Dr. Johnson and friends …

… ‘The Club’ Review: ‘An Assembly of Good Fellows’ - WSJ. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Johnson has been accused of speaking less for conversation than for victory. This alone might seem off-putting, were it not that nearly everything he is recorded to have said was so dazzlingly intelligent. He said that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” yet he also said that “the only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.” His put-downs, in person or in print, were definitive. After praising “Paradise Lost,” in his “Lives of the Poets,” he added that “none ever wished it longer than it is.” Of a minor and now forgotten poet named George Stepney, he concluded, in a remark perhaps even more useful when contemplating many of the swollen reputations of our day, “one cannot always find the reason for which the world has sometimes conspired to squander praise.” Politically conservative, he said that “most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.”