Samuel Johnson stands today as one of the most commonly quoted of all literary figures in the English-speaking world. In my Collins Dictionary of Quotations, he gets about nine pages. Shakespeare gets about sixty and the Bible gets seventeen. Just as there are Shakespeare societies all over the world, so too are there Samuel Johnson societies. Books, essays and postgraduate theses on Johnson or his works must number in the hundreds if not thousands. This brings us to the first enigma concerning Johnson—the fact that many of the works of commentary involved concentrate on the personality of Johnson himself and…