" and expands its implications, makes it explicit, and reclaims the phrase for poetry. "Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk." That's Johnsonian in the best sense. See Donald Greene's comment, "Johnson often 'freshens' a cliché … by continuing the metaphor" ("'Pictures to the Mind': Johnson and Imagery," 144). William Wimsatt's comment about Johnson's imagery is also apropros here. "Perhaps this is the thing most characteristic of Johnson's 'imagery,' a tendency to reverse dead metaphors, to force them back to their etymological meaning so that they assume a new metaphorical life" (in this case the verb "to milk"; Wimsatt, Prose Style, 66). See also Bate's comment about the imagery in "The Vanity of Human Wishes." "What is typical of Johnson is that his imagination follows up and completes the rather conventional metaphor (torrent of fate) so that now man is pictured as actually rolling down it" (285).

²⁹ Raman Selden, "Deconstructing the Ramblers," in Nath, 279.

³⁰Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi) 1776-1809, ed. Katherine C. Balderston, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), 1: xxiii.

³¹ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 149, xv-xvi.

³² Max Black, "Metaphor," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society n. s., 55 (1955): 285. See also Black's extended discussion of the "interaction metaphor" as distinct from the "substitution view of metaphor" (the idea that "a metaphorical expression is used in place of some equivalent literal expression" [279]), or the "comparison view of metaphor" (the idea that "metaphor consists in the presentation of the underlying analogy of similarity" [283]), and his comment that "substitution-metaphors and comparison-metaphors can be replaced by literal translations …—by sacrificing some of the charm, vivacity, or wit of the original, but with no loss of cognitive content. But interaction-metaphors are not expendable" (292).

³³The Spectator, 3 July 1712, in Addison and Steele: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator, 2d ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1957), 415.