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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
Dr Samuel Johnson, despite his dying exactly a century before this I Dixie Chair was founded, is linked with it individually and in three ways. The first is, that the only time he came to Cambridge he came to see Dr Richard Farmer of Emmanuel College – one of the two or three most celebrated Masters of Emmanuel College. When Johnson came to Cambridge, Farmer was not yet Master, being junior proctor that year, which was March 1765. He and Johnson had a common interest in Shakespeare, and Johnson used Farmer as his informant for some of the lives of the poets. They also had a common quality of both being lovers of London club conversation; and both totally careless of their appearance, so that at times observers could mistake each of them for being half-crazed; and both finding it impossible to get up in the morning.
2 Best account of his visit by Stubbings, F. H. in The Emmanuel College Magazine, xlviii (1965–1966), 64–71; cfGoogle Scholar. New Monthly Magazine, x (1818), 385ffGoogle Scholar.
3 Mandell Creighton, 1884–91; Henry Melvill Gwatkin, 1891—1916; James Pounder Whitney, 1919–39; Norman Sykes, 1944–58; Owen Chadwick, 1958–68; Gordon Rupp, 1968–77; Christopher Brooke, 1977—.
4 Wain, John, Samuel Johnson, 2nd edn, London 1980, 303Google Scholar.
5 Lives of the Poets, ed. Waugh, A., London 1896, i. 113–14Google Scholar.
6 Boswell, , Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, Pottle, F. A. and Bennett, C. H. (eds.), New York, 1936, 41Google Scholar.
7 Boswell, Life, ii. 548, has the well-known utterance: ‘I would be a Papist if I could. I have fear enough; but an obstinate rationality prevents me. I shall never be a Papist, unless on the near approach of death, of which I have a very great terrour.’
For Johnson’s religion in general, the key treatments are by Quinlan, M. J., Samuel Johnson; a layman’s religion, Madison 1964Google Scholar; and Pierce, C. E., The Religious Life of Samuel Johnson, London 1983Google Scholar.
Johnson wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine a short life of Father Paolo Sarpi and, in his penurious search for guineas, wondered whether to publish a new translation of Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent. Hawkins, Sir John, in his Life of Johnson, London 1787, 162Google Scholar, attributed ‘the tincture of enthusiasm’ about Johnson’s religion, in part to the fervour of his imagination, in part to the writings of ‘à Kempis and the ascetics’. But see also Hawkins, p. 543: ‘He was for some time pleased’ with The Imitation of Christ... ‘but at length laid it aside, saying that the main design of it was to promote monastic piety and inculcate ecclesiastical obedience’.
Johnson once cited to Hawkins a saying of Howell that to make a man a complete Christian, he must have ‘the works of a Papist, the words of a Puritan, and the faith of a Protestant’. This was James Howell, Epistolae Ho-elianae, 1645, and following.
8 Hawkins, Sir John, Life of Dr Samuel Johnson, London 1787, 593Google Scholar; Prayers and Meditations, 8 September 1783 (Works, Yale edn, i. 364–5).
9 It was Neville Figgis who gave the young Norman Sykes his first stimulus to church history. Cf. also Tucker, M. G., John Neville Figgis, London 1950Google Scholar. For the election see especially the Diary of T. R. Glover (in the library of St John’s College Cambridge) for the relevant dates of April-May 1919; Guardian, 1919, 422. The electors were the vice-chancellor (Shipley of Christ’s); Stanton; A.V. Laurence; Armitage Robinson; A. W. Ward; J. B. Bury; T. B. Strong (Oxford); M. R. James; the Master of Emmanuel ex officio. Laurence was away. T. R. Glover was a candidate but withdrew before the election. Armitage Robinson, Shipley and M. R. James were for Coulton. A. W. Ward led the movement for Whitney. The world of education was happy, if we judge by The Times Educational Supplement, 1918–19, 207.
10 For Whitney, R. E. Balfour’s memoir as a preface to the History of the Reformation, new edn, London 1940Google Scholar: the inaugural lecture of Sykes, Norman, The Study of Ecclesiastical History, Cambridge 1945Google Scholar; Balfour, R. E. in Cambridge Review, lxi (1939–1940), 12–13Google Scholar. The Times, 19 and 22 June 1939.
11 But see Boswell, ii. 642: ‘Though Johnson loved a presbyterian the least of all, this did not prevent him having a long and uninterrupted social connexion with the Reverend Dr. James Fordyce, who, since his death, hath [sic] gratefully celebrated him in a warm strain of devotional composition.’ For Fordyce see D.N.B.; a well-known Presbyterian preacher at Monkwell Street in London 1760–82, he was the first writer after Johnson’s death to treat Johnson’s religion seriously (in Addresses to the Deity, 1785; Address VT on the Death of Dr Samuel Johnson).
12 For Gwatkin, apart from D.N.B. and its references and the memoir by T. R. Glover prefixed to Gwatkin’s collection of sermons, The Sacrifice of Thankfulness, Edinburgh 1917Google Scholar, there is a mass of material now catalogued, in the library of Emmanuel College; including a collection of obituary notices and some unpublished reminiscences; Cambridge Review, (1916–1917), xxxviii, 117–130Google Scholar. His inaugural lecture does not mention Seeley by name but is clearly directed against his idea of what history ought to be (The Meaning of Ecclesiastical History, Cambridge 1891Google Scholar). He competed for the chair in 1884; and the resulting correspondence with Creighton, when Creighton won, is inspiring. When he entered his name as a candidate, he evidently welcomed the new professorship for reasons which were not solely those of history. For he wrote to Emery Barnes: ‘It (the professorship) will not be, as many professorships used to be - a mere phrase for giving it to the first Trinity man who likes to stand.’ Gwatkin was of St John’s College. Studies of Arianism was originally of 1882; 2nd edn, Cambridge 1900; Early Church History to AD 313, originally of 1909; 2nd edn, London 1912Google Scholar; the Guardian and the Athenaeum were not pleased with the book.
13 Hawkins, Life of Johnson, 577.
14 Originally 1677; volume 11 was Ecclesiastici, or the History of the lives, acts, deaths and writings of the most eminent Fathers of the Church. The fourth edition, corrected, was of 1716. We have earlier seen Sir John Hawkins (p. 162) attribute (doubtless erroneously) the ‘tincture of enthusiasm’ in Johnson’s religion in part to the perusal of St Augustine and others among the Fathers. Hawkins (p. 542) said that Johnson was ‘competently skilled in the writings of the Fathers, yet was he more conversant with those of the great English churchmen’ from Hooker onwards. Johnson’s own writings show large acquaintance with the English, very little with the Fathers. His affection for Richard Hooker and Izaak Walton is clear. For the use of Cave, see Prayers and Meditations in Works, Yale edition, i. 409. Johnson owned copies of Augustine, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Origen, Athanasius, Eusebius, Ephraem Syrus, Basil, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyril of Jerusalem, Jerome and Dionysius the Areopagite. He also owned Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, Paris 1624Google Scholar.
15 Gwatkin was a disciple of Frederick Denison Maurice, but more radical than his master. He was a very strong Protestant. He accepted Weingarten’s theory that the sources for early Egyptian monasticism were fabricated. ‘There were many people’, wrote his friend and reverer T. R. Glover, ‘for whom his Protestantism was too outspoken.’ He had a special aversion for St Cyprian and for Cardinal Newman.