Volume 46, Number 5 · March 18, 1999
The Doctor's Prescription
By Derek Jarrett
Samuel Johnson: The Life of an Author
by Lawrence Lipking
Harvard University Press, 372 pp., $35.00
Samuel Johnson
by W. Jackson Bate
Counterpoint, 646 pp., $25.00 (paper)
'Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history,' wrote Macaulay in 1831. 'His vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood.'
Review, 5753 words
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