Samuel Johnson

I finished W. Jackson Bate's biography on Johnson. Some selections that caught my eye:

The Seven Years' War had begun. In political articles, he strongly attacked the policy of imperial and commercial expansion. The quarrel of the British and the French in America, as he viewed it, was the quarrel of "two robbers" for the land stolen from the Indians. Of the two, the French had at least the credit of treating the victim -- the natives -- with more consideration.
(Chapter 19, section 4, 3rd graph)

The truth is that something very serious was beginning to happen to him, and he was quite aware of it. The general reconsideration of life so common in middle age and the problems inevitable to it were something he had foreseen long before this. He had taken them into account and half assimilated them in advance, in protective preparation . . . But now, as he was entering his fifties, he was more vulnerable . The larger part of middle age could seem already behind him, and instead of his life being half over . . .it could now, by any optimistic calculation, appear two-thirds over, and most of it could seem a waste -- a history of disappointments, frustrations, regrets, and mistaken choices, none of it to be blamed on the work but only on himself.
(Chapter 20, section 1, 4th graph)

"Work and love," said Freud near the end of his own life, in Civilization and Its Discontents, are the only ways in which human nature can come closet to happiness or at least avoid misery. Freud adds, of course, that far fewer people really "love " than think they do.
(Chapter 21, section 5, 1st graph)

[Baretti] was put in Newgate Prison, where a rival Italian teacher soon called on him saying he wanted to take over Baretti's pupils after his execution and asking Baretti to write him a letter of recommendation.
(Chapter 24, section 2, 3rd graph)