AND FIRST PRESIDENT OF KING'S COLLEGE,
RECTOR OF ST. THOMAS'S CHURCH, NEW HAVEN.
PUBLISHED BY HURD AND HOUGHTON.
THE materials for a volume of this kind are rarely accessible after the lapse of a century. Letters and papers of historic value are so often scattered and destroyed, that unless the biographer attends to his task in season, he may find it difficult to gather the information that he needs for writing with fullness and satisfaction. "If a life," said Dr. Johnson, the great name which is the pride and glory of English literature, "be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence."
Though this work is published one hundred years after the death of its distinguished subject, yet I trust it will be found that besides being impartial, I have escaped the caustic criticism of giving "little intelligence." In writing the History of the Church in Connecticut, I fell upon original sources of information, which seemed never to have been carefully explored. Chandler's "Life of Johnson," brief and unsatisfactory as it may be, was very well for the day in which it appeared, and I should not have attempted an ampler biography, if I had not felt that it was now due to the memory of one of the most important names in American history.
The Johnson MSS., not a tithe of which could have passed under the inspection of Chandler, have all been kindly placed in my hands, and unless I had been familiar with them by previous acquaintance, the preparation of this work would have been much more laborious, and its publication longer delayed. As it is, the hours of leisure during a period of three years, if the busy Rector of a city parish may be supposed to have any leisure, have been devoted to it, and nothing has been overlooked which was calculated to shed any new light upon the character of Johnson, and the times in which he lived.
By introducing large portions of his correspondence with eminent men in this country, and with Bishops and leading minds in the Church of England, I have made him in a measure his own biographer, and at the same time rescued from oblivion faded manuscripts which the accidents of another generation might have put quite beyond our reach. One gets a better idea of a man from seeing him in his letters and writings than from the estimates of those who weigh him in their own scales, and describe him in their own language.
It was a remark of Bishop Jebb that "the lives of good men are an invaluable portion of a clergyman's library; " but it is to be hoped that these pages will not be limited to readers of this class. All who are interested in Yale College, its early struggles and first endowments, the gifts of Berkeley and the influence of his Philosophy, all who would know anything of the origin of King's (now Columbia) College, New York, and of the progress of liberal education in this country, and all who would thoroughly understand the efforts to secure the American Episcopate, the strange opposition to it, and the movements which led to the Revolution and the Independence of the Colonies, will find many fresh historical facts in this volume, and wonder why they were not before given to the public.
The engraving which forms the frontispiece is made from a portrait in the possession of his great grandson, Mr. William Samuel Johnson of Stratford. The painting, though there is nothing but a tradition in the family to support the statement, is without doubt from the pencil of Smibert, the artist who accompanied Dean Berkeley to America, and remained in Boston after the return of his friend and patron to England. It has the touch of Berkeley's own portrait by the same painter, which is among the treasures of Art that adorn the walls of Yale College.
New Haven, December, 1873.