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Samuel Johnson
The "Literary Intelligence" section of the December 1783 EM concluded by reporting that "Dr. Johnson, we are happy to hear, is much better, and has sat down to put the last hand to the life of Spencer, which, with his other lives of the poets, we understand is the whole that he means to favour the literary world with" (p. 408). Hannah More wrote in her Memoirs, "Johnson told me he had been with the king that morning [in 1780], who enjoined him to add Spenser to his Lives of the Poets."[3] But Boswell, recording information given him by John Nichols, quoted the latter's saying that he rather wished that Johnson "would favour the world [so much like the EM, "favour the literary world"], and gratify his sovereign, by a Life of Spenser, (which he said he would readily have done, had he been able to obtain any new material for the purpose)" (Life, IV. 410). Nichols's wish and Johnson's answer are unfortunately undated; hence one is unable positively to contradict the statement in the EM.
In the second part of a series of "Atoms of Information" an anonymous correspondent wrote,
Dr. Johnson had planned a book on the model of Robinson Crusoe. Pomponius Gauricus, a learned Neapolitan, who had dabbled in Alchemy, Physiognomy, &c suddenly disappeared in the year 1530, and was heard of no more. The supposed life of this man the Doctor had resolved to write. "I will not (said he) shipwreck my hero on an uninhabited island, but will carry him up to the summit of San Pelegrini, the highest of the Appennines; where he shall be made his own biographer, passing his time among the Goat-herds, &c."
By Dr. Johnson's advice, the late Duke of Cumberland ordered a brass cannon to be fabricated on a new plan: Our artillery is usually complained of, on account of its weight, and size. The Doctor was willing to think these defects might in some degree be obviated; first, by casting every gun out of a less quantity of metal than usual, and afterwards by hammering it into solidity. The experiment was tried, but set aside on account of the expence attending it.
Gauricus, a Neapolitan humanist, was a sixteenth-century classical scholar who also wrote on sculpture. Johnson, according to Joseph Cradock, was once in the company of Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, and if Johnson advised him on cannon, it must have been on this occasion, but the EM account, in August 1787, refers to the Duke as "the late Duke of Cumberland," whereas Henry Frederick died in 1790.[4]
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