London and the Vanity of Human Wishes

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Excerpt from London and the Vanity of Human Wishes: With Notes, Historical Biographical, & a Glossary The most striking figure in the social and literary history of the period from 1709 to 1784 was that of Samuel Johnson. His career was preeminently that of a man of letters, and the slow and laborious efforts by which, in spite of every obstacle, personal as well as material, he raised himself to the highest intellectual supremacy, present a spectacle equally instructive to us and honourable to him. He was born in 1709, the son of a learned but poor and struggling provincial bookseller in Lichfield, and he exhibited, from his very childhood, the same singular union of mental power and constitutional indolence, ambition and hypochondriacal gloom, which distinguished him through life. He was disfigured and half blinded by a scrofulous disorder, which scarred and deformed a face and figure naturally imposing, and at the same time afflicted him with strange and involuntary contortions, reacting also upon his mind and temper, and making him sombre, despondent, and irritable. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.