

Transcribed from the 1889 Cassell & Company edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org

                          [Picture: Book cover]

                       CASSELL’S NATIONAL LIBRARY.

                                * * * * *





                                 RASSELAS
                           PRINCE OF ABYSSINIA


                                * * * * *

                                    BY

                          SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D.

                       [Picture: Decorative image]

                       CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED:
                        LONDON, PARIS & MELBOURNE.
                                  1889.




INTRODUCTION.


RASSELAS was written by Samuel Johnson in the year 1759, when his age was
fifty.  He had written his _London_ in 1738; his _Vanity of Human Wishes_
in 1740; his _Rambler_ between March, 1750, and March, 1752.  In 1755 his
_Dictionary_ had appeared, and Dublin, by giving him its honorary LL.D.,
had enabled his friends to call him “Doctor” Johnson.  His friends were
many, and his honour among men was great.  He owed them to his union of
intellectual power with unflinching probity.  But he had worked hard,
battling against the wolf without, and the black dog within—poverty and
hypochondria.  He was still poor, though his personal wants did not
exceed a hundred pounds a year.  His wife had been seven years dead, and
he missed her sorely.  His old mother, who lived to the age of ninety,
died poor in January of this year, 1759.  In her old age, Johnson had
sought to help her from his earnings.  At her death there were some
little debts, and there were costs of burial.  That he might earn enough
to pay them he wrote _Rasselas_.

_Rasselas_ was written in the evenings of one week, and sent to press
while being written.  Johnson earned by it a hundred pounds, with
twenty-five pounds more for a second edition.  It was published in March
or April; Johnson never read it after it had been published until more
than twenty years afterwards.  Then, finding it in a chaise with Boswell,
he took it up and read it eagerly.

This is one of Johnson’s letters to his mother, written after he knew
that her last illness had come upon her.  It is dated about ten days
before her death.  The “Miss” referred to in it was a faithful friend.
“Miss” was his home name for an affectionate step-daughter, Lucy Porter:—

    “HONOURED MADAM,—

    “The account which Miss gives me of your health pierces my heart.
    God comfort and preserve you, and save you, for the sake of Jesus
    Christ.

    “I would have Miss read to you from time to time the Passion of our
    Saviour; and sometimes the sentences in the Communion Service
    beginning—’Come unto me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden, and
    I will give you rest.’

    “I have just now read a physical book which inclines me to think that
    a strong infusion of the bark would do you good.  Do, dear mother,
    try it.

    “Pray, send me your blessing, and forgive all that I have done amiss
    to you.  And whatever you would have done, and what debts you would
    have paid first, or anything else that you would direct, let Miss put
    it down; I shall endeavour to obey you.

    “I have got twelve guineas to send you” [six were borrowed.  There
    was a note in Johnson’s Diary of six guineas repaid to Allen, the
    printer, who had lent them when he wanted to send money to his dying
    mother], “but unhappily am at a loss how to send it to-night.  If I
    cannot send it to-night, it will come by the next post.

    “Pray, do not omit anything mentioned in this letter.  God bless you
    for ever and ever.

                                                                    “I am,
                                                        “Your dutiful Son,
                                                            “SAM. JOHNSON.

    “_Jan._ 13, 1759.”

That is the personal side of the tale of _Rasselas_.  In that way Johnson
suddenly, on urgent pressure, carried out a design that had been in his
mind.  The success of Eastern tales, written as a form of moral essay, in
the _Rambler_ and _Adventurer_, upon suggestion, no doubt, of Addison’s
_Vision of Mirza_, had prompted him to express his view of life more
fully than in essay form by way of Oriental apologue; and his early work
on Father Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia, caused him to choose Abyssinia for
the land in which to lay his fable.

But Johnson’s _Rasselas_ has also a close relation to the time when it
was written, as Johnson himself had to the time in which he lived.  From
the beginning of the century—and especially, in England, since the
beginning of the reign of George the Second—there had been a growing
sense of the ills of life, associated in some minds with doubt whether
there could be a just God ruling this unhappy world.  Hard problems of
humanity pressed more and more on earnest minds.  The feeling expressed
in Johnson’s _Vanity of Human __Wishes_ had deepened everywhere by the
year 1759.  This has intense expression in _Rasselas_, where all the joys
of life, without active use of the energies of life, can give no joy; and
where all uses of the energies of men are for the attainment of ideals
worthless or delusive.  This life was to Johnson, and to almost all the
earn