JOHNSON AND THE “45”

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1638, 7 May 1925, Page 7

JOHNSON AND THE “45”

■Sir Charles Russell has put forth a pamphlet, which (says the Morning Post) will be a startling surprise to those who think of that essential Englishman, Samuel Johnson, as a large and cumbrous person, riagued by constant ill-health that comes of a sedentary life. He revives Choker’s suggestion that the famous -mhn of letters, the Socrates of the coffee-houses and literary conventicles, ready to confute anybody and everybody in an improvised argument, was actually “out" in the Jacobite rising of 1745. Sir Charles Russell, working out Broker's hint in detail, makes out a very good case for his belief that Johnson actually fought, in the Forty-Five. In the first place, we know nothing at all about Johnson’s life in the years 174546, and this spell of obscurity can be explained on the assumption that he found it expedient to disappear from the public gaze, while the hand of authority was hard on the rebels and all who sympathised with them. Secondly, there can be no doubt that Johnson was possessed not only of personal courage, but also of the fighting man’s temperament. He had learnt to box, as Mrs Piozzi tells us. from an uncle, who kept the ring at Smithfield—then, as now, a place where the noble art is constantly cultivated—and Boswell gives a number of instances in which he actually resorted to the gentle laying on of hands when attacked or insulted, or effectively expressed his willingness to do so. Thirdly, he came from a country that was strongly pro-Stuart, where they actually hunted a fox in a red uniform with plaid-clad faith, and his own Jacobite sympathies were often very strongly expressed. Indeed, it seems unlikely that this born fighte o would have sat with arms folded while his rightful Prince was marching in triumph through the Midlands, his own homeland.

Fourthly, when he passed through the Highlands, in Boswell’s company, the fact that he looked upon many scenes of the age-long struggle “with -lack-lustre eye,” may be proof, as Hazlitt thought, that they were already familiar to him, or associated in his mind with interests that he durst not explain. Fifthly and finally, how came he to have the musket, sword and belt, which Boswell saw hanging in his closet? It is all a fascinating speculation, and it is possible to believe it without losing any of our affectionate admiration for one of the greatest of Englishmen