ABSTRACT
This chapter picks up the earlier thread that leads from S. Johnson's treatment of Minim, and turn first to the subversive comic and satirical temper of Johnson as it plays over a wider range of 'Lives' that we know so well but hear so faintly. Thomas Babington Macaulay's vividly conjured visualization of Johnson in his notorious 1831 review of Croker's edition of Boswell's Life fixes Johnson, bundled with his critical mentality, judgments and ideas, to a particular instant in the history of criticism. Gillray's shockingly adept visual portrayal thus prepares the wider culture beyond literature and criticism for the Johnsonian monster of Macaulay's prose. Johnson may have protested to Mrs. Thrale that he would not be 'known to posterity for his defects only'. But he rightly anticipated the memorializing power these 'defects' can have.
