Thus even so simple a document as Johnson’s will occasioned searchings of heart, a result that some strive heroically or pathetically to avoid. “I again desire that all things may be composed with peace honour and honesty,” wrote Dorothy Eve, of Canterbury, in 1691. A merchant, James Clegg, whose will was proved the same year as Johnson’s, declared that he made his testament “to explain my last will for the distribution of what shall result to be my property and to me belonging at the time of my decease, in such manner that I hope not to embroil those persons who will have the pleasure of surviving me.” Wills that stir the passions and sting the memory are indeed of frequent occurrence. Wills that satisfy every friend must surely be few.
To what an extent the remembrance of friends may be carried is illustrated by a will made a few years after Johnson’s death. While Johnson bequeathed books to less than a score of friends, Martha Shorte, in a list which must long have engaged her thoughts, bequeaths mementoes to more than a hundred beneficiaries. “The small trifle,” she says in one place, “is only to denote that all my kind neighbours lived in my memory.” In some cases it may be surmised, or at least the suspicion will cross the mind, that her friends were not unaware of her testamentary tendencies. To one, for instance, she gives “two mahogany stools that she used to like,” to another, “an old inlaid Chinese cabinet that she always admired,” to another the “yew-tree card-table which she admired.” But there is a danger in lavish remembrance: for if one be omitted where many are comprised, the sting is so much the more sharp.
Johnson left the residue of his estate to his negro servant, Francis Barber. Even this raised dissent. Sir John Hawkins, says Boswell, seemed not a little angry at this bequest, and muttered a caveat against ostentatious bounty to negroes. Barber had once been a slave, but had received the gift of liberty under his master’s will. The latter years of his liberty Johnson hoped to provide for.
Simpson Strachan, the merchant whose will was buried for fear of the enemy, may illustrate the case of Barber. “My will and my intention is that my negro man ... in virtue of his faithful services be made free of all slavery whatever, and I do hereby order and ordain and request my executors to pay all the expenses attending his freedom from my estate, and that they give him the sum of £330 currency to his own use and behoof as a reward for his fidelity and attachment to me.” Most would agree with Boswell that a faithful servant, in lieu of near relations, is peculiarly entitled to enjoy
“A little gold that’s sure each week, That comes not from his living kind, But from a dead man in his grave, Who cannot change his mind.”
Nor was it his master’s fault if Barber made so ill a use of his money as Hawkins affirms.
Provision for old servants is still a frequent, even an outstanding, feature of wills, accompanied often by graceful expressions of gratitude. Perhaps it has always been so. The Rt. Hon. Humphry Morice, of the Privy Council, was writing a codicil by way of instruction to his executors, shortly before the year of Johnson’s death. He makes us feel vividly what Johnson must have owed to his faithful servant: “My diamond shoe and knee buckles I mean to include in my wearing apparel left to Richard Deale, also gold-headed canes, as his attention and fidelity increases every day, and sorry I am to say he is the only servant I ever had who seemed sensible of good treatment and did not behave ungratefully.”
To the ordinary reader Dr. Johnson’s other bequests appear thoughtful too, though Hawkins considered them ill-proportioned and ill-calculated. To the Rev. Mr. Rogers, of Berkeley, near Frome, he gave £100, “requesting him to apply the same towards the maintenance of Elizabeth Herne, a lunatick”; to his god-children, “the son and daughter of Mauritius Lowe, painter, each of them £100 of my stock in the 3 per cent. consolidated annuities, to be applied and disposed of by and at the discretion of my executors, in the education or settlement in the world of them my said legatees”; and to “Mr. Sastres, the Italian master, the sum of £5, to be laid out in books of piety for his own use.” But uppermost in his mind, it would seem, was the debt of gratitude he owed, for his father’s sake, to Innys the bookseller; for him he remembered in his will made in the immediate apprehension of death, while most of his bequests occurred in the codicil executed on the following day.
One of the strangest characteristics of man is that, in the face of death, he can without a qualm speak bitter words and cherish hard feelings, a characteristic which sometimes distinguishes or disfigures wills. Dr. Johnson’s will is free from any such taint. Yet he retained a certain roughness of language to the last. “Treat thy nurses and servants sweetly, and as it becomes an obliged and a necessitous person,” says Jeremy Taylor. Boswell speaks of Johnson’s “uncommon kindness to his servants.” But, asked one morning how he liked a new attendant who had sat up with him, Johnson replied with a touch of his old humorous self: “Not at all, Sir; the fellow’s an idiot; he is as awkward as a turnspit when first put into the wheel, and as sleepy as a dormouse.”
When Burke heard how Langton could convict the Doctor of nothing worse than a roughness of speech or manner, he said: “It is well if, when a man comes to die, he has nothing heavier upon his conscience than having been a little rough in conversation.” It does seem that Johnson was not unworthy of some such eulogium in spite of certain charges raised against him, and in spite of his fear of death. It is grateful to consider that Johnson’s words may be applicable to himself: “The better a man is, the more afraid he is of death, having a clearer view of infinite purity.” Boswell says that the word polluted in Johnson’s will may to some convey an impression of more than ordinary contamination, but mentions that the same word is used in the will of Dr. Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, who was purity itself. A man would indeed be ignorant of human nature, not to mention the phraseology of wills, if he were to attach importance to the words polluted with many sins; he would indeed be blind to the “view of infinite purity.” It may be of interest therefore to compare the will of Dr. Sanderson with Dr. Johnson’s in this respect. “First, I commend my soul into the hands of Almighty God, as of a faithful Creator, which I humbly beseech Him mercifully to accept, looking upon it, not as it is in itself—infinitely polluted with sin—but as it is redeemed and purged with the precious blood of His only beloved Son, and my most sweet Saviour Jesus Christ.”