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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 1, 1898)
s THE BATTALION. was written to pay some debts and to defray the funeral ex penses of his mother. Johnson’s principal works are his “Dictionary of the En glish Language,” “Lives of the Poets,” “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” “Irene,” “The Rambles,” “The Idler,” and “Easselas.” Johnson was the central figure m the Lit erary club which included Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Gib bon, Garrick and others. In 1735 he-married Mrs. Porter, a woman old enough to be his mother. To this woman, who dressed in wretched taste, and painted her cheeks, he showed untiring devotion until her death. In 1763, Boswell, his future biographer, was introduced to him—a circumstance to which we owe the most minute ac count of a man’s life and character that has ever been written. Boswell, though a very ordinary mortal, bas immortalized himself by this performance. In Lord Macaulay’s words we have “Ins coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus’ dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye; the out ward signs which too clearly indicated the approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce, his veal pie with plums; tis inextinguishable thirst for tea; his trick of touching the poets as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up orange peel, his morning slumbers, his mid night disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his grunt- ings, his puffings, his vigorous acute and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates—old Mrs. Lovett and blind Mrs. Williams; the cat, Hodge, and the negro, Frank; all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood.” In 1784 after a long illness, during part cf which he had fearful apprehensions of death, his mind became composed and he died full of that faith which he had so vigorously de-