Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BLAIR WORDEN - A BOOK OF FRIENDSHIP

point in history. 13 Johnson, the devout layman, did not share Brown’s worldly preoccupations, but suicide similarly haunted his imagination. There was an unintended symbolism in the fact that the drawing-room at the Mansion, Taylor’s house in Ashbourne, contained both a portrait of Johnson by Reynolds and a portrayal of the death of Seneca; 14 Christianity and the legacies of heathen Rome offered a precarious balance in Enlightenment England, an era of carefully cultivated intellectual and cultural ambiguity. Taylor was later inspired to write a letter on a future state to rescue Johnson from self-destructive thoughts; in 1787, three years after Johnson’s death, he revised it for publication. It was a piously Whig publication, replete with a dedication to the duke of Devonshire to whom, on his own death, Taylor bequeathed a precious Tory memento from Dr Johnson, his medal from Queen Anne on being touched for the King’s Evil as a young boy. 15 A Derbyshire baronet, Sir Brooke Boothby, a devotee of Rousseau, provided a prefatory poem extolling the putatively philanthropic powers of Taylor’s prose, containing lines rapturously celebrating friendship: 16 ‘But oh! not here the blest effect would end,/ No; let thy purpose to the world extend:/ Flash bright conviction on a doubting age,/ And leave to latest times thy well-wrought page;/ Teach weaker minds the mighty truths to scan,/Not more the Friend of JOHNSON, than of man.’ Bathos and pathos were closely if unconsciously aligned here, a tragi-comic balance which persisted throughout the six decades of friendship shared by Johnson and Taylor. The slightly younger pupil had learned from his literary master, and the opening paragraph of Taylor’s letter clearly echoes the apologetic purpose of the wedding sermon of some thirty years earlier: ‘A very superficial inquiry into the nature of the human mind will convince us, that the fear of death is the great disturber of human quiet; and therefore, of all speculations, none can be so interesting to the wise and to the good, as such as will discover to us the most efficacious remedies against the restless horrors of those most terrifying expectations, and afford us the best and most certain lights to cheer the gloomy passage through the valley of the shadow of death.’

13 Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: empire, commerce, crisis (London, 2024). 14 Taylor, Life of Taylor , p. 141. 15 Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings , iii. 62; Taylor, Life of John Taylor , p. 76. 16 On Boothby’s Rousseauism, see Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings , vi. 126-27.

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