“He repeated with great spirit a poem, consisting of several stanzas, in four lines, in alternate rhyme, which he said he had composed some years before, on occasion of a rich, extravagant young gentleman's coming of age; saying he had never repeated it but once since he composed it, and had given but one copy of it.”
The date was
November 30, 1784, two weeks before Dr. Johnson’s death. His final days mingled
grotesquery with nobility. He suffered from general circulatory disease made
evident six months earlier by a stroke; chronic bronchitis and emphysema,
accompanied by growing breathlessness; congestive heart failure, the cause of
Johnson’s fluid retention; and rheumatoid arthritis. The recipient of the “one
copy” was Hester Thrale (Piozzi), who would publish it in her collection British Synonymy in 1794. The passage
above is from the final chapter of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The poem begins:
“Long-expected
one-and-twenty,
Ling’ring year, at length is flown:
Pride and
pleasure, pomp and plenty,
Great . . . . . . ., are now your own.”
Because of
the poem’s satirical thrust, Johnson was cagey about the identity of its
addressee. In a letter to Thrale dated August 8, 1780, Johnson had written:
“You have
heard in the papers how [--] is come to age. I have enclosed a short song of
congratulation which you must not shew to anybody. It is odd that it should
come into anybody’s head. I hope you will read it with candour; it is, I
believe, one of the author’s first essays in that way of writing, and a
beginner is always to be treated with tenderness.”
Scholars
have identified the young man as Sir John Lade, born on August 1, 1759, thus turning
twenty-one on that date in 1780. He was the nephew and ward of Mrs. Thrale’s first
husband. According to Abraham Hayward in his Life of Piozzi, Lade asked Johnson if he should marry. Johnson
replied: “I would advise no man to marry, Sir, who is not likely to propagate
understanding.” Hayward adds that Lade “married a woman of the town, became a
celebrated member of the Four-in-Hand Club, and contrived to waste the whole of
a fine fortune before he died.” He obviously ignored Johnson’s advice and even
spent time in debtor’s prison.
Don’t get
too self-righteous when judging Lade. How many of us, turning twenty-one, could
say with a straight face that we were prudent, mature and possessed common
sense? By my twenty-first birthday I had been using a fake ID for three years.
After work that day I stopped by the liquor store to arm myself for that
evening’s party, and was excited to use my legitimate ID (“long-expected”) for
the first time. They didn’t card me and I was immensely disappointed. Nor did I
heed the “wise man” in A.E. Housman’s poem from A Shropshire Lad (1896):
“When I was
one-and-twenty
I heard a
wise man say,
‘Give crowns
and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls
away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was
one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
“When I was
one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
‘The heart
out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid
with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am
two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.”
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