“DR. JOHNSON & COMPANY”

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 139, 26 May 1928, Page 9

“DR. JOHNSON & COMPANY”

By

Robert Lynd.

(Hodder and Stoughton.) Here is a lively little book to which collectors of Johnsoniana will give an eager welcome. He is a courageous man who writes a book about Johnson at this time of day, and yet the author has managed to bring the whole circle again before the mind’s eye in a fresh and entertaining way. It is in Johnson as a talker, of course, that the writer is chiefly interested. “More than any Englishman who has ever lived,” he says, “he raised a life of talk to the level of a life of action.” The man himself is described to us. His idlenenss, his broken resolves, his self-condemnation, are all there, and again we sit as silent listeners in that brilliant circle which included Reynolds, Burke. Garrick, and Goldsmith, while the great lexicographer thunders forth his views In measured and stately prose, uttered always in accordance with the classical principle that “Art is nature to advantage dressed. What oft was thought, but ne’er so

well expressed.” If the book does nothing else, it will send its readers back again to Boswell, who is described as the un. conscious writer of his own biography as well as that of the ponderous dictionary-maker.