Although Boswell ascribed this article in the Gentleman’s Magazine to Johnson on internal evidence (Life, I.150), G. B. Hill noted, “This piece is certainly not by Johnson. It contains more than one ungrammatical passage” (n. 1). Hill was reacting to the silliness of this piece and its appropriately low style.1 The genre of jokes or facetiae about scholars had, however, a well-established popularity among the best scholars and grammarians, and Johnson certainly knew it well. He encountered it, for example, in Bacon’s Apophthegms, from sources of these very brief stories about scholars in Erasmus, and directly in Erasmus’s sources, which include pseudonymous authors such as Hierocles, Aesop, and Philogelus (Laughter-Lover). Johnson reflects their enduring theme, for example, in Rambler 137: “Nothing has so much exposed men of learning to contempt and ridicule, as their ignorance of things which are known to all but themselves” (Yale, IV.362–63). Johnson also provided evidence that he knew the particular stories in Hierocles presented here. He once chided Boswell’s “bustling,” for example, by mentioning Hierocles’s story of the pedant who rode his horse on board ship (Life, V.307–8). In his preface to Shakespeare he recalls the story of the pedant who exhibited a stone as a sample of the house he wished to sell (Yale, VII.62).

The contribution to the Gentleman’s Magazine presented herewith comprises twenty-one of the twenty-eight “absent-minded professor” jokes published in Greek, with a Latin translation, by Marquard Freher with the title Hieroclis Philosophi Facetiae de priscorum studiosorum dictis et factis ridiculis (Ladenburg, 1605). Freher’s collection was reprinted as an appendix to Meric Casaubon’s edition of the Commentary by the neo-Platonist philosopher Hierocles of Alexandria (fl. c. 430) on the Carmina Aurea of Pythagoras (1654), a work owned by Johnson (Greene, pp. 67–68).2 The stories were also included in Peter Needham’s edition of the Commentary (1709; pp. 460–66). In later editions, and in some manuscripts, they are often combined with some 240 similar stories attributed to the pseudonymous Philagros (Country-Loving, or Country Bumpkin). There is a learned edition of the whole collection by Alfred Eberhard (Berlin, 1869). Although the stories are silly, they have attracted serious scholarly attention. Among the many commentators on these works down through the years are some of Johnson’s humanist idols, Pontanus and Isaac Vossius, for example. The text presented here is from the Gentleman’s Magazine for September 1741 (XI.477–79), but we have profited from a privately printed version, edited and introduced by O M Brack, Jr. (1999).