Had the Gough Square house been memorable only as the birthplace of the Dictionary, it would have been enough to have given it immortality; for, as Carlyle says (and Carlyle once went reverently over these rooms, and wrote a record of his visit), “Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight, and successful method, it may be called the best of all dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great, solid, square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete; you judge that a true builder did it.” But, still while the Dictionary was going on, shortly after the publication of The Vanity of Human Wishes, which yielded him £15, Garrick produced his tragedy of Irene at Drury Lane. It was a failure on the stage; the audience shrieked “Murder! murder!” when the bowstring was placed round the heroine’s neck; but Johnson, feeling that a dramatic author should be more gaily dressed than it was his wont to appear, sat in a box on the first night in a scarlet waistcoat, with rich gold lace, and a gold-laced hat, and accepted his failure with unruffled calmness; and Dodsley paid him £100 for the right to publish the play as a book.
Still while he was in the thick of the Dictionary, he set himself, in 1750, to start The Rambler, and you may take it that he was sitting in his Gough Square study one night when he wrote that prayer before publishing his first number:—
“Almighty God, the giver of all good things, without whose help all labour is ineffectual, and without whose grace all wisdom is folly; grant, I beseech Thee, that in this undertaking Thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, but that I may promote Thy glory, and the salvation of myself and others. Grant this, O Lord, for the sake of Thy Son Jesus Christ. Amen.”
SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS
His first number was printed on the 20th March 1750, and he issued it every Saturday and Tuesday afterwards for two years. “This,” as Boswell has it, “is a strong confirmation of the truth of a remark of his, that ‘a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it’; for, notwithstanding his constitutional indolence, his depression of spirits, and his labour in carrying on his Dictionary, he answered the stated calls of the press twice a week, from the stores of his mind, during all that time; having received no assistance, except four billets in No. 10, by Miss Mulso, now Mrs. Chapone; No. 30, by Miss Catherine Talbot; No. 97, by Mr. Samuel Richardson; and Nos. 44 and 100, by Mrs. Elizabeth Carter.” He was so pressed for time that he wrote a good many of the essays in such haste that he had no opportunity even to read them through again before they were printed. One thing that particularly gratified Johnson in connection with the Rambler was that his wife said to him, after she had read a few numbers, “I thought very well of you before, but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this.”
Gough Square is hallowed, too, with sadder memories of Johnson’s wife, for she died here in March 1752; and to the end of his days he never forgot her or ceased to sorrow for her. She was a plain-featured woman some years older than himself, but he always spoke of her with a wonderful tenderness and love, and as of one who had been beautiful to look upon. How deeply he felt her loss is evident not merely from some of his sayings, but from his letters, and from those Prayers and Meditations, in which he set down his most intimate thoughts and feelings. After his death, this written prayer was found among his papers, dated in the month after her passing:—
“April 26th, 1752, being after 12 at night of the 25th.
“O Lord! Governor of heaven and earth, in whose hands are embodied and departed spirits, if Thou hast ordained the souls of the dead to minister to the living, and appointed my departed wife to have care of me, grant that I may enjoy the good effects of her attention and ministration, whether exercised by appearance, impulses, dreams, or in any other manner agreeable to Thy government. Forgive my presumption, enlighten my ignorance, and however meaner agents are employed, grant me the blessed influences of Thy Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”