Johnson, who was by now in his early forties, was at work on the Dictionary, carrying it out with a dispatch that has always puzzled the historian of genius. He was in need of money, was often unwell, and was harassed by personal troubles. The periodical writer who “condemns himself,” as he said in the final paper (No. 208),

The first number appeared on Tuesday, March 20, 1750; and thereafter one was published every Saturday and Tuesday until the last day of publication, Saturday, March 14, 1752. All but four of the Ramblers, and parts of three others, were written by Johnson himself.1 The publication was undertaken by John Payne, Joseph Bouquet, and Edward Cave, and Johnson was paid two guineas for each paper. Though the publishers advertised the early numbers widely, the sale (at 2d a copy) proved modest-never exceeding 500 copies per number, according to Arthur Murphy. Johnson's friends feared the tone was too sombre for wide appeal.2 But even during the first printing, the Rambler enjoyed more success than the small circulation indicates. It was a common practice for eighteenthcentury periodicals to draw on each other; and many of them quickly began to swell their pages by reprinting entire numbers or selections from particular numbers of the Ramblers.3 Afterward, it was to go through ten numbered printings before Johnson died; and long before then, the Rambler, as much as the Dictionary, had permanently established his reputation.

The title of the Rambler, as Boswell said, seems singularly inappropriate to the moral elevation of so many of the essays. Arthur Murphy wondered whether it had been “suggested by the Wanderer; a poem which he mentions with the warmest praise in the Life of Savage.” Murphy was probably right. Years after Johnson had written the Rambler he told Oliver Edwards that he considered himself something of a “straggler” -“I may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo without being missed here or observed there”; and there was an important part of Johnson that was sympathetically identified with writers, like Savage, who lacked opportunities and hung on the fringes of literary as well as other society. From Johnson himself we have only the account of the title that he later gave to Sir Joshua Reynolds: “I was at a loss how to name it. I sat down at night upon my bedside, and resolved that I would not go to sleep till I had fixed its title. The Rambler seemed the best that occurred, and I took it.”

His belief that he had at least partly succeeded (expressed in the last paper) remained with him as the years passed. Whatever else he wrote, he preserved a special fondness for the Rambler. Few writers have been less given to expressing selfapprobation. Yet we recall the well-known remark recorded in Samuel Rogers's Table-Talk: “My other works are wine and water; but my Rambler is pure wine.”

The sense of dedication expressed in the prayer on beginning the Rambler is revealed in another way altogether typical of Johnson. This was his decision to keep the authorship secret-to keep himself, in fact, as completely out of the picture as possible. To begin with, he did not wish to disrupt the series with the unsolicited contributions that the periodical writer was expected to accept.4 But he had a deeper, less obvious reason. No moralist has been so acutely aware of the inevitable disparity between a writer's moral precepts and the temptations and unpredictable accidents, the divided feelings and mixed motives, of the writer's life as an individual. The subject recurs constantly in Johnson's writing, and especially throughout the dark middle years of his life. True enough, his general tendency is to defend the frailty of human nature, in this as in other ways:

(Rambler 14)

But “reasonable with regard to others,” said Mrs. Thrale, Johnson “had formed vain hopes of performing impossibilities himself.” At no point in his life was he pleased with the result, least of all in the years that preceded and followed the Rambler. And he was only too aware of the way in which he appeared to others as well as to himself. It was less than six years before that Johnson, invited to dinner by Edward Cave after the Life of Savage was published, had eaten behind a screen because of the shabbiness of his clothes. Though some of the finest observations in the Rambler were to be concerned with the value of good nature and good humour, he once despondently told Henry Thrale that he had never even “sought to please till past thirty years old, considering the matter as hopeless.” As he prepared to begin the Rambler, he deeply wished the purity and soundness of the work to be free from the prejudices the reader might bring to it if he knew the author. Early in the series (Cave wrote to Richardson) and before the name of the writer was known, “Mr. Doddington sent a letter directed to the Rambler, inviting him to his house, when he should be disposed to enlarge his acquaintance.” Johnson, plainly a little embarrassed, did not accept the invitation, and “in a subsequent number a kind of excuse was made, with an hint that a good writer might not appear to advantage in conversation.”5 Cave here refers to No. 14, in which occurs the passage quoted above. Needless to say, Johnson's hope to keep the authorship secret was doomed from the start. David Garrick and others who were closely acquainted with Johnson recognized his style and mode of thought, and within a short time the authorship of the Rambler was widely known.

Johnson's universality as a moralist stands in some contrast to the form that he took as readiest to hand-the eighteenth-century periodical essay. In the Rambler, his first substantial effort in prose, he was especially on his guard against mere topicality, admitting, in the last paper: “I have never complied with temporary curiosity, nor enabled my readers to discuss the topick of the day.” Johnson's range of reference and quotation (discussed below under “General Annotation”) is itself a reminder that we are dealing with a writer who disdained the “local and temporary”: hardly more than a twentieth of the allusions are to eighteenth-century writers. Naturally, since Johnson is writing periodical essays, at least some of what Coleridge would call the “exterior” characteristics of the form are present. One is the frequent, and not always felicitous, use of the “letter to the editor” (63 of the Ramblers are written thus, in whole or in part). We often think of the Rambler as consisting in the main of direct moral essays. This is a tribute to the tone and dedicated purpose of these essays; for fewer than half (92) can be strictly counted as such,6 though at least a dozen of the “portraits” could be added7 since in these cases the portrait, instead of comprising the essay, is contained within it as a part. Again, 31 of the Ramblers may be classified as literary criticism;8 and for the insertion of such essays in a periodical series (however different Johnson's own critical premises), Addison was of course the great model. Finally, we should remember that the Rambler essays, appearing in periodical form, would differ from most of the traditional moral essays simply because a deadline had to be met and because the length of each number was roughly fixed (the Ramblers average about 1,450 words-ranging from 1,200 to 1,700 in the first 20 numbers, and gradually becoming shorter until, in the last 20, they average about 1,200 words). Still, the true literary ancestry of the Rambler is overlooked, and our conception of it trivialized, if we concentrate merely on the periodical essay as it descended from Addison and Steele, or even if we confine ourselves too parochially to the eighteenth century itself. In one respect the nineteenth century was perfectly right when it contrasted the Rambler so unfavourably with the Tatler and the Spectator. It took Addison's Spectator as the prototype of one special form (the periodical essay) and then, finding the Rambler so much more serious in tone and weighty in thought, judged Johnson's work as failing to fulfill the special ideals and opportunities of that particular form. A more accurate statement is simply that he transcended that form.

If we are to use an historical framework, it should be fairly capacious and should extend from the Greek aphorists and the book of Ecclesiastes, through the Renaissance humanists and writers of exempla, and continue through the English seventeenth-century religious writers. Montaigne and Bacon, in particular, are the progenitors of the more straightforward moral essays in the Rambler. Even if we leave these essays aside and consider only the narrative sketches and portraits, we could as justifiably cite an eighteenth-century influence other than the periodical essay itself-William Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), which Johnson had first read at Oxford, “expecting to find it a dull book ... and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion.”

Already, in Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), we can see two strains combining, though with a good deal of tension. There is the satiric reductionism that unites him with Mandeville (and, for that matter, with Swift), further sharpened by the impatience and exasperation that we always find stirring in him. Even mere phrases in the Rambler and in the Adventurer exemplify it. Thus, of scientific research: “He who is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.” The whole frantic zeal of writing, scholarship, criticism, and reviewing is suddenly reduced in a phrase like the “epidemical conspiracy for the destruction of paper.” And there is the modest man in Rambler 188, whose good-natured silence gives pleasure because his companions conclude that it results “not from inability to speak but willingness to hear.” The tart, fidgety phrases are distilled from an unillusioned awareness of the frightening strength and sleepless craving of human egotism. In the Vanity of Human Wishes we have the hunger of the human ego presented in an almost savagely panoramic form, from the scramble for riches, for reputation, for advancement, for power (the “fawning” niece, “hot for a legacy”; the rising statesman whose predecessor's “door/Pours in the morning worshipper no more”), to the rise and fall of entire nations. But at the same time this whole protest and all it distills are ultimately assimilated and morally directed as the Vanity of Human Wishes begins to follow the procedure of Law's Serious Call.9 One by one, Law (following in turn the prototype of Ecclesiastes) had touched on the ambitions and hungers of the human heart and imagination, disclosing how each new possession, each new step of achievement, soon ceases to fill the heart, which can ultimately find stability and purpose only through religion.

If we dwell for a moment on Johnson's powerful, condensed poem, it is because the great moral writing of the following decade, which begins with the Rambler and ends with Rasselas, may be described as the prose explication of the Vanity of Human Wishes. (The difference is that here, in the prose writing, the religious answer is in general implied rather than stated.) One of the fascinations of Johnson is that he seemed to possess all the positive equipment for satire though he was himself ultimately incapable of writing it: a completely undeluded view of human nature; strong aggressive instinctsabove all, a capacity for anger (not the cold anger of Swift, but, as in Juvenal, something heady, impetuous, even potentially violent); and, above all, an ingenious gift for inventing grotesque or ludicrous remarks and scenes, thrown off by an imagination that is often most fertile and concrete when it is stung by exasperation. Yet Johnson is not really a satirist, and in fact, as Mrs. Thrale said, he had “an aversion” to general satire. We could put it more strongly and say that he had a hatred and fear of satire-a fear that led him to be notoriously unfair in his critical estimate of Swift. We do not explain this by saying only that he feared to release the satiric impulse because it was too strong. We come closer to an explanation if we say that Johnson was unable merely to observe, but had to participate and share; and that his own participation sets a bar to satire. The result, time and again in all of his moral writing, is that we have anger, protest, even ridicule, always in the process of turning into something else. This creates a distinctive form of writing, from the Rambler through the Adventurer and Idler to Rasselas, that we might describe as “satire manqué” or “satire foiled.” Though we are here thinking specifically of the portraits, which make up so large a proportion of the Ramblers, the same spirit also applies to the direct moral essays. There too the subjects have to do with the self-defeating “snares” (to use the word in the Vanity of Human Wishes) that human beings are always creating for themselves and others in the short time that they have on the planet-the hungry prevalence of envy; the ceaseless jostle for place, for approval, for riches, for position; the fanciful hope for relief through change of place; and so on. From the portraits a single instance can be cited-the letter (No. 73) supposedly written by that stock figure in satire, the legacy hunter-an account quickly etched with a savage directness we might expect from Swift or Mandeville (but never Addison). As we read of this familysitting about and waiting for the death of three elderly, wealthy aunts, we also recall Johnson's affinity with Juvenal, the “angry” satirist. The story is both grotesque and ugly. But the anger and exasperation, before the short sketch is finished, are suffused by a sadness anda final charity that completely transform them. The aging nephew, who has waited so long and has consoled himself that “all are mortal,” finds that he himself is altogether “mortal”—that he has become the helpless victim of time and habit. Having for so long become “corrupted with an inveterate disease of wishing,” he is now “accustomed to give the future full power” over his mind, and to “start away from the scene before me to some expected enjoyment.”

If the direct moral essays carry us back to the seventeenthcentury sermon, to Jeremy Taylor, and especially to the essays of Montaigne and Bacon, the mention of William Law's Serious Call reminds us of the “Theophrastan character” of the seventeenth century, and, once again, of its classical sources (to which we should add the historical portraits by Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch, especially in the Moralia).10 And whether we are thinking either of the moral essays or of the sketches and portraits, we are also led back—as we suggested above—to Ecclesiastes, both directly and also through the long tradition of Christian apologetics.

We are dealing, in short, with a mode of writing that in its amplitude and essentialism cannot be dated, except in crudely obvious stylistic ways. The best of the Rambler is timeless. It is timeless because it is ultimately concerned with the fundamental questions of living; because its theme, like that of most of the greatest moral literature, is the purification of the motives that create most of the evil and unhappiness of the world; and because Johnson's honesty to experience, his immediacy in turning every thought to what can be “put to use”—to what can be brought directly to the aid of “helpless man”—is here as concentrated as in anything else he ever wrote.

From such a writer as Johnson, the range of what is quoted or cited is naturally of interest. For he wrote rapidly, was far from eager to search out quotations, and, as we said, often quoted from memory. Accordingly, from the citation in a work so richly studded with references as the Rambler, we get a rough sense not only of the range of his reading but also of what, from his reading, was uppermost in his mind. Of the 669 quotations or literary allusions in the Rambler (omitting translations, except in No. 143, which discusses the subject of poetic imitation), well over half—406 (60 per cent)—are from Greek (104) or classical Latin (302) authors. Horace is cited more than any other classical writer (103), followed by Juvenal (37), by the Greek biographers, aphorists, historians, and philosophers, considered as a group (35), and then by Ovid (29), Virgil (27), and Homer (25). It is of some interest that the Bible, whatever the explanation, is cited only seven times, while the citations from the Greek Anthology total 15. Of the 251 quotations and references to works since the beginning of the Renaissance, only 37 are to eighteenth-century writers.2

One of the most interesting facts about the references and quotations, especially since it has not been stressed before, is that so many of them are to writers from the beginning of the Renaissance to the close of the seventeenth century. A mere list of the names of some of them at once brushes aside the naïve notion, still strangely common, that, apart from classical antiquity and except for Shakespeare and Milton, the year 1660 marks something of a boundary to Johnson's “sensibility” and knowledge. References solely to continental writers before the eighteenth century (58) include Bellarmine, Camerarius, Cardano, Castiglione, Cornaro, Cujacius, Descartes, Erasmus, Fabricius, Gassendi, Grotius, Julius Libri, Lipsius, Politian, Pontanus, Quevedo, Sannazaro, the Scaligers, and Thuanus. Johnson's interest in such writers covered the entire span of his adult life. At the age of twenty-five he was planning to bring out the Latin poems of Politian; and in his last years, according to John Nichols, he “often talked” of dictating a translation of Thuanus. His constant concern to discover what “can be put to use,” to find and to share with others the means by which a thing can be achieved, led him sympathetically to the “Revival of Learning” in almost all of its aspects. One of Johnson's projected works, after all, was a

This deep sympathetic kinship with human effort, this close interest in the earlier stages of any achievement, is one of the principal characteristics of Johnson's mind. We should also recognize his close emotional affinity with English writing—especially English religious and prudential prose—before 1700. Johnson, as Whitehead noticed a generation ago, is “still of the essence of the seventeenth century.” Even if we leave aside the 63 references to Milton in the critical numbers devoted to him and the 14 citations of Dryden, there remain another 79 citations of English writers from the Renaissance to 1700—a number over twice that of eighteenth-century writers. They include men as diverse as Bacon, Chillingworth, Harrington, Hooker, Locke, Gervase Markham, and Jeremy Taylor. As we continue to encounter his use of such writers, we recall the suggestion of Sir John Hawkins, who knew Johnson's interests so well, that he “owed his excellence as a writer to the divines and others of the last century.” Certainly in Johnson, as in no other moralist of the eighteenth century, the spirit of the period that begins with the “Revival of Learning in Europe” and continues till the later seventeenth century is still contained in solution; and the citations in the Rambler provide a convincing illustration.

Though Boswell evidently did not know it, Johnson was merely recollecting what he had already done some thirty years earlier. The late David Nichol Smith pointed out long ago that Rambler 1 was lightly revised when the stock of this first number “was exhausted and a reprint was required.”4 James Elphinston's edition, brought out with Johnson's approval in Edinburgh between 1750 and 1752, while the original numbers were still appearing in London, seems to contain no authorial changes.5 But it has been recognized ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century that on two separate occasions Johnson revised the Rambler extensively: once, for the collected edition in duodecimo of 17526 and a second time for the fourth edition of 1756.7 Alexander Chalmers, to be sure, exaggerates when, in speaking of these two major revisions of the Rambler, he says that “Dr. Johnson almost rewrote the Rambler after the first folio edition”;8 but with the changes numbering in the thousands, there can be no denying that Johnson had indeed done a considerable amount of “putting out, adding, or correcting.” “Nam ad scribendum impetu plerumque trahimur,” writes Sir Thomas More to Martin Dorp; “intermissa quum retractamus, certum adhibetur iuditium.”9 Johnson would doubtless have agreed.

While the fourth was by no means the last edition to appear in Johnson's lifetime,1 after 1756 the text remains substantially unchanged: Johnson, one supposes, had grown away from it.2 The ninth edition of 1779, as Professor Bradford shows, corrects “a number of misprints that had crept into the text by a process of slow corruption,”3 and even introduces a handful of emendations, but, so far as is now known, none of these changes was authorial. For practical purposes, in short, the text had become stabilized. This is why all those familiar with its history (Alexander Chalmers in the early nineteenth century, David Nichol Smith and Curtis B. Bradford in the twentieth) maintain that the revised text of 1756 must “be the basis of any critical edition of the Rambler.”4 The fourth edition of 1756, rather than the Folio, is therefore the copy-text, and earlier readings are recorded in the textual notes. The choice of this edition makes for very substantial convenience in the treatment of a complicated textual history and reduces the risk of editorial error.

It is clear that this fourth edition is no nearer to Johnson's manuscript in accidentals than is the Folio, but since Johnson did not read proof for the Folio, the fourth edition is fully as much the edition approved by Johnson. The Folio is full of interest because, being printed from his manuscript, it does in general preserve Johnson's spellings; but it is carelessly printed, and the printer normalized somewhat spasmodically as he proceeded. One can therefore never identify a particular spelling as certainly derived from the manuscript, however probable such identification may be. The Folio prints quite impartially either “critic” or “critick,” “enquiry” or “inquiry,” “gaiety” or “gayety,” “persuade” or “perswade,” “persue” or “pursue,” “splendor” or “splendour.” One is at first tempted to see such readings as the normalizations of different compositors, and perhaps many of them are; indeed, almost any anomaly selected at random can be argued as a printer's normalization, or his error. But the theory of compositorial choice is not a reliable guide: we know that Johnson himself differed often in his spellings (in his manuscript of the Vanity of Human Wishes, written in 1748, he spelled “Gothic,” “monastic,” “pacific,” and “philosophic” with “—ic,” but he wrote “—ick” for “frolick,” “heroick,” and “musick”); he prescribed spellings in his Dictionary that he frequently neglected in his own practice; hence, printer's normalization or error cannot always be differentiated from printer's careful following of copy. Thus, in No. 7, on a single page appear the three readings “pursue,” “persuit,” and “persue”; the Dictionary has “pursuit” only, but Johnson wrote “persue” at least as often, even after 1755; the compositors of the Folio seem to have set the word “persue” (and its inflected forms) about twice as often as they set “pursue.” Similarly, in No. 20, on the inner forme of the first sheet the word “politicks” faces “critic”; in No. 21 on a single page the words are “topics” and “havock”; in No. 23 on the inner forme the word “publick” faces “public”; in No. 206 “topic” and “tropicks” are on adjacent lines; in No. 208 “topic” and “publick” are on the same page; in No. 189 “dependence” and “dependance” are on adjacent lines.

It may also be noted that, so far as we know, Johnson did not object to his printer's normalizations. Although Boswell insisted on the Saxon “k,” Johnson seems not to have cared; he may well have assumed that the printer would regularize his own inconsistent but not especially bad spelling. The method in this old-spelling edition is therefore to keep the spelling of the copy-text whenever that spelling is permissible by the standards of Johnson and his printers.

Johnson's revisions, as already noted, are exceedingly numerous, particularly in the moral essays, and while interested readers may wish to study for themselves Professor Bradford's detailed report on Johnson's revisions, a word or two about their general characteristics may be in order here. The important point to make about them is surely that, except in very rare instances, they do not reflect significant changes in the argument. Revising only a comparatively short time after the original composition,5 Johnson evidently saw no need to think the Ramblers through again, and so confined himself almost exclusively to touching up the style: thus, he eliminated unnecessary adjectives and intensives, broke up excessively long sentences, honed and polished the phrasing. Almost always he pruned rather than elaborated, “put out” rather than “added”; and when he substituted one word for another, more often than not he did it to avoid repetition, employing what we now call “elegant variation.” It was therefore not so much a matter of rewriting as of correcting “faults which originally he would not have made had he not been too close to his composition or too much hurried.”6 Almost 30 years later, as Professor F. W. Hilles has shown recently, Johnson was to do precisely the same thing in belatedly revising the proof-sheets of his Life of Pope.7 By then it had become the habit of a lifetime.

In following the fourth, the earliest edition to contain Johnson's final revisions, we may therefore claim to be showing a proper regard for the author's wishes. At the same time, it is of the utmost interest to observe the stages through which the text has passed to become what it now is, to get a glimpse of Johnson at work. For this the textual notes should prove helpful. The fourth edition has been collated with the original numbers, with Elphinston's Edinburgh edition, and with the collected duodecimo edition of 1752; the textual notes record all variant readings in the earlier editions that may be considered of the slightest consequence.8 Obvious misprints have either been ignored (when they appear in editions before the fourth) or silently corrected (when in the copy-text). Only on those rare occasions when the typographical error or the corruption might conceivably give rise to a misunderstanding has it been noted. The word “other” in the phrase “other triflers” at the end of the ninth paragraph of Rambler 2, for example, is misprinted in the fourth edition as “ther,” and this slip evidently caused later printers to reproduce the phrase as “the triflers,” a reading found in editions subsequent to 1756. Misprints of this sort have been recorded.

Variations in punctuation among the editions have been recorded only if they affect the meaning. The punctuation of the copy-text is more ample than that found in either the Folio or the second edition,9 but because of our uncertainty about Johnson's own preference and the sheer physical difficulties of recording every change, however minute, only those variants that affect the structure have been noted. Spelling variations in the earlier editions are recorded in the textual notes whenever it seems possible that Johnson passed a spelling different from that found in the 1756 text. Since he did not read proof for the Edinburgh edition, the marked idiosyncrasies of the Edinburgh printer have been disregarded.1 Nor, in view of Johnson's ready acquiescence in house styles,2 would much purpose have been served by noting the usage of printers concerning a number of words about whose spelling considerable uncertainty prevailed.3

Finally, no attempt has been made to eliminate the many spelling inconsistencies within the copy-text: “public” /“publick,” “reflection” /“reflexion,” “splendor” /“splendour,” and others. While, according to the plan of the entire edition, capitalization, possessives, and typography (in such matters as digraphs or diphthongs, italics, and the like) are modernized, in all other respects the text of the 1756 edition has been reproduced with as much fidelity as possible. The table of contents, omitted in 1756, is reprinted from the edition of 1752. The identification of quotations both in the mottoes and in the text, customarily limited by Johnson to the author's name (often abbreviated), has been completed silently. The headings have been printed in a standard, normalized form.

Textual notes are marked with the letters a to z either following a single word or at the end of a phrase or passage. A single word which in the copy-text replaces an earlier reading has not been repeated in the textual note; for phrases, enough of the phrase or passage has been repeated (generally the first and the last word with ellipses) to prevent confusion. When a single word has been added in editions later than the Folio, om.. for “omitted” is used in the textual notes to indicate the word's absence in the earlier editions—a convention which, though it may offend against logic, is sanctioned by custom.4 When a word or phrase has been dropped from editions later than the Folio, the last word common to both earlier and later readings is given, followed by the omitted word or words. Punctuation at the end of variants, if identical with that of the copy-text, has not been printed.

The following sigla are used:

In addition to the variant readings of the editions just specified, numerous stop-press corrections have been found in the Folio numbers. These have been recorded in the textual notes whenever the correction is more than the restoration of a dropped letter or similar misprint: no doubt others exist, but those recorded have been derived from the comparison of certain numbers in three to ten copies. Any copy may preserve one or more of the uncorrected readings, and variants may occur at random in any particular bound set.

The sigla employed to identify such variants are Fa and Fb. (The same sigla have been used for the two distinct printings of Number 1.) Fa has been assigned to what appears to be the uncorrected reading; only a few of these editorial decisions are in any degree subjective. The importance of these variants is not great, though a few are more than routine: they include Johnson's correction of “rural” to “bucolic” to avoid a repetitive sound (No. 37); his correction of “accuracy” to “efficacy” (No. 5); one or two slight recastings of the structure; and simple corrections of typographic error, perhaps made with no authorial intervention.