In his 1932 Norton lectures, reflecting on Johnson as poet-critic, that other poet-critic T. S. Eliot argued that “it is surely by unconscious irony that we speak of an ‘age of Johnson’ as we do of an ‘age of Dryden’ or an ‘age of Addison.’ Lonely in his life, Johnson seems to me still more lonely in his intellectual and moral existence.” A great mountain towering above foothills such as Gray and Collins, Johnson was “their superior as a poet, not in sensibility, not in metrical dexterity or aptness of phrase, but in a moral elevation just short of sublimity.” Yet, a third of the way into the twentieth century, the Harvard audience still had to be convinced that Johnson was superior to these “meditative-Miltonizing” poets of sensibility, as Eliot's admirer F. R. Leavis would call them in his influential Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (1936). Johnson, Eliot told his audience, “could not even very much like the poetry of his age with which admirers of the eighteenth century now ‘think it necessary to be pleased.’ ”1Leavis in Revaluation acted even more decisively to move Gray, Collins, and company to the margins of the post-Pope, pre-Romantic canon. This age (still “Augustan” for Leavis) “had not favoured any very interesting use of minor talents. . . . And since unconvinced and undistinguished verse in Augustan modes . . . is pretty obviously uninteresting, minor talents took largely to the meditative-Miltonizing poetical modes.” Johnson, however, not only towered above the minor talents, but also achieved meaningful innovation, renewing Augustan idiom and style, Leavis argued. As “a professional writer and a scholar,” Johnson, unlike Pope, “transmitted no pressure of Good Form, no polite social code, through his pen,” which was driven instead by a moral elevation just short of sublimity. Thus, “both the professional and the moralist are felt in the characteristic weight that makes his verse so unmistakable for Pope's.”2These moves by Eliot and Leavis to revalue Johnson's poetry and critical prose, especially The Lives of the Poets, were timely. They were made when the scholarly labors of R. W. Chapman, L. F. Powell, David Nichol Smith, and others to edit and publish the Johnsonian and Boswellian corpus, building on George Birkbeck Hill's foundation, had gotten under way. This revaluation of Johnson's imaginative writing and criticism, undertaken in tandem by editors and professional critics, was to bear much fruit, notably, in the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (1955–2019) and the Yale Boswell Editions, officially launched in 1949. The impressive body of scholarship that has grown from this modernist and mid-twentieth-century critical and editorial flowering is already well known to many readers of this journal. Suffice it to say the good work goes on. Celia Barnes and Jack Lynch's new edition of Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in the Oxford World's Classics series, for instance, was released in January 2020, keeping these perennial texts accessible for the undergraduate student and (one hopes) common readers.Criticism and literary history still proceed in tandem with editing, of course, as in Eliot and Leavis's time, and so, three volumes of new essays on Johnson and writers connected with him, both admiring and less admiring, have appeared in the last two years. (As The Age of Johnson has been publishing scholarship on Johnson, his circle, and their time annually for more than thirty years now, it seems safe to overrule Eliot on this point and use the titular term. It usefully describes even—perhaps especially—the writers and thinkers in that age who disliked or disputed Johnson.) These three volumes, each edited by Anthony Lee, are Samuel Johnson among the Modernists (2019), Community and Solitude: New Essays on Johnson's Circle (2019), and New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation (2018). In addition, I shall briefly note a book of Johnsoniana for the “bestseller” market: Leo Damrosch's The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (2019). Considerations of space, inevitably, structure this review, and to keep within publishable limits, I have singled out roughly a third of the chapters in the three collections. This is not meant to slight the others; rather, the subject matter of those singled out is (also inevitably) of special interest to this reviewer. I begin with two essays in Samuel Johnson among the Modernists: Melvyn New's “Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and the City,” and Jack Lynch's “Johnson Goes to War.”Like Eliot's own critical prose, New's chapter recognizes “that great authors of any era and any ‘ism,’ when placed in proximity by attentive readers, will be overheard engaging in conversations well worth chronicling” (21). New, like Boswell contriving to seat Johnson and Wilkes next to each other at dinner to observe the results, facilitates a conversation between London, Johnson's reworking of Juvenal, Satire 3 on Rome, and Eliot's own poem of the wicked city. That poem is not as one might expect The Waste Land, but rather The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. New's rationale is that “London and Prufrock have an important biographical connection, being the first successful poems by two young men encountering the city as the place of their chosen residence for the remainder of their lives” (25). This intertextuality exists at the level of structure—Prufrock has a satirical older speaker whom Eliot the poet follows through the streets, New argues (27)—but it also exists at the level of theme: the wicked city. Eliot, as New points out, constructs much of his disenchanted, alienated, twentieth-century cityscape by alluding to the poets of Dunciadic London, especially Pope and Johnson, because they “showed the same life persisting through time: the life of men and women in a bored, materialistic society, aimless and frivolous” (24).More importantly, putting Eliot in conversation with Johnson “uncover[s] a foreshadowing of the one aspect of modernism that seems out of place for both authors: their Christian faith. . . . At this early stage in their careers it was already shaping their vision” (25–26). The decisive biographical fact of their Christian faith explains why Johnson and Eliot, though they lived and died in London (and, in Johnson's case, praised it on occasion), nevertheless believed, as for Juvenal before them, that “the city confines, corrupts, and finally exhausts everyone,” such that their “modernism . . . can be defined as a persistent state of psychic depression inherent to this urban experience” (26). Modernism is thus a pessimistic structure of feeling or state of mind as natural to first-century Rome or 1730s London as to Great War London.But as New points out, in each of these places and times, the official ideology was optimism, a secular faith in “rational political and social amelioration through science and human intellect, the pillars of the urban structure, ancient or modern” (27). Johnson in London and Eliot in Prufrock, though not yet thirty, had already perceived the vanity of these human wishes, and so uneasily embraced “the fraught role of being displaced (or unplaced) urban Christians, fully aware of the oxymoronic character of the term” (28). For here, Johnson and Eliot have no continuing city, but seek one to come—not the brave new London of virtual reality, promiscuity, and antidepressants, but the Pauline and Augustinian city of God. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut to it through the Welsh countryside, where Thales (the disgruntled, departing friend who speaks most of London) is headed; human nature is just as fallen there as in the Strand, though given fewer opportunities to prove it.Eliot, in “Johnson as Critic and Poet” (1944), could not quite believe that Johnson sincerely meant London's and Thales's praise of the country, which imitates Umbricius's in Juvenal's Satire 3. Yet, as New observes, “Howard Weinbrot . . . demonstrated [in 1976 that] there is almost certainly no irony in Juvenal's ‘georgic existence’—nor would Johnson have believed there was” (29). Did Eliot carelessly conflate London's speaker and poet, as David Venturo has suggested? New offers another explanation: Thales's praise of rural retirement and horticulture does exhibit “the diction of satiric parodies of the pastoral tradition,” but Eliot “fail[s] to acknowledge that the same language was Edenic as well” (29). “Johnson may well have built this ambiguity into his poem because while the georgic seems to offer a valid alternative to the city it ultimately fails—as does the city—to answer the question ‘how to live?’ ” (30). This follows from his and Eliot's profound Christian conviction that post-Fall humanity is “in a steady and continuing retreat from perfection, [which] is precisely the opposite of Enlightenment thought,” so that “the attempt to find an Edenic existence in the countryside” turns out to be “as hopeless a dream as a social and political creation of perfection within the secular state” (30).New, having outlined this skeptical, Christian modernism (entirely distinct from optimistic, secular modernity) shared by London and Prufrock, reinforces his case with some deft Quellenforschung. He sketches a dense network of scriptural allusions in Prufrock (31–32), adding to Christopher Ricks and James McCue's tally in their magisterial Johns Hopkins edition of Eliot's poems. He complements this with convincing close readings of passages in London that uncover a network of similar allusions, such that “one finds glimpses of Johnson's Christianity, heavily marked, even at this early date, by three of the four last things: . . . Death, Judgment, and Hell” (33). “Both London and Prufrock are guided by a similar scriptural response to the modernist question: how are we to live in the destructive [city]?” (34). That response, as New notes, is to cultivate being “poor in spirit,” as formulated in the Beatitudes, or emptied of self, which must be replaced by God's will.All of this is not to deny what New characterizes as Johnson's favorable views of “scientific progress, better education, and social amelioration.” Rather, it is simply to recognize that these cherished nostrums of modernity move forward and backward unpredictably, by fits and starts, and are no guarantee of future peace, plenty, or happiness. Human wishes notwithstanding, their practical outcome is often appalling: within ten years of Johnson's death, the revolutionary mass murder of perhaps 120,000 French Catholics in the Vendée, or in Eliot's lifetime, the Holodomor famine and strategic bombing of civilian populations. “What binds Johnson and Eliot together is their effort, despite their skeptical empiricism, to retain the single most fundamental truth of their Christian heritage: . . . we are fallen, mortal, and immoral. . . . The [secular] city being built is only another Tower of Babel” (36). Thus, while neither Johnson nor Eliot (nor indeed Juvenal) in the end left the city, their working lives there were “a residence of lifelong conflict and tension, the modernist dilemma of dwelling in despair because there is no other place to dwell” (37).Self-emptying in the modernist city can also take a pernicious form. New carefully explicates the keyword “insidious” in London (152–55), in which French flatterers invade . . . your Breast;Explore your Secrets with insidious Art,Watch the weak Hour, and ransack all the Heart. (38)He traces this keyword, with its Latin overtone of “insidere,” to ambush, to Paradise Lost, 9.404–11, where Satan in the guise of the serpent, “such ambush hid among sweet Flow'ers and Shades / Waited with hellish rancor imminent” to invade Eve's breast, watch the weak hour, and ransack all her heart. “If one accepts that Johnson . . . has this passage in mind when he recounts the several ‘ambushes’ awaiting the walker in the streets of London,” then these “can also be seen as a replay of the first loss of innocence that underlies all Christian thought” (38–39). And “insidious intent,” of course, is what haunts the streets of the modernist city in Prufrock, leading Eliot, the poet, and his reader “to an overwhelming question,” possibly, as New suggests, that of Pascal: will you wager on denial or faith? Prufrock himself lacks the courage to ask it; “Those who empty themselves of self only to be filled with the dreams of infinite knowledge and boundless self-sufficiency (the ‘sins’ of the Enlightenment) are not strengthened but weakened” (39).New acknowledges that “it is . . . counterintuitive, perhaps, to suggests that [Johnson's and Eliot's] first poetic successes revolve . . . around Paradise Lost,” given their contempt for Milton's republicanism and heterodoxy, and, in places, for his poetics as well. Yet one “need not posit a concrete influence of Milton on either poet” (39). Rather, “Literary genius is always in dialogue with literary genius, and no English-language poet . . . can avoid entering into a conversation with that one English poet who retold so brilliantly the most essential story of Christianity, from the Fall, . . . to the redemption through Christ” (40).If Johnson was a modernist avant la lettre as early as London (1738), and the poem's Christian skepticism of Enlightenment anticipates Prufrock (1915), what did readers at the dawn of modernism make of Johnson? Jack Lynch answers this question in “Johnson Goes to War,” a fascinating outline of his reception during and following the First World War. Lynch opens by reminding us that Johnson never went to war, though, to Boswell's amusement, he kept a sword and belt hanging in his closet, left over from his call-up by the City of London Trained Bands. Nevertheless, “He thought a great deal about war” over a long career, once praising “the Bravery of the English Common Soldiers” in 1760, and planning an unrealized “Hist. of War,” perhaps the Seven Years’ War then ongoing, also in 1760. If we keep in mind his lifelong concern with military matters, then, “it is only fitting . . . that those engaged in matters military gave thought to Johnson” (116). Lynch therefore focuses attention on those so engaged from 1914 to 1918, and uncovers “a surprising number of points of contact between” Johnsonians and the Great War.For one thing, “A generation of Johnsonian scholarship was put on hold.” David Nichol Smith's then-projected edition of Johnson's poems for instance was delayed and not completed (with E. L. McAdam) until 1941. Johnson societies were also affected. The Johnson Club of London, meeting in the house in Gough Square, had its 13 October 1915 meeting interrupted by “a German zeppelin . . . dropping bombs on the City of London” (117). Both the Conservative MP and publisher, Arthur Baumann, and the Liberal chief secretary for Ireland, Augustine Birrell, were present; “Some of the nation's most important political figures during the war . . . were actively involved with Johnson” (118). Another was Hebert Asquith, wartime Prime Minister until his replacement by Lloyd George in December 1916, who, shortly after war's end, addressed the club on “Dr. Johnson and Fanny Burney.”Moreover, “Most of the literary figures of the Great War were also Johnsonians to some degree” (119), as Lynch explains. These included Siegfried Sassoon, who owned the twelve-volume 1801 Works, and Rupert Brooke, who, in late spring 1914, was absorbed in reading Boswell. More consequentially, in 1916, George Saintsbury published The Peace of the Augustans, with its argument that Johnson “is, from a certain side and in a certain sense, the eighteenth century” (emphasis in original). Saintsbury long influenced literary historians and common readers to see “the culture of [Johnson's] century” as “a Place of Rest and Refreshment”—a dubious but understandable impulse in the year of Verdun and the Somme. Lynch cites Paul Fussell's observation that frontline soldiers were drawn to “eighteenth-century writing” because it seemed to offer “an oasis of reasonableness and normality, a place one could crawl into for a few moments’ respite from the sights, sounds, and smells of the twentieth century,” in which some 8,500,000 young men were killed in combat and by disease, and perhaps 13,000,000 civilians died, over four terrible years.It was “only natural,” amidst this ungraspable suffering, “that soldiers brought copies of Johnson's works to the front,” and a “series of pocket editions . . . seem to have been designed with soldiers’ packs in mind. Three separate pocket abridgments of Boswell's Life were prepared during the war” (120). One such soldier was Geoffrey Keynes, Royal Army Medical Corps lieutenant and brother of John Maynard. The most notable (for Johnson scholars) was the thirty-three-year-old Scot R. W. Chapman, who exchanged the Clarendon Press for the Royal Garrison Artillery and Salonika, on the Macedonian front, where the Allies were propping up a tottering Serbia. Here, Captain Chapman spent “long hot afternoons . . . [as] a temporary gunner, in a khaki shirt and shorts, . . . collating the three editions of the Tour to the Hebrides, or rereading A Journey to the Western Islands in the hope of finding a corruption of the text” (121).Most Great War readers of Johnson were, however, concerned primarily with his political valence. Propagandists enlisted him, out of context and against the grain, in support of interventionist, internationalist continental and global war. As Lynch drily puts it, this “sometimes involved some creative excision of Johnson's own language” (123). The Oxford archaeologist Alexander Montgomerie Bell, for example, published in 1916 The Johnson Calendar; Or, Samuel Johnson for Every Day in the Year, dedicated to Asquith. This text repurposed Johnson on the 1770s American crisis to lament that Woodrow Wilson, then running for reelection on the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” had not yet repudiated it and was not to involve the US in Britain and Germany's struggle for mastery until 1917. Needless to say, Bell's “quotations were partial, many qualifications gone, most anti-war sentiments swept under the rug” (124). In a similar vein, “In July 1918, the Johnson Club heard E. S. P. Haynes discuss ‘Dr Johnson on Liberty,’ in which he informed [them] that Johnson promoted liberty, ‘a characteristically British ideal on which reposes the solid fabric of the British Empire’ ” (124–25). Johnson, it turned out, had been an enthusiast for the fiscal-military state, liberal individualism, and overseas expansion. If only Walpole, Wilkes, and the New England colonists had known.At the same time, “Just as his words could be pulled out of context to make him a militarist, he could also be presented as an anti-war campaigner.” These words included Idler 22’s vivid evocation of battlefield carnage during the Seven Years’ War, “so shocking that it was removed from collected editions,” and the even more vivid evocation of (narrowly avoided) carnage on land and sea in Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands. “A few lexical archaisms aside, this could have been written in the Somme, or Ypres” (127). These and cognate passages were put to anti-war use by leftist journals such as Advocate of Peace and Socialist Review, and even Blackwood's Magazine, before, during, and after the war. “David Starr Jordan, . . . pacifist and eugenicist [and] first president of Stanford, published an article in Advocate of Peace through Justice that somehow turned Johnson into an enemy of social subordination, because socialists were convinced that subordination leads to war” (129)—and this, in 1924, when the nominally egalitarian Soviet Union had been launching wars of aggression in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.The trouble was, Lynch concludes, that “the kind of realism Johnson embodied was in short supply after the Treaty of Versailles” (130). “Using Johnson to advance their own positions, the people who lived through the war and the ensuing peace were more eager to speak through him than to listen to him. Had they read the Vanity, . . . Rasselas, . . . the original Idler 22, had they even read to the end all the passages they abridged, . . . had they done any of this, they might have been less surprised by what happened less than twenty years later.” And “Johnson, I venture to speculate, would be saddened by this but not at all surprised. The peace [in 1918] that left so many hopeful soon enough led to another war to end all wars, . . . another war in which Johnson was recruited as both critic and booster” (131).If New listens to Johnson in conversation with Eliot and modernism, and Lynch listens to the Great War generation conversing about and by means of him, the contributors to New Essays on Samuel Johnson: Revaluation renew Leavis's project of reinstating Johnson and his critical and imaginative writing at the center of English letters, between Pope and Romanticism. (Leavis's writings on Johnson, however, in particular Revaluation, are not invoked in Lee's preface or by the several contributors.) I begin with John Richetti's chapter “Samuel Johnson as Heterodox Critic and Poet,” which is welcome for reinforcing Johnson's status (already foregrounded in the 1930s by Eliot and Leavis) as an accomplished poet whose unique voice cannot be subsumed in a movement or age, even his own, eponymous one. Richetti is well qualified to discuss Johnson's and his contemporaries’ poetic practice, and not only by study. In recent years, he has organized lively ASECS panels in which participants memorize and recite eighteenth-century verse, sometimes a lot of it. (In 2014 in Williamsburg, Adam Potkay wowed the audience by enthusiastically reciting Burns's Tam o’ Shanter in its entirety.) Richetti's chapter uses reader-response and reception theory, though it is jargon free; it shows rather than tells how the concepts work. Johnson would have approved. “He rejoiced, as he put it, ‘to concur with the common reader’ in finding [in great poems] ‘images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo’ ” (134).In fact, the real, historical writer Samuel Johnson is the very opposite of caricatures in his own time—Churchill's and Gillray's Pomposo, Archibald Campbell's Lexiphanes, Robert Fergusson's “Great Pedagogue”—and in ours. Think, for example, of Robbie Coltrane's buffo turn as a bloviating Johnson in the 1987 Blackadder episode “Ink and Incapability.” As Richetti reminds us, “Despite his undeserved reputation for pompous verbiage, Johnson was a master of eloquent simplicity, and in that talent, he was truly a heterodox poet and critic” (143). While Johnson's religion and politics were orthodox, in historical context, his criticism and poetry were anything but. Rather, in thinking “ ‘his language more poetical as it was more remote from common use’ Gray [for instance] was . . . closer to orthodox poetic practice and theory in the mid-eighteenth century than was Johnson.” Then as now, the depressing idée reçue was that aesthetic merit consisted in “a deliberately cultivated artificial and pretentious poetic language” (131). If common readers such as Johnson found such language unlovely or obscure, this was simply proof that they were tasteless or philistine.Johnson's solidarity with the common reader in Lives of the Poets also extended to “contempt for poetry that lacks coherent and widely applicable force as moral truth and relevance” (132)—as in the famous dismissal of Lycidas, grounded in contempt for Milton's republicanism and heterodoxy and for trite Arcadian pastoral (but not, significantly, Virgilian pastoral). Richetti calls attention to Johnson's prologue for the Drury Lane Theatre opening under Garrick, which contrasts genuine “passion” with “the pomp of show” and “declamation,” which is “always a term of contempt for him, signifying facile and insincere rhetoric that is merely verbal” (132). (One is reminded here of Philip Smallwood's interesting work on Johnson and the sublime, which for Johnson typically consists in absolute, lucid simplicity, a rational experience altogether unlike the dizzying sensory overload and ecstasy of the Romantic sublime.) Behind this critical stance lies a “strenuous moral and psychological realism, implicitly grounded in his own experience” (133). Weighing his meditative-Miltonizing contemporaries in the balance, Johnson finds them wanting; they “employed the misleading tricks of the trade—flashy images lacking in intellectual and moral rigor.” Their poems are not conversations with an implied moral and intellectual equal, but monologues full of sound and fury, signifying nothing—or, perhaps, the “self-expressive needs” of a Kermodean artist in isolation (134). This was not just a social but an intellectual and moral blunder; Johnson, as Pat Rogers has noted, “believed that it was incumbent on people to use their knowledge instead of hoarding it to themselves.”Since sound criticism is a sustained (implied) conversation with the reader, Richetti wants to know “just how Johnson's own poetry embodies the moral/aesthetic values he promotes with such strength in his criticism and indirectly exemplifies in his verbal discourse, both written and spoken” (135). In London, the first of two creative conversations with Juvenal, Johnson does so by dramatizing “recurrences in human experience, stressing continuities rather than . . . singularity and remoteness.” His imitations of Satire 3 “are narratives of actual human life, . . . historically specific” to England under Walpole in 1738, and “Both of Johnson's Juvenal imitations are also dramatic and dialogical” (136). Richetti then zeroes in, as Leavis had, on Johnson's novelty and freshness in imitating Roman poetry; London “is mediated by Pope's [Horatian] satires, avoiding the slangy breeziness and local complaining of the Latin original, . . . [its] speaker is much more eloquently moralistic.”The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), in turn, is “more truly dialogical in that it features many individual scenes and actors who speak, . . . and then are answered and corrected by the monitory voice of the poet” (137). The poem's diction and tone are conversational too, in a register the meditative-Miltonizing poets cannot reach. The couplet “Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy, / And shuts up all the Passages of Joy” (259–60), for instance, is marvelously “colloquial, clear, and explicit, . . . virtually clinical in its evocation of the orifices of the body . . . that Time will ‘shut up’ ”; it is typical of “Johnson's imagination [that] general concepts and personifications are rendered vividly and concretely.” Thus, while the poem is “as much a lyric lament over human failure . . . as a satirical survey of human vanity, . . . the issue of ‘truth’ is always relentlessly highlighted, with nothing improved or palliated” (138).Crucially, for Richetti, these conversational as opposed to declamatory qualities of London and Vanity “mark [them] as outside the mainstream of mid- and late-eighteenth-century English verse, virtually free of the poeticisms that . . . disfigure a good deal” of this corpus. Johnson's “singularity as a poet” consists in his writing “absolutely true to his critical principles” of unblinking honesty, moral exemplarity, and conceptual and lexical clarity. In Johnson's 1783 ode On the Death of Dr Robert Levet, for example, the “combination of stark simplicity and deep and general suggestiveness is the vivifying secret of the poem. I don't know of its like in the whole range of eighteenth-century verse.” Levet's “power of art without the show” is also Johnson's—a phrase that echoes both the sound and the sense of the 1747 prologue at the Drury Lane Theatre opening, further “profound testimony to Johnson's intellectual coherence and consistency” (141). As Richetti concludes, reprising Leavis's dual role as literary historian and critic, “Johnson's elegiac touch was sure; his taste impeccable. . . . [The Levet elegy] not only mourns his friend but reveals his radical pessimism, his sympathy for the poor and oppressed, and his deep Christian belief. But [it] also exemplifies . . . his ear for simple eloquence” (142).Paul Tankard, in turn, is well equipped to deal with that belief. His background as a keen student and editor not only of Johnson's and Boswell's essays and journalism, but also of C. S. Lewis and his fellow Inklings, makes “ ‘Try to Resolve Again’: Johnson and the Written Art of Everyday Life” especially illuminating. Johnson anticipated Lewis in interesting ways: each was a youthful “lax talker against religion” before conversion at Oxford (in Johnson's case, by Law's Serious Call, in Lewis's, by talks with Tolkien). Both publicly acknowledged a “mere Christianity” shared by all communions but, in private, were intensely introspective Anglicans who, in Catholic or orthodox fashion, prayed for the dead. Both also wrote compelling spiritual autobiography (in Johnson's case, its intended readership himself). Unlike Surprised by Joy or A Grief Observed, though, this life-writing was not neatly delimited but a “shadowy text . . . which Johnson was writing, literally writing, all his life and with his life”: the generically various writings collected in the Yale Diaries, Prayers, and Annals. In these, Tankard argues, “Johnson's resolutions are at the core of his practice as a journal-keeper” (217).Tankard calculates that 27 percent of Johnson's “prayers or journal entries have [an] ‘occasional’ character,” marking “major liturgical days and his own personal anniversaries.” These writings “are not, like Boswell's journals, an indiscriminate celebration of the everyday”—Johnson had resolved multiple times to keep a regular journal and failed (218). Indeed, Boswell's journal is filled to overflowing with its author's personality, which