University of Virginia Library

J. D. Fleeman: A Memoir
by
David Fairer

Very recently David Fleeman came upon a work by Samuel Johnson that had eluded all previous scholars and is recorded in no bibliographies. It is a forty-line fragment 'On the Character and Duty of an Academick' published for the first and only time as an appendix to John Moir's Hospitality. A Discourse (London, 1793), and its words are appropriate for the man whose work this volume celebrates: "An academick," says Johnson, "is a man supported at the public cost, and dignified with public honours, that he may attain and impart wisdom. He is maintained by the public, that he may study at leisure; he is dignified with honours, that he may teach with weight. The great duty therefore of an academick is diligence of inquiry, and liberality of communication." If, as Johnson avers, public honours impose a duty, then David Fleeman's long-laboured duties, his "diligence of inquiry, and liberality of communication" to eighteenth-century scholars worldwide, demand to be publicly honoured. It is Johnson's implicit blessing on this volume, and perhaps a personal acknowledgement of someone who has worked with absolute devotion in his cause.

As tutor and fellow of Johnson's own college since 1965, and its librarian from 1969 to 1984, David Fleeman has been in every way at the heart of Johnsonian studies. In 1984 he brought scholars from around the world to Pembroke for the bicentenary conference, and for so many students of the eighteenth century he is a mine of expertise on Johnson and his circle. In private communication, whether by letter, telephone, or bubbling talk, he delights in the circulation of knowledge, offering new leads to anyone with a scholarly problem, putting one individual in touch with another, or supplying just the obscure fact or detail that will open up someone's work in exciting ways. He is generous to a fault with his time, and has always been conscious of the duty that scholars owe to each other and to the field of endeavour they share. It is a Johnsonian conviction. To quote the fragment again: "The great effect of society is, that by uniting multitudes in one general co-operation, it distributes to different orders of the community the several labours and occupations of life." Knowledge is held in common, and truth can best

advance through the pooling of expertise. In his 1984 "Valediction," delivered to the departing conference-goers, he spoke in similar tones on behalf of the Johnsonian community, skillfully surveying the various projects in hand and setting out some of the tasks that lay ahead. Typically he looked forward as well as back, to new techniques as well as to familiar problems, and he urged those present to have a mind to the tercentenary in 2009 when the work of the intervening years would once again be held to account: "Much remains to be done," he exhorted; "Johnsonians cannot stand idle if we are to make a respectable showing at our next meeting."

Fleeman's contribution over more than thirty years to this enterprise deserves celebration: he is someone for whom being brought to book is no throwaway metaphor, but a due responsibility. In his published editions and studies of Johnson's writings, soon to be crowned by his massive bibliography, Fleeman has considerably increased our understanding of the great man, but not by any commanding theory or dramatic reinterpretation (these are for him a dubious combination of metaphysics and egotism). Instead, what we are offered is a scrupulous attention to the workings of Johnson's mind and the particular struggles by which his conceptions made their way into print and out to their readership. The picture is always a dynamic one: Fleeman's Johnson is not a man of monumental certainties, but a mind at work, facing practical difficulties and encountering challenges at every stage, whether in the progress of a subscription or a set of proofs. Bibliography for Fleeman never loses touch with biography. In a paper on Johnsonian Bibliography delivered to the Oxford Bibliographical Society on 17 February 1994 (as yet unpublished) he acknowledged the "biographical bias" that close attention to an author's text will inevitably give, and commented about his own project that "it was this which led me to think that an account of the emergence of Johnson's thoughts into the form in which we now meet them, might serve instead of yet another 'critical biography.'" In his work on bibliography and textual criticism Fleeman has never lost sight of Johnson's thoughts, or his principles either, and it is interesting to discover that he thinks of his body of Johnsonian scholarship in terms of an alternative intellectual biography.

I

John David Fleeman is a Yorkshireman and a "Johnson" on his mother's side. He was born at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor in the old East Riding on 19 July 1932, the son of Mary (née Johnson) and Joseph Fleeman.

"Fleeman," derived from Flamanc/Flamand, or Fleming, is a scarce name, but several graveyards in the Isle of Axeholme, the district beyond the southern tip of the riding around the villages of Snaith and Rawcliffe, house generations of Fleemans who farmed the lands in the area. It was his grandfather, John William (1866-1936), who broke away from the agricultural life and by dint of self-education eventually became an Inspector in the West Riding Constabulary, and his son Joseph (1906-1983) took up schoolteaching as a career. When David Fleeman was very young the family moved to Laxton, an isolated hamlet on the flood plain of the River Ouse near the point where it becomes the tidal Humber, and here his father was the village schoolmaster and a lay preacher at the small church of St. Peter. The young Fleeman's most formative childhood experiences were as a choirboy in this church, chanting the Psalms and hearing intoned the words of Cranmer's prayerbook and the King James Bible. Later, when he read Johnson for the first time, he felt an immediate kinship with his solemn tones and measured phrases, as though he were hearing a familiar congenial voice.

In 1943 he entered Pocklington School (founded 1514), a public (i.e., "private") boarding school fifteen miles north of Laxton, where he was taught English by a man who during the First World War had taught his father before him. His methods were those that had implanted English Literature into many generations of Pocklingtonians: the pupils memorised poems, and they were made to stand up and recite them. In history, dates were learned by rote; in divinity, psalms and parables. But in this ritual of recollection and recital Fleeman excelled. He enjoyed the stirring rhythms of Bridges and Hopkins, or Tennyson's Light Brigade, and he won a prize for declaiming a passage from Shakespeare's Richard the Second. It is no surprise that a boy who relished an author's memorability, and who had an instinctive feel for pattern and cadence, would find Dr. Johnson a powerful writer.

In fact, Fleeman was hooked on Johnson before he read Boswell. What first stirred him was a copy of the selected essays, and especially the solemnity of the last Idler, number 103: "Though the Idler and his readers have contracted no close friendship they are perhaps both unwilling to part. There are few things not purely evil, of which we can say, without some emotion of uneasiness, 'this is the last.'" Dark and sober words, and not perhaps those that an adolescent might appreciate—at least not those Rasselas meets—but they struck home "like a sledgehammer." Johnson's horror of the last was one Johnsonian's beginning.

In 1951 Fleeman went up to St. Andrews University, that venerable seat of learning on the Fife coast in Scotland, and in his freshman year studied French and German, Modern History, Philosophy, and English.

At first it seemed that modern languages were to be his speciality (th??? previous year he had applied to read French and German at St. John College Oxford, which did not then admit for English). He attende??? lectures in French on Corneille and Voltaire, and in German on Goeth and Lessing. The yearning Romanticism of Lamartine and others disgusted him (in the eighteenth-century sense), and it was Balzac, Maupassant and Zola who hit his taste. In English he came under the in fluence of Richard Logan, a lecturer who combined a contempt fo??? romanticism with a conviction that Horace was in fact an Englishman Logan's view of vernacular English Literature as an intellectually unsatisfactory offshoot of the classical tradition was never unequivocall shared by Fleeman, but it is no surprise that the Age of Pope and John son became his great love. In general he relished wit, intellect, sociarealism, and responded to doubt, difficulty, struggle ("we are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle"). He developed a conviction that would stay with him for life: that nothing easy is worth doing. Slick methods and glib answers were anathema. Already Johnson was providing the scenario for a life that embraced effort and sought firm evidence and sure results.

Having graduated in 1956 with a First in English Language and Lit erature (he won the class medal), Fleeman confronted what for many of his generation was certainly a struggle—National Service. He joined the Twentieth Foot of the Lancashire Fusiliers at Bury, and after basic training entered the Royal Army Education Corps as a Sergeant. It was a life built on order and hierarchy. He felt happily at home with army discipline, teaching everything from the writing of reports to the reading of ordnance survey maps (something he had learned at school), and he developed a relish for Pythagorean geometry. With the confidence of youth he committed himself to attainable knowledge and satisfying conclusions. Having instructed the officers on how to write clearly, he was attached to the Lifeguards at Windsor, teaching recruits to the elite Household Cavalry. During this time, in 1957, he married Isabella Macaskill from the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, whom he had known since his undergraduate days in St. Regulus' Hall, and together they moved into married quarters in Windsor.

Leaving the army the following year, he returned to Yorkshire and taught as a schoolmaster for a year at Selby, from where he applied to do graduate work at Oxford. Somewhat unconventionally he was met by Graham Midgeley, English tutor of St. Edmund Hall (a notoriously "sporty" college), at the South Door of York Minster, and the interview was conducted in Betty's tearooms. (To a fellow Yorkshireman this does

not seem incongruous: Betty's to this day has more formality than many an Oxford common room.) "Do you row?" he was asked. "I'm afraid not," was the reply. "Good!" said a relieved Midgeley. And so he gained his place at Oxford. It was All Fools Day 1959.

There was little doubt that he would settle on some Johnsonian research topic, but the choice was not easy. The immediate possibility was, predictably, a study of how Johnson's style was coloured by the Prayerbook and the Authorized Version of the Bible (the first Yale volume containing the prayers and meditations had appeared the previous year), and before coming up to Oxford Fleeman began compiling an index of phrases. But his supervisor for the first two terms, Mary Lascelles, persuaded him that the research would lead to no surprising conclusion, and so for a time his thoughts turned to a wider stylistic essay on Johnson. Things seemed to come into focus again when he found in Blackwell's second hand department a first edition copy of The Adventurer and decided that he would like to edit it. This discovery coincided with his introduction to the delights of bibliography through attending Herbert Davis's printing class, part of the course work for any probationer B. Litt. student. The fascinating detective work of investigating printing practices, type, paper etc., offered a combination of difficulty, fact, and physical detail to which he was by nature responsive, and it made a powerful impression.

It was at this moment that the discipline of bibliography came into conjunction with the powerful moral presence of Johnson, and it was a decisive combination. He was sent to talk to L. F. Powell, who was then preparing the Yale second volume, and Fleeman proudly marched in with his Adventurer under his arm. "An interesting project," remarked the great man, "but what will you do when you've finished it? Why work for three years on Hawkesworth, when Johnson can offer you a life sentence? You'd better work on him." Intriguingly Powell led him to the 1825 "Oxford" edition of Johnson's works (published by Pickering, Talboys and Wheeler): "This is still the standard edition; but nobody knows how it came to be as it is. Go and have a look at the text and make some comparisons." Fleeman found that in chapter one of Rasselas alone fifty commas had been added, and it was clear that this edition, which dominated traditional stylistic analyses of the "ponderous" Johnson, offered a thoroughly corrupt text in which some three quarters of the punctuation is unwarranted. So he began work comparing it with earlier editions, charting variant readings and listing errors in the text, until a family tree of Johnson's complete works began to take shape. It also revealed to him how significantly punctuation can affect the way

we hear the words of an author, and the revelation of lifting away those thick overlays from Johnson's sentences forever sharpened his eagerness to recover exactly what Johnson wrote.

Settled onto a Johnsonian topic, and now with L. F. Powell as his supervisor, Fleeman became a protégé of a scholar of almost mythic status in Oxford. Never having sat an academic examination in his life, or completed any thesis, Powell had retired over a decade earlier from his post as Librarian of the Taylor Institution and was finding a useful role at the age of seventy-nine supervising a few postgraduates while pursuing his own research. He was a model of capacious knowledge harnessed to diligent and disciplined inquiry, but it is clear that his influence came as much from the man as from the work. When Fleeman wrote the entry on Powell for the DNB "Missing Persons" volume, he took the opportunity of expressing his deep admiration in phrases of a Johnsonian weight and intensity:

Powell spent his final years in a nursing home in Banbury, not far from Oxford but beyond the buzz of scholarly conversation. In order to remedy this deficiency Fleeman suggested to Roger Lonsdale that each should pay him a visit on alternate Sunday afternoons for some eighteenth-century chat, and they both maintained this with only rare interruptions for several years until LFP's death in 1975.

In Oxford the Fleemans lived at 32 New Inn Hall Street, a historic house notable as a place where John Wesley preached in the 1780s (the Wesley Memorial Church was later built across the road)—but for the Anglican Fleeman a more stirring association was that Charles the First had kept the royalist silver in their cellar during the Civil War. The genuine treasure-house, however, was the Bodleian Library, and here Fleeman had a wealth of manuscript and printed material at his disposal. As he set about examining hundreds of individual Johnson items the emphasis of his work shifted from the primarily textual to the bibliographical,

and he began to identify many reprints and editions not known to Courtney or other bibliographers, besides finding that so-called "new editions" were occasionally merely reissued sheets. Fleeman's research had led him progressively from the redolence of Johnson's language, to the development of his texts, and on to the underlying bibliographical problems.

In the Autumn of 1961 Donald and Mary Hyde visited Oxford. They had asked Powell to suggest someone who might take on the task of cataloging their superb eighteenth-century collection, and a party was thrown at the Mitre attended by all L. F.'s pupils, including Roger Lonsdale, John Hardy, and Christian Deelman (Powell was proud of his eighteenth-century "chaps"). In the event Fleeman accepted an invitation for a period of two years to catalogue the library at Four Oaks Farm, and this went along with an appointment as bibliography consultant at Harvard. It was a bold move, considering that his Oxford thesis remained unfinished, but the opportunity to work on such a wonderful hoard of material was too tempting. His brief was to complete the catalogue in two years, and indeed two years later, to the day, the task was done. Twenty-eight thousand filing cards were processed, and Isabel Fleeman proved a meticulous and helpful collaborator in the later stages, herself responsible for indexing the miscellaneous manuscript correspondence.

A further year followed with Fleeman's appointment as "Hyde Fellow in Bibliography" at Harvard, and the project was extended to develop the catalogue into a bibliography. In 1964 the catalogue of printed books was privately produced in three volumes as Catalogus Bibliothecae Hydeianae. During this time he also took the opportunity to travel around the States accumulating information: the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library, Chicago, Texas, Philadelphia, all were visited and many original documents examined. His Oxford D. Phil. thesis made good use of these primary sources and was finally submitted from the U.S. and successfully defended in January 1965. "A Critical Study of the Transmission of the Texts of the Works of Dr. Samuel Johnson" (Bodleian MS D. Phil. c. 444) shows that at that early date Fleeman already had an impressive command of an extremely wide range of material. The thesis describes in detail the transmission of Johnson's texts from their first publication to their inclusion in the collected editions of 1787-89, and supplies a general view of their subsequent development through the various collected editions to the 1825 "Oxford" volumes. Every text is analysed, the stemma indicated, and the textual features of each edition recorded. This thesis, which still repays consultation by the Johnsonian scholar, provided not only the basis for an editorial assessment of any given version or reprint of a Johnsonian text,

but the textual foundation for a new bibliography of Johnson's works. The massive project was already under way.

In terms of a career Fleeman's first wish was to be a librarian, but there were no openings available. However, the sudden death of Robert Browning, the English tutor at Pembroke College, created an unexpected vacancy there. The possibility of a fellowship at Johnson's alma mater was tempting, and he was well acquainted with its Johnsonian holdings (a few years earlier Browning had allowed him to see the manuscripts and catalogue them). In spite of a feeling that teaching was not his main love, and acutely aware of the narrowness of his literary interests during the previous six years, he rose to the occasion at interview. In response to the question, "What would you expect your students to take away from your teaching?" the former army instructor gave the reply, "I hope they would learn how to write a decent English sentence." He was elected.

Along with the security of a college fellowship came the responsibility for tutoring on literature from the Renaissance to the end of the Romantic period. With an intake in English of up to ten students, Pembroke has at any one time about thirty undergraduates reading English (a tenth of the student body), and the teaching duties are shared with an English Language/Medieval tutor, and some bought-in assistance. As a teacher Fleeman is tough, tactical, interrogatory, oppositional, but fair, and it is never easy to forget the bibliographer behind the tutor. Sweeping conjectures, ingenious theories, unsupported generalizations, second-hand commonplaces—all are given short shrift. But underneath is a deep love of books and a respect for the individual writer's struggle to find the right word.

Fleeman does take pleasure in literary criticism and can enjoy tutoring undergraduates, but its relish for him lies in playing a game by the rules, with rallies of words and argument. His students need to be able to return his serve. Perhaps it is precisely because he does not see "truth" as being at issue in mere literary criticism that he is able to appreciate it as a rhetorical exercise or battle of wits. (He remains conscious of the fact that where Harvard's motto is Veritas, and Oxford's Dominus illuminatio mea, that of St Andrews is Ever to be best.) Teaching for him is an enjoyable encounter that exploits the energy of debate, but it cannot be a search for truth because it exercises itself in the play of ideas. Sometimes a student would be reminded of the rigorous argumentative powers of Ursa Major, but where Johnson's unpredictable swings from game to earnest could injure the unwary, Fleeman, like his mentor, resembles "Johnson without the danger." As a teacher he has always been conscious of working within formal rules—"then each side knows what

it's doing," he once remarked, alluding directly to the adversarial encounter of the tutorial. Until women entered the college in 1979, he would insist on academic gowns being worn, and surnames were used ("Mr Smith" in the first year, the more intimate "Smith" in the second, and "John" in the third). Placed either side of the fire, the players would begin the match.

College work kept him busy: a schedule during term of twelve hour-length tutorials a week was the norm, and administrative duties increasingly impinged on the remaining hours of the day. Like many a recently recruited fellow he found himself handed the job of Secretary to the Governing Body (1966-71), but a pleasanter task came his way in 1968 when he succeeded Douglas Gray as Pembroke's Librarian (like other college posts this brought no remission in teaching). The college's books were at that time widely scattered, having overflowed their original depository; and so his chief task was to oversee the building of a new library, opened by the Chancellor, Harold Macmillan, in 1974. One event that gave him particular personal pleasure was Pembroke's award in 1966 of an honorary fellowship to L. F. Powell, then at the ripe age of eighty-five. A devoted college man, Fleeman became its acting head during 1991-93 at a difficult time, and as Vicegerent he superintended the protracted appointment in 1992-93 of a successor to the Mastership. This was an exhaustive and exhausting process, but according to one colleague he saw the business through with an impressive combination of fairness and efficiency, integrity and good humour.

Beyond the confines of the college, the English Faculty also imposed duties. As a Lecturer he has regularly taught the M. Litt. probationer class in Bibliography and Textual Criticism, passing on to a new generation of students the intriguing delights of inner formes and cancels, and the darker tales of corruption, contamination and foul papers. Especially memorable were the classes he taught jointly with David Foxon, when they made a superb doubles pair: Fleeman striking the ball hard down the baseline, while the flamboyant genius Foxon vollied spectacularly at the net. When Foxon unexpectedly retired as the University's Reader in Bibliography, the post was frozen and Fleeman had to shoulder a considerable extra burden for several years until a replacement was appointed.

He also proved a valuable Faculty member as a postgraduate supervisor, and from his first probationer in 1966 to the present day he has seen fourteen students successfully through to their Oxford B. Litt. or D. Phil., supervising theses on a surprisingly wide range of topics—and only one of them specifically on Johnson. Subjects have included Edward Cave, Elizabeth Carter, Percy's Reliques, William Tytler, Roger

North, Sheridan's The Rivals, and McKenzie's Man of Feeling, and have extended to the sporting novels of R. S. Surtees and no less than four theses on Thomas Hardy. The experience of my own first supervision in October 1969 is probably not unique. His opening move was preemptive and a little startling: "Of course, you know there's only one writer you should be doing a thesis on. . . ." My reply, delivered with as much uncertain confidence as possible, that I was interested in working on Thomas Warton, seemed to hover invitingly in the air for ever. "That's all right. At least he was a friend of Johnson's." Immediately the practicalities were entered into: there was no discussion of Warton's milieu, his ideas, his influence, his poetic development, his theory of history. I was asked to return in two weeks' time with a card index of every item of Warton's correspondence I could trace. In the first hour I had received my own life sentence.

To have access, through Fleeman, to a store of useful information on works of reference, manuscript collections, editorial procedures, bibliographical questions, whom to write to and where to look, was a boon to any fledgling research student, and supervisions gave the impetus for many weeks of work. The talk was always buoyant and fascinating, the interest genuine, the help practical. He knew when to leave a student to get on with the job, and when immediate help was needed. I answered the telephone early one morning to hear a single word being forcefully enunciated—"Propagate!"—a startling injunction, especially at 8.30 a.m. It was, however, the solution to a hiatus in a torn letter, mentioned to him the day before, which had come to him while shaving.

Beyond the college and the Faculty, Fleeman's workload increased dramatically during 1976-77 when he was appointed one of the two University Proctors (a post dating back to the Middle Ages). Marked out by white tie and clerical bands, the two Proctors, who traditionally represent the colleges and are independent of the Vice-Chancellor, are jointly responsible for student discipline—although they and the "bulldogs" (their thick-set, bowler-hatted deputies) do not command quite the same awe among the student body as they did in Johnson's day. As a Proctor Fleeman held overall responsibility for the conduct of university examinations and was ex officio a member of every administrative committee of the university, participating in the work of over sixty bodies. Not surprisingly, the job is taken on for only a year.

In 1977 this responsibility was handed on, only for another to take its place: when J. C. Maxwell was knocked down and killed by a motorcycle while walking home to his Oxford flat, Fleeman generously took on the joint editorship of Notes & Queries (the language/medieval editor was his Pembroke colleague, Professor Eric Stanley). No single human

being could replace the indefatigable Maxwell, with his carrier-bag filing system and panoptic learning, but for the next seven years he had a worthy successor. Contributors, especially inexperienced ones, could rely on Fleeman's encouragement and practical help: a submitted note might call forth a four-page letter full of ideas for fresh lines of inquiry and a host of questions for further deliberation. It is impossible to say how many young scholars found new impetus for their researches through such editorial support. Also during this period he was General Editor of the publications of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, and as such was responsible between 1974 and 1984 for the planning and overseeing of at least one volume a year. Between them the two editorships imposed a heavy burden.

They also came at a time when Fleeman's health was giving serious cause for concern, and the physical strain was considerable. Acute kidney failure followed, which was fortunately remedied in September 1979 by a successful transplant. Although his energy returned and he was soon able to resume work, this unsettled period was especially disruptive of research and left his major project suspended for a time. But happily he was about to enter his most productive decade to date, during which a series of publications confirmed him as the leading British Johnson scholar.

As early as 1971 Fleeman's devotion to Johnson was given public recognition when he was elected President of the Johnson Society of Lichfield, following in the footsteps of such luminaries as David Nichol Smith, L. F. Powell, Mary Lascelles, Mary Hyde, James Clifford, and Helen Gardner. The Annual Supper that year was more than ever a splendid occasion: "Liveried footmen served the traditional fare in the panelled Guildhall; the City plate—candelabra, punch bowls etc.,—was much in evidence, while the churchwarden pipes, smoke curling upwards in the candlelight, created a passable reproduction of an 18th century atmosphere" (so the report in the society's Transactions reads). In his Presidential address Fleeman (who had read Handley Cross by the age of six) likened himself to R. S. Surtees's Jorrocks: "O, John Jorrocks! John Jorrocks! you are indeed a most fortunate man! a most lucky dog! O dear! —O dear! was ever anything so truly delightful!" But instead of continuing in this vein with an after-dinner talk of Johnsonian anecdote and reminiscence, the Presidential Address soon became an informative lecture on Johnsonian bibliography. Fleeman has always been uneasy about what he referred to in a 1988 review as the "hoary old business" of "The Great Cham" whose main claim to greatness is his talk. For him Johnson is primarily a writer, a maker of books, not the anecdotal Johnson of dinner-table delight; his Johnson is more the man of the essays,

prefaces and poems, speaking directly in his own words and not dependent on the note-taking of others. It is as though Fleeman wants to discover Johnson from within, not as caught in performance by his friends. This uneasiness with the Johnson of many Johnsonians has worked to sharpen the rigour of his scholarship and the image of Johnson that it conveys.

As past President of both the Lichfield Society and the Johnson Club (1972-73), and a governor of Johnson's House since 1980, he was invited by the Johnson Society of London to lay the commemorative wreath in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, on 19 December 1981. On this occasion he chose to speak Johnson's haunting words on Iona: "To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings." In this powerful passage, memory and imagination, recollection and hope, relieve momentarily the struggle of the present, and Johnson in that spot senses a kind of eternity. But the next day he is busy again with practicalities: "In the morning we rose and surveyed the place. . . . I brought away rude measures of the buildings, such as I cannot much trust myself, inaccurately taken, and obscurely noted." The diurnal, self-deprecating human endeavour in a way brings us closer to Fleeman's Johnson; and it is this man, the brilliant master of words who recognised (to quote Fleeman's 1984 "Valediction") that "language is a mysterious and ultimately devious medium," who has been the focus of his scholarly research for over thirty years.

II

For some people books themselves are invisible, and the power of literature resides in the ideas and images which transcend the material that contains them. For Fleeman the bibliographer, however, books embody physically the effort to get things right, to see ideas through to the point at which they communicate, and from the chain lines and the press marks, to the imprint or the cancels, they tell a human story. Fleeman's uneasiness with "pure" literary criticism is partly a distaste for things that float free (like the yearnings of Lamartine), and a conviction that, as Pope said, "when we are confined to truth, we soon find the shortness of our tether." This Johnsonian belief that what is right and true is not mysterious, ideal, or distant, but is embedded in the present and tangible, means that its recovery is both a practical and ethical challenge.

Difficulty is the moral warrant of truth, and it is difficult because self-deception, human frailty and circumstance will always offer an easier path into conjecture. Bibliography, with its actualizing of literary endeavour, engages with fact, not opinion. For Fleeman one is either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, an idealist or an analyst. He distrusts the secret and the subjective. Certainly the truth can be lured from its hiding place, but once recovered it must be demonstrable and submit itself to general acceptance. Private truth is a contradiction in terms; a truth that only one person can see is madness. So at the heart of the matter is a very Johnsonian combination—a preparedness to play and "argue for victory" alongside a passionate conviction about the actuality of truth. Fleeman's strength of feeling on this matter comes through in an early essay on "Johnson and the Truth" (1962), where he approvingly opens with a quotation from the life of Cowley: "the basis of all excellence is truth." His footnote significantly adds: "My italics."

Before gaining his Oxford fellowship Fleeman had already published four papers on Johnson, and the earliest of these exemplifies his concern for the processes of Johnson's thought. "Some Proofs of Johnson's Prefaces to the Poets" (The Library, 1962) demonstrates the great man's solicitude and attention to minutiae at the proof stage, and also his consideration for his printer. Fleeman reveals how "the restrictions of time and space . . . stimulated his critical faculties to acute and incisive activity" as Johnson reworked ideas sometimes through the smallest stylistic emendations. In an appendix, along with a checklist of the surviving proofs of the Prefaces, Fleeman offers a full tabular analysis of the many kinds of proof-changes under various headings, a fascinating record of Johnson's sustained commitment to stylistic accuracy, to getting things right. This detailed work on Johnson's proofs convinced him that beneath the public image of the confident critical dictator was the scrupulous craftsman and conscientious refiner of language, and the article set him off on a lifelong exploration of the dynamics of the Johnsonian text, its creation, revisal, printing, and distribution.

The most enjoyable of the early papers on Johnson is "The Making of Johnson's Life of Savage, 1744" (The Library, 1967), a highly satisfying blend of detection and reasoned conjecture which exemplifies bibliography's forensic role in tackling a literary mystery. After demonstrating bibliographically that the Life was printed in two parts, he relates the final part (of forty-eight pages) to those "forty-eight printed pages" that Johnson told Boswell had been written "at a sitting." An examination of Johnson's marginalia in the Glasgow University Library copy suggests that the hurried rewriting may have been the result of new material from a Popean source, but "whether he obliged Johnson to

remove explicit references to himself, or whether he supplied new information cannot yet be known." The article ends with the intriguing possibility that there may somewhere survive a copy containing the first version of those forty-eight pages, Johnson's earliest account of Savage's latter days.

In his R.E.S. note (1968) on Johnson's Prayers and Meditations he gives the results of a close re-examination of the Pembroke College manuscripts. From beneath George Strahan's heavy obliterations he is able to recover a considerable number of new readings, and although the censored details are unremarkable, the very anti-climax of the conclusion has a vindicatory ring to it: "References to doubts, scruples, uncertainties, and perplexities of mind and to melancholy (μχ) are the targets of Strahan's Indian Ink; those who seek sensational disclosures need not look for them in Johnson's papers." Reminiscent of Johnson striding into the cave to dispel Boswell's delicious mystery, Fleeman relishes making conjecture face up to the empirical evidence, wittily substituting for the abstract word "disapproval" the all-too-tangible "Indian Ink."

In fact, a subtext of much of Fleeman's scholarship is his distinction between the practical bibliographer and the over-sensitive "litterateur." This term appeared in his 1969 review of Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, in which he responded to Edmund Wilson's slight on Fredson Bowers as a "monomaniac bibliographer." In making that comment, says Fleeman, Wilson reveals himself as someone "for whom 'literature' is a self-evident phenomenon, whose sensibilities are sufficient to define it." Bibliographers are needed, he continues, to remind such people that "the translation from inspiration to publication is a far from simple matter. . . . A text is not a stable entity but rather needs interpretation through an understanding of the ways in which it came into existence and that those ways are less than finely metaphysical and too often grossly physical." A critic who disowns bibliography is placing literature on a Platonic plane, cutting it free of its incarnation as a series of human processes. For Fleeman "literature" is inseparable from the act of giving physical form to an idea: "It is too easy" he concludes, "for the litterateur to dismiss the bibliographer because he occasionally wants to spell 'literature' as 'books.'"

It was an exciting moment for Fleeman the booklover when, in the Spring of 1963, he discovered William Bowyer's ledgers in the Grolier Club of New York. While searching with Gabriel Austin for general information on eighteenth-century printing practices, he came across the seven volumes which had lain forgotten since their purchase in 1929 and immediately saw their significance. Having reported his findings

in the Times Literary Supplement, he demonstrated in a 1964 article on Somervile's The Chace how the progress of a particular edition could be traced through Bowyer's printing accounts.

Fleeman's tireless efforts to track down every surviving item of Johnsoniana have led to a number of very useful reference volumes that should be on any self-respecting Johnsonian's shelf. The earliest of these was partly the result of his travels around American libraries and especially of his work on the Hyde Collection; modestly entitled A Preliminary Handlist of Documents & Manuscripts of Samuel Johnson (1967), it consists of 265 items and includes documents bearing Johnson's autograph annotations or endorsements. A companion volume listing 285 copies of "books associated with Dr. Samuel Johnson" appeared in 1984. His substantial C.B.E.L. entry for "Samuel Johnson" (1971) is a significant contribution to Johnsonian bibliography and offers some further helpful lists, including works dedicated to Johnson, his contributions to others' books, his periodical writings, and his many "proposals." In 1975 Fleeman published a facsimile edition of the sale catalogue of Johnson's library (reproduced from the annotated Harvard copy), adding an introduction, and providing an index of authors, titles and purchasers, along with a census of all known copies, some not identified in the catalogue. In the same year his article "The Revenue of a Writer" brought together all the available information on Johnson's literary earnings during his career, and made good use of William Strahan's bank account to present a striking picture of the financial realities behind the man of letters. In 1985 he published a detailed list of thirty-one prospectuses and proposals in which Johnson was concerned, and in the 1993 volume of Studies in Bibliography he and Donald Eddy offered a further "preliminary handlist" of the many books to which Johnson subscribed. Taken together, these bibliographic publications provide a wealth of Johnsonian knowledge that eighteenth-century scholars can be grateful for.

For Fleeman all bibliographies are in a sense "preliminary," all knowledge finally tentative. In his 1984 "Valediction" he offered the sobering remark that, thanks to the increasing refinement of analytical techniques, "every modern critical edition is obsolescent on the day of publication:"

Johnson himself had second, third, and even further thoughts, and he frequently acquiesced in the intrusions of others (as with John Nichols's interventions in the Lives of the Poets): "By what means are such intrusions to be identified? Are they to be eliminated? or should we not leave them as our author did?" These are the questions of a committed pragmatist.

One of Fleeman's strengths as an editor is his keen awareness that a literary text is a flux upon which any printed edition is bound to impose an artificial fixity. In a review of Cornford's edition of Young's Night Thoughts (Notes & Queries, 1991), he echoes the 1969 review quoted earlier, but develops his point in terms of the compromised role of the editor: "Language is undoubtedly a slippery and elusive agency," he writes, "and despite the apparent certainty of the written or printed form, it cannot be wholly settled in an unequivocal state. Editors nevertheless undertake to do exactly that." This healthy awareness of textual pragmatics causes him to be suspicious of tidy impositions of consistency upon a text that may reflect its author's uncertainties or oversights. Although editors have to make choices, these should not be decided through a desire to impose a comforting predictability that will not trouble a reader. It is as though Fleeman even wants that reader to notice inconsistencies or quirks in a text, as reflecting more truly its conception in the fallible human brain. A regularized text is therefore anathema to him. In his reviews he criticizes editions that invoke a publisher's "house style" as an excuse for regularizing, or, under the cloak of a comment that "such matters as punctuation and capitalization were left to the compositors," tidy up a text so that the idiosyncrasies are wiped out.

As an editor Fleeman is prepared to be equivocal, even inconsistent, when he deems it appropriate, and he will weigh the balance of probabilities at those points where certainty is impossible. He feels that an editor must show his hand and reveal exactly why a particular reading is being emended or retained. In fact a stubborn retention of readings is a marked feature of his work, which is only conservative in the most literal sense. His "conservatism" can be bold and daring when a safer course might have been to emend something awkward, inconsistent or strange. He insists, however, that editions should preserve a degree of unfamiliarity, so that the reader is reminded that the text is not a modern one, just as the mind that produced it was not a modern mind. In welcoming Fleeman's 1985 edition of the Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland ("a model of its kind"), Mervyn Jannetta commented: "it is heartening to encounter such straightforward statements of editorial policy, which are the more reassuring for the openness with which they

acknowledge the pressures of practical necessity on editorial ambition. Time and again in the textual notes we are made acutely aware of how expediency is anything but a soft option" (The Library, 6th ser., 8 [1986], 284-285).

A characteristic of Fleeman the editor is his capacity to keep an open mind and think each specific problem through. Rather than apply a textual theory and work to produce a neat, consistent answer, he is an intelligent realist who works with the grain of the material, however knotty, and develops a method appropriate to each instance; furthermore, his knowledge of Johnson is profound enough to appreciate the writer's own inconsistencies.

There is a note of comprehending sympathy in this, and it is no surprise that the introduction to his edition of A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland tells a story worthy of his author. Setting out on an idealistic mission to reconstruct the lost manuscript from which the text had been set, he had hoped to identify individual compositors and work back to the holograph they had in front of them (this early optimism is evident in his 1981 lecture to the Johnson Society of London, summarized in The New Rambler). But in the end the fact had to be faced that typesetting conventions and variations in spelling and punctuation did not form a consistent pattern, and so his task changed to a humbler but far more Johnsonian one:

This Johnsonian awakening from a "dream of hope" highlights Fleeman's editorial decorum.

In his introduction to the Journey he remarks that "a text, and certainly not this one, is not a single entity but is rather a process. Its witnesses are merely markers on the continuum of that process," and it is this awareness of process which justifies some of his decisions. Inconsistency is embraced as an authentic mark of human fallibility which it is not the editor's job to override, and the reader of this edition is brought intriguingly close to Johnson's thought processes and seems to be leaning over Johnson's shoulders as he writes. Some of Fleeman's more daring decisions are to resist emendation. Perhaps the most outrageous is his retention of the printed "Frith of Forth" in the third paragraph, even though later in the text the word appears as "Firth" (as in "Firth of

Tay" on p. 7) to which it is normally emended. In this case he even accepts that "Frith" must have been a compositor's misreading of MS "Firth," but he proceeds to argue that in reviewing it in proof Johnson may have allowed the word to remain, assuming as he did so a possible derivation from Latin 'fretum': "Such a train of thought would be highly characteristic of Johnson who retained a misreading 'fecundine' for 'secundine' (placenta) in his Preface to 'Cowley', 1779 (116, line 7; Lives, ed. Hill, i. 42, para. 136; cf. The Library, 5th ser. xvii (1962), 216), and so no emendation is here proposed." The editor puts us in touch with Johnson's mental processes so that we see how he might retain a misreading of his manuscript at one moment but allow a different spelling to stand a few pages later. Mere consistency carries no weight in the argument.

Perhaps Fleeman's most triumphant emendation (all the more convincing because of the many carefully argued refusals to emend) concerns Johnson's description of the Armadale otter. The published texts read: "I expected the otter to have a foot particularly formed for the art of swimming; but upon examination, I did not find it differing much from that of a spaniel." Fleeman's brilliant emendation of "art" to "act" is the result not merely of close acquaintance with Johnson's handwriting, but of a sure sense of Johnson's mind: "Though swimming may be an 'art' for men," he comments, "it is not so for otters. Johnson defined art as 'the power of doing something not taught by nature and instinct'." Johnson's sureness and clarity of mind have been absorbed by his editor. The majority of its readers will value the edition for the almost two hundred pages of commentary and appendices, which reveal a range of erudition and eye for detail worthy of his mentor Powell (in his Notes & Queries review, A. F. T. Lurcock commented that "it could be reviewed properly only by a committee"); but it will not surprise some to know that he himself is proudest of the thirteen pages of textual notes. Indeed, as the above examples show, it is there that we come closest to Johnson's mind and art.

The text of Johnson's poems may have offered less scope for annotation and emendation, but here too Fleeman took a firm stand. His Penguin edition of 1971 (subsequently revised) remains for many the standard edition (in a 1975 review O M Brack concluded that it contained the best texts of the poems). The policy of the Penguin series required a modernized text, but after a sustained struggle Fleeman persuaded the publishers that in Johnson's case the updating of his spelling and reduction of his capitalizations would prevent the full meaning from coming through. His two-page discussion of this point in the introduction makes

a watertight case and should be read by any editor of eighteenth-century poetry who may be tempted to impose modern conventions. He convincingly argues for a link between spelling and stress, in Johnson's tendency for example to give added weight to the final syllable, so that we even begin to hear Johnson as we read (dreadfull, controul, compleat and many more). Though they are not idiosyncratic spellings, the point holds, and if we turn to the poems themselves the verse in places begins to sound with more gravity. Ever conscious of Johnson's own views on editorial matters, Fleeman quotes the poet's disapproval of Lord Hailes's modernized edition of John Hales of Eton: "An author's language, Sir, is a characteristical part of his composition, and it is also characteristical of the age in which he writes. Besides, Sir, when the language is changed we are not sure that the sense is the same. No, Sir, I am sorry Lord Hailes has done this." Once again, the weight of Johnson himself is placed behind the argument. Rather than accommodate Johnson to the language of the present, Fleeman is adamant that Johnson is emphatically "not a modern author . . . his is not a modern mind."

Consistent with his interest in the workings of Johnson's mind, he chose in this edition to supply a critical text: "one advantage of the construction of a critical text is that the recorded variants will illustrate the progress of a composition by which a rough draft develops into a finished work." This dynamic principle extends to the contents of Fleeman's edition: two texts of the same translation of Horace Odes I.22 are placed side by side. As he says in the introduction, "the changes are slight, but the two together illustrate the kind of polishing to which Johnson often subjected his compositions." In his selections from Irene he gives extracts from Johnson's draft notes so as to "give some idea of the development of his thoughts and expression." It is clear throughout Fleeman's scholarly work that it is the movement of Johnson's mind that fascinates him: his Johnson is never the self-confident dictator occupying a firm position on every subject, but a writer who is always thinking things through, reworking ideas and developing his responses in a context of human uncertainty and fallibility. The crucial poem for Fleeman is, not surprisingly, The Vanity of Human Wishes, and he ends the Penguin volume with the text of the original manuscript in the Hyde Collection "so that the curious reader may see for himself the progress of Johnson's mind and art." This point was developed in his 1985 R.E.S. review of The Unknown Samuel Johnson: "It is clear from the manuscript of the Vanity of Human Wishes that the act of composition was a dynamic process in which Johnson was both maker and audience interacting to generate words and ideas sometimes in conflict, sometimes

harmonious." Fleeman's contributions to Johnsonian bibliography never ignore this sense of dynamic process, and they are everywhere strengthed by it.

Fleeman's well known dissatisfaction with the editorial principles of the Yale Edition of Johnson's works is best seen in terms of this concern for the dynamics of the Johnsonian text. His objections are clearly presented in his 1971 R.E.S. review of the three-volume Rambler. In reprinting a modernized version of a "best" text, the "straitjacket of editorial policy" allows no consideration of Johnson's "processes of thought;" the reduction of initial capitals and elimination of italics sacrifices subtleties of meaning; and the editor's defensive appeal to the house style of the original publisher gets short shrift: "'House style'," says Fleeman, "is assumed to exist in the eighteenth century even though there are no surviving manuals of it, no analyses of it, and no definitions of it: it has become a kind of magic handkerchief into which editorial problems may be persuaded to disappear." Furthermore, in rejecting the layout of the original folio Ramblers, the edition ignores Johnson's care for the appearance of his texts (witness the displayed compliments in his letters), and so the "spaciousness, dignity, and public statement" of the Folio is replaced by the crowded page "of a mere commercial venture." Another Yale principle of which Fleeman disapproves is the separation of the textual editing from the writing of the critical introduction. The assumption behind this division of labour contradicts his belief that the textual editor has the true critical warrant: "One of the best ways to approximate to an understanding of an author's work is to try to edit him. However carefully Mr. Bate may have read the Rambler there will remain tracts of Johnson's mind which only Mr. Strauss has traversed, and it is regrettable that we have not been given the results of that journey." (In that single word "tracts" we gain a sense of Fleeman's conviction that bibliography is the reverse of a narrow pursuit.)

Fleeman was given the chance to enter the arena of criticism when he was invited to deliver the British Academy's prestigious Warton Lecture on 3 November 1983. Rather than map out "Johnson's ideas" or "Johnson's style" (those static concepts beloved of so many undergraduate essays) Fleeman took the dynamic principle as his key, finding the clue to Johnson's art in his revisions, and the Vanity of Human Wishes manuscript played its role in this. For Fleeman, Johnson's mind and art were always in progress together—his words were not idea-led. To demonstrate this he follows the poem's third line, "Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife," through its earlier stages (from "Explore each restless . . ."):

This is a simple but remarkable statement, with significant implications for our view of Johnson as a writer. The word is anterior—no reach exceeding grasp here. The passage also shows how Johnson for him is forever in close up, recutting his pen, weighing words and working from them to the ideas, not glimpsing an idea and attempting to capture it in words. For Fleeman, the word is the "thing" from which Johnson the poet starts (all those years of dictionary making), and although Fleeman does not, and probably would not, say this, line three in its successive reworkings exemplifies in miniature Johnson's own properly laboured art, eventually discarding the merely "restless" and pushing through to a thoughtful pairing of the "eager" with the "anxious." A writer on Johnson needs to understand the nuance that such a disentangling allows.

What drives Fleeman's lecture, as well as his scrupulous editing, is a conviction of the immanence of meaning, contained and expressed in the words themselves. There is no fashionable interplay of multiple meanings, it is not imported by the reader's own independent experience or transformed by a modern perspective. All is contained in the "now" of Johnson's words to which our minds should be addressed. But that "now" is itself in process and leads outwards. Fleeman concludes: "It is this feature of Johnson's poetry which projects its interest beyond the words which make it. It is projected into a dimension which is not backward from or anterior to those words, but which looks forward to something which is yet to arise from the words. The interest of his words is not so much in where they start but in where they lead."

The "life sentence" that L. F. Powell promised him in 1960 is still being served. For over thirty years Fleeman has been working towards a complete account of every published piece by Johnson, and of every known fragment of manuscript material which can be traced. Not resting content with describing the editions published in Johnson's lifetime, he has set himself the task of listing all later printings including translations, abridgments, chap-books and school text books, a detailed examination of which can give valuable information on the dissemination of Johnson's writings during the nineteenth century when it has often been supposed that his reputation was in eclipse. The fact that

Rasselas alone has run through more than five hundred editions in English, in addition to over 130 editions of translations (one of which, into Italian, Fleeman welcomed in a 1984 review), indicates the scale of the enterprise. Looking back, Fleeman attributes his comprehensive scheme to the idealistic ambitions of "Rash Youth" (Johnsonian capitals), which "Crabbed Age" has come to view in a more sober light. But the commitment is being heroically carried through.

Some shifts in approach have been necessary as the work entered areas of study not envisaged at the outset, and the bibliographer has even had to become reconciled to the sociologist. For example, nineteenth-century school editions of Rasselas or the Dictionary (see his 1993 essay, "Johnson in the Schoolroom") needed to be placed in the context of the educational curriculum on both sides of the Atlantic. In his 1994 Oxford Bibliographical Society paper Fleeman recognised that the project has widened his view of the nature and possibilities of bibliography:

For Fleeman, certainty is at every moment vulnerable to new facts. The predominant tone of his writing is therefore elegiac, and sometimes rueful. The incremental advance of knowledge is won in the face of doubt rather than on a surge of confidence, and it is more a matter of recognising misconceptions than of constructing theories. Above all, scholarship is a moral activity conducted at the meeting point of honesty of purpose and clarity of method. Any scholar of Johnson's Dictionary or the Shakespeare will be familiar with the way in which (to quote Fleeman again) "a clear plan of action turns fuzzy and unclear once we leave the early stage of projecting, and begin to wrestle with uncomplaisant data."

Throughout his scholarly life Fleeman has struggled to come as close as possible to Johnson's mind and art. The energy of his researches, the integrity of his principles, and the generosity of his commanding knowledge deserve our gratitude. But for all his unrivalled expertise he has never forgotten that the work of the scholar must never supersede or blur the direct message of the great man himself. As he reminds himself and us in a 1985 R.E.S. review: "[Johnson] did not write to set arcane puzzles for professors in academies, but in order to say something, despite

his recognition of the devious nature of language, to his readers, and happily, some of those 'common readers' still exist." Certainly, something of Johnson's own powers as a writer and man can be glimpsed in everything Fleeman has written. In all senses of the verb, he represents Johnson to us.

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It would be appropriate to conclude this memoir with the full text of "A FRAGMENT of the late Dr. JOHNSON, ON THE CHARACTER AND DUTY OF AN ACADEMICK," printed as an appendix (pp. 42-43) to Hospitality. A Discourse Occasioned by Reading His Majesty's Letter in Behalf of the Emigrant French Clergy, in St. Dionis Back Church, May 26, 1793 . . . By John Moir, A. M. It is introduced by Moir as follows: "The affinity of the subject has induced me to present the reader with the following STRICTURES, by one of the most illustrious moralists in modern times, presented to me, in the Author's own handwriting, by a friend whose confidence is one of my best comforts, and whose communications are all valuable, and merit the highest gratitude. The utility of the order is implicated in the functions thus forcibly described and inculcated."

David Fleeman agreed that the word originally printed as "national" in the second paragraph was probably a misreading of Johnson's handwritten "rational" ("his initial ragged 'r' is very like an 'n' to those unfamiliar with his hand"), and he also cited in favour of the emendation Johnson's sense of the internationalism of learning and knowledge.

In the month before his death David Fleeman had managed to do some preliminary research into Moir's background. He apparently was born in Scotland of English parents, and brought up a "Seceder," i.e. a schismatic of the Kirk (1733), but he was bright enough to do well in various Scottish schools, and studied divinity at Edinburgh (though did not graduate), before coming to England and joining the Church of England. He published a number of books and sermons, and a collection called Gleanings (2 vols., 1785), which includes a whiggish essay on Johnson, and an even more whiggish one on "Majesty," but which is published by the Author, from his house "8 Bolt Court, Fleet Street," viz. the house in which Johnson died in December of the year before. Nowhere in Gleanings does Moir indicate that he had this "Fragment," nor does he at that time show much respect for his predecessor in the house, so it may be assumed he acquired the paper some time later. In 1788 he was living in Southwark, and held a curacy and a lectureship in London. His most successful work was called Female Tuition, which ran into several editions.

ON THE CHARACTER AND DUTY OF AN ACADEMICK

The great effect of society is, that by uniting multitudes in one general co-operation, it distributes to different orders of the community the several labours and occupations of life. The general end is general happiness, which must result from the diversified industry of many hands, and the various direction of many minds. From this distribution every man being confined to his own employment, derives opportunities of attaining readiness and skill by improving daily on himself, and to this improvement must be ascribed the accommodations which are enjoyed in popular cities, and countries highly civilised, compared with those which are to be found in places thinly inhabited, where necessity compels every man to exercise more arts than he can learn.

From this complex system arise different obligations. Every man has his task assigned, of which, if he accepts it, he must consider himself as accountable for the performance. The individuals of this illustrious community are set apart, and distinguished from the rest of the people, for the confirmation and promotion of rational knowledge. An academick is a man supported at the public cost, and dignified with public honours, that he may attain and impart wisdom. He is maintained by the public, that he may study at leisure; he is dignified with honours, that he may teach with weight. The great duty therefore of an academick is diligence of inquiry, and liberality of communication. Of him that is appointed to teach, the first business is to learn, an unintermitted attendance to reading must qualify him to be heard with profit. When men whose active employments allow them little time for cultivating the mind, and whose narrow education leaves them unable to judge of abstruse questions, may content themselves with popular tenets, and current opinions, they may repose upon their instructors, and believe many important truths upon the bare authority of those from whom they received them; but the academick is the depositary of the public faith, it is required of him to be always able to prove what he asserts, to give an account of his hope, and to display his opinion with such evidence as every species of argument admits. Our colleges may be considered as the citadel of truth, where he is to stand on his guard as a sentinel, to watch and discover the approach of falsehood, and from which he is to march out into the field of controversy, and bid defiance to the teachers of corruption. For such service he can be fitted only by laborious study, and study therefore is the business of his life; the business which he cannot neglect without breaking a virtual contract with the community. Ignorance in other men may be censured as idleness, in an academick it must be abhorred as treachery.