“Don’t read any more of that newspaper to me. I will not listen to any more of it. What a world it is! what an ill-conditioned planet! As if there was not enough to do to extract a living from this difficult earth, as if there was not enough to do to manage our private affairs, sufficiently confused by every kind of folly, but we must rush into wars;[1] and, for the sake of dynastic ambitions, sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of our fellow-creatures!

Footnote 1:

This work was commenced, as the reader will perceive, some time ago.

“What quarrelsome wretches we are! I do believe that if the arrangements of the world were such that we were placed upon separate pillars--each of us being a Simeon Stylites--we should contrive to do each other a great deal of mischief. Our food might be brought to us by benevolent birds. We should save it up in order to make a hard substance of it to hurl at the heads of our neighbours, whom we should hate with a truly neighbourly hatred; or we should make such hideous grimaces at one another, that the weaker brethren would drop from their pillars for fear of the hatred of the stronger; and then the stronger would clap their hands and laugh.

“Here is a middle-aged man toiling away, not grudgingly, for a large family. His life is not too happy in itself, but he is tolerably contented with it, having merged all his own desires and hopes in the happiness of those dear to him. He little thinks, poor man, that the wild fanaticism of some statesman, upon whose mind he cannot hope to have the faintest influence, will be the means of removing him from the face of the earth, leaving his family to the mercy of a world not too tender-hearted to the friendless and the poor. The result is, that such a man is profoundly interested in the ill-doings of all the ill-doers who inhabit not only the regions nearest to him, but those who inhabit what to him are the ends of the earth.

“Then look at government: what a thing it is, even in the best-governed communities! True it is, there are a few nations who enjoy something like constitutional government; but what a wilderness of empty talk goes on amongst them, and how little comes from it!

“There was a poet who compared man to a heavily-laden ass, driven by a brutal owner; and the poor ass learnt the right road only by heavy blows being administered to it whenever it diverged to the right or the left of the road marked out for it by its cruel master.

“Then there is the vanity of man--that unappeasable, inexhaustible vanity, always longing to be first. Nobody seems to see the beauty of being second or third. As Carlyle says, ‘We are like snakes in a bottle, all wriggling about and endeavouring to get uppermost, biting and hissing at one another.’

“Then look at the progress of Christianity. Even the most astute theologian has not been able, in his bewildering tomes, utterly to obscure the innate beauty of that grand religion. It has now been more than eighteen centuries before the world; and when a great opportunity comes for manifesting what it has done, we hear only of ‘My rights,’ ‘My honour,’ ‘My glory,’ ‘My just demands,’ and every fanatical folly that dynastic ambition can produce.

“The truth is, man is not great enough for the place he holds in creation. If Darwin’s theory is right, there is much of the ape nature still left in us, and we are still as mischievous as monkeys.

“Yet I suppose it is all right somehow, and that my thoughts are mere chimeras; but how are we to get over the sufferings imposed upon the brute creation?

“I believe I should not care about war so much, if it were not for the poor horses. If this war goes on, there will be at least a quarter of a million of these poor creatures sacrificed to it, with every variety of suffering. I begin to wish we had never subdued them.

“Well, sir, and what do you say to all this? What answer do you give to all my doubts and difficulties? There is wisdom in the mouths of babes and sucklings. What says my young metaphysician, and most judicious private secretary?”

“Well, sir, I say ditto to Mr. Burke.”

“Ah! I wish you would not say ‘ditto,’ but provide me with some answer to all my ugly questions.”

It was the foregoing outbreak on the part of my master that first made me think of writing this story, and therefore I put it at the beginning. And now I shall commence to tell who I am, and whom I serve.

My name is Alexander Johnson. I was born of poor parents. Indeed, my father was the village blacksmith--as good a man as ever made a horse-shoe, and I was the clever boy of the village, the first monitor at the National schools, who was always shown as a native prodigy to admiring visitors. Kind friends determined that I should have a better education than most boys of my class; and they got me placed in the map-drawing department of a neighbouring town, where in the evening I learnt some Latin. To tell the truth, I did not think a little of myself. The neighbouring Squire, proud of the clever boy whose cleverness had been developed in his village, chose me as tutor to his sons and daughter. The result so common in such cases happened to me. The sons were stupid, but the daughter made marvellous progress; and I, though her tutor, was to some extent her pupil; for, with feminine tact, she taught me the rules of behaviour, and by her shrewd and subtle questions in our studies often taxed my ingenuity to answer.

Need I say that we loved one another, or at least that I loved her passionately, and that she had some regard--who knows how much?--for me; but it was arranged that she should marry the neighbouring Lord’s younger son; who, however, had the merit, not always belonging to younger sons, of having a very sickly elder brother. The man was stupid and heavy: at any rate, he seemed so to me. His talk was of horses, and dogs, and guns. Why should I make an ordinary story long? Whatever he was, he succeeded in gaining the consent of her parents; and my Annie--to whom, as an honourable man, I never breathed a word to show what my feelings were towards her--agreed, after displaying the greatest reluctance, to marry this ordinary man.

I could no longer bear to be near her, and went up to London to try my fortune there. I put an advertisement in _The Times_, setting forth as best I could my poor acquirements and abilities; and, strange to say, my advertisement was answered by a request to call on him, made by a well-known political person--Mr. Milverton.

He told me that the simplicity and directness of my advertisement had caught his attention, and that if I were anything like what I represented myself to be, I should suit him very well.

It was agreed that I should go and stay with him at his country house, to which he was then going for the vacation.

The way in which I entered my new situation was one that caused me some terror. It was arranged that I was to meet Mr. Milverton, at a town seven miles distant from his residence. It was evening when I reached this town, and we immediately set off for his residence in a post-chaise. Our horses went very slowly, and when we came to a hill, Mr. Milverton proposed that we should get out and walk. He began talking to the post-boy about the appearance of his horses, which seemed dreadfully jaded; he soon extracted from him the fact that these poor animals had previously gone a journey of thirty miles. Upon this, Mr. Milverton became furious. I never saw a person in so grotesque a passion. He explained to the wretched post-boy (by the way, an elderly man) the Pythagorean system, and declared to him that he himself might be a post-horse in another life. And he told the post-boy all this with expressions of the strongest nature. The poor man seemed too dazed to make any other than the most incoherent replies.

When we got into the carriage again, we were silent for a few minutes, till Mr. Milverton turned to me and said: “You are frightened, are you not? You think you have come to live with a tiger; but the truth is, nothing infuriates me like cruelty to animals. Poor creatures, they can’t speak up for themselves, and if there were not some one to speak up for them--even to get into a fury about their treatment--it would go worse with them even than it does now.”

We had another walk up another hill: Mr. Milverton kept aloof from us this time, and the post-boy communicated to me his grievances.

“We should not have done it to please any one but the Squire; but we were afraid of offending him. I am sure I would rather have thunder and lightning than be talked to by him. He is an awful man, the Squire: he is.”

When the journey was finished, I expected that the post-boy would be dismissed ignominiously; but, on the contrary, Mr. Milverton, after insisting that the horses should remain at his place during the night, addressed the post-boy, very gravely and seriously, and gave him the accustomed fee, on making him promise (repeating the words after him), “That never again, not for anybody, not for the Queen herself, should he consent to start his horses upon a journey, after they had performed such a day’s work as these poor animals had done.”

I must confess I was a little frightened at perceiving the possible violence of the man with whom I had come to live in such a dependent position; but I have now lived with him some years, and he has never said an unkind word to me; and the terms upon which we are, may be well shown by the way in which he half-laughingly appealed to me after he had uttered the foregoing soliloquy.

I imagine in the course of this story which I firmly, believe will be a very interesting one, that I shall appear, though my name is Johnson, to be a sort of Boswell. I do not care. How can a man do greater service--at least, such a man as I am, who have not much originality--than in preserving for the world the sayings of cleverer men than himself under whom he has served? How large a part of all that wisdom has been lost to mankind for want of Boswells!--who, perhaps, are rarer characters than Dr. Johnsons. They say that no man is a hero to his valet; to which, it has been well replied, that that is not because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is nothing more than a valet.

I have said that I am not a man of much originality, but I think I have one quality in great excess which happens to be very useful now. I confess to being intensely curious about character, and the manifestations of character. My master often jokes me about this, and says, “Now, my boy, you are looking into me, and endeavouring to find out what I think, and what I feel: and you may find it out, for all I care.”

I think I have sufficiently introduced myself to the reader, and may now bring my principal personages on the scene.