Zachary Pearce, the Bishop of Rochester, died in 1774 at the age of eighty-four. He left in the care of his chaplain John Derby a biblical commentary and notes. Derby brought these to the press, along with a few of Pearce’s fugitive pieces, in two large quarto volumes in 1777. Johnson alludes to Derby in conversation with Boswell in Oxford on 20 March 1776: “The chaplain of a late Bishop, whom I was to assist in writing some memoirs of his Lordship, could tell me scarcely anything” (Life, II.446). Johnson’s assistance with the “memoirs” resulted in the preliminary “Life of the Author,” which consists in large part of quotations from Pearce’s own account of his life, “a short narrative written by himself in November, 1769” (Commentary on the Four Evangelists, I.ii). Johnson, however, provides a total of thirty-nine paragraphs, only a few of which consist of his quotations from other sources. L. F. Powell printed seven sentences of Johnson’s part in an appendix to his revision of Hill’s edition of the Life (III.489–90), but the whole of Johnson’s substantial contribution to this work has never appeared in any collection of his works. It comprises observations on Pearce’s writings, including his two essays for the Spectator and his refutation of the deist Thomas Woolston (Commentary, I.v–vi; xxxiii); and remarks on scholarly editing, praising his subject’s editions of Cicero’s De Oratore and Longinus On the Sublime, and endorsing his vindication of the standard text “when Dr. Bentley published his imaginary emendations of the Paradise Lost” (Commentary, I.iii–v, x, xxxiii).

In this life of the author, Johnson also makes several characteristic biographical remarks. Reporting the success of Pearce’s marriage, for example, he says, “It is always pleasing to be told, that men who deserve well of the publick, are happy in domestick life” (Commentary, I.vii). With more philosophic gravity, he remarks on the controversy surrounding Pearce’s resignation of his preferments late in life: “A wish for degradation and diminution is a passion of which so few examples are found, that it was perhaps at first hardly thought serious, and afterwards hardly thought sane and sober. It was to act against the common course of human practice, to contend for the loss of things, which all the rest of the world is contending to gain. Of a resolution so uncommon, curiosity was naturally diligent to enquire the motive” (Commentary, I.xxxvi–xxxvii). Johnson decides that “the heart cannot be completely known” (Commentary, I.xxxvii), but a poem left by the bishop and expressing his wish for retirement probably expresses his truest feeling (Commentary, I.xxxvii–xxxviii).

With some reluctance, we have consigned the Life of Pearce to Contributions to the Works of Others for these reasons: as Johnson’s paragraphs are interspersed, the work is best read with the parts that are not Johnson’s and make up more than half the work; the work is written, like the dedication and the advertisement, as a collaboration with John Derby; even though Johnson alone composed thirty-nine paragraphs, he was certainly receiving information from Derby and putting it down without acknowledgment. He was, we believe, exaggerating when he told Boswell that Derby told him “scarcely anything.” We wish also to note a curious moment showing some disassociation from the text on Johnson’s part. When he mentions the fact that Pearce was buried next to his wife in the churchyard at Bromley in Kent, Johnson does not recall or record that this is also the final resting place of his own wife Elizabeth, a place that he never visited. The Life of Pearce, thus, seems to us a composite work, like the Vinerian Lectures that Johnson wrote in collaboration with Robert Chambers, and like them it will find a home outside the Yale Edition.

Herewith we include only Johnson’s dedication to the king for Pearce’s Commentary. We know Johnson wrote it in its entirety; obviously it stands on its own; and Chapman called it Johnson’s best dedication (Hazen, p. 156). Johnson’s professional connection to Pearce began unhappily, when he noticed that Pearce was a supporter of John Johnson, whose proposed translation of the History of the Council of Trent forced Johnson’s own translation from the field (see Yale, XIX.3–5). Johnson acknowledged receiving some etymologies for his Dictionary from an anonymous source later identified as Pearce (Life, I.292). In the Dictionary (s.v. realty), Johnson quotes one of Pearce’s many notes on Milton included in Thomas Newton’s edition of Paradise Lost (1749). He referred directly to Pearce’s Review of the Text of the Twelve Books of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1733) in his proposals for William Lauder’s partially forged edition of Grotius’s Adamus Exsul (1747; see p. 143 above). It is clear from the Life of Pearce that Johnson was also acquainted with several of Pearce’s other works, but there is no evidence of a personal connection.