In his ‘Essay on Epitaphs’, he wrote:

The best Subject for EPITAPHS is private Virtue; Virtue exerted in the same Circumstances in which the Bulk of Mankind are placed, and which, therefore, may admit of many Imitators… he that has repelled the Temptations of Poverty, and disdained to free himself from Distress, at the Expence of his Virtue, may animate Multitudes, by his Example, to the same Firmness of Heart and Steadiness of Resolution.41

It takes no very profound reading of ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’ to see that its surface meaning is very much concerned with rectifying the neglect of society, and of paying due accord to the virtues of the obscure and the petty.

But, beneath that, there is also a more profound moral level to the poem, where it engages with the consideration that Johnson felt should always inform a person’s moral conduct; that is to say, the certainty of death. Rambler No. 78 states the principle:

… the remembrance of death ought to predominate in our minds, as an habitual and settled principle, always operating, though not always perceived… [for] the great incentive to virtue is the reflection that we must die.

Yet the fact of our own eventual death, as Johnson conceded in that same paper, is a certainty from which the repetitious nature of daily life, its common round, perpetually distracts us. In the poem on Levet, Johnson employed what he had, as a grammarian, considered a flaw in the English language, to penetrate the reader afresh with the knowledge that, while virtually everything else can happen to us many times, or may not happen to us at all, we will certainly encounter death, and will encounter it only once.

On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet

Condemn’d to hope’s delusive mine,

As on we toil from day to day,

By sudden blasts, or slow decline,

Our social comforts drop away.

Well tried through many a varying year,

See LEVET to the grave descend;

Officious, innocent, sincere,

Of ev’ry friendless name the friend.

Yet still he fills affection’s eye,

Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind;

Nor, letter’d arrogance, deny

Thy praise to merit unrefin’d.

When fainting nature call’d for aid,

And hov’ring death prepar’d the blow,

His vig’rous remedy display’d

The power of art without the show.

In misery’s darkest caverns known,

His useful care was ever nigh,

Where hopeless anguish pour’d his groan,

And lonely want retir’d to die.

No summons mock’d by chill delay,

No petty gain disdain’d by pride,

The modest wants of ev’ry day

The toil of ev’ry day supplied.

His virtues walked their narrow round,

Nor made a pause, nor left a void;

And sure th’Eternal Master found

The single talent well employed.

The busy day, the peaceful night,

Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;

His frame was firm, his powers were bright,

Tho’ now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbbing fiery pain,

No cold gradations of decay,

Death broke at once the vital chain,

And freed his soul the nearest way.

For the first eight stanzas of this poem, Johnson is concerned with repeated actions: our daily toil in hope’s delusive mine, Levet’s toil of every day which met the needs of every day, the narrow round of his habitual exercise of his single talent. And in the penultimate stanza Johnson also alludes to the inattention engendered by the repetitive nature of our quotidian existence:

The busy day, the peaceful night,

Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;

But in the last stanza the verbs do not describe repeated actions. They become instead true preterites, referring to single, accomplished actions:

Death broke at once the vital chain,

And freed his soul the nearest way.

It is a feature of ‘the anomalous preterites of verbs’ in English that these two functions of the past tense (that of referring to repeated action in the past, and also to single, accomplished past actions) are not distinguished by the suffix. Had, for instance, Johnson decided to write this poem in Latin (as he was well capable of doing), the suffixes of the verbs would clearly have distinguished the separate kinds of past event to which they refer. ‘Glided’ might have been rendered by ‘surrepebant’; ‘broke’ and ‘freed’ by ‘fregit’ and ‘liberavit’. This hypothetical Latin poem, by virtue of the more regular and intricate formation of past tenses in the Latin language, would have discriminated the two types of past event which lie behind the poem more scrupulously than does, or could, the English poem we possess. But this hypothetical Latin poem would also, I believe, be a lesser poem. For it is in the ‘strange perplexity’ (to return to Hawkins’s phrase) which every reader must, for a moment, feel as we move, without preparation or warning, from imperfect to perfect tense in the final stanza, that the poem achieves its moral impact. The irregular identity of imperfect and perfect tenses in English, deplored by Johnson the grammarian as an irregularity, is here made the vehicle for the reflection which Johnson the moralist wished to place in the foundations of our ethical existence: namely, the ‘reflection that we must die’. The tenses of our hypothetical Latin poem could register vividly and directly the different event which is death. It could shock us with it. It could not, as Johnson’s English poem does, ambush us with it. For the moral impact of this poem is more subtle, and more profound because more subtle, than that of any translation could be, except a translation into a language as casual as is English in forming its past tenses. Only in such a language could what Johnson does in this poem be duplicated. Surprised by death at the end of the poem, we are forced to acknowledge, before our habitual distractedness resumes, that we too will die, and to reflect, albeit momentarily, on whether or not death will be for us an emancipation, as it was for Levet. In the strange perplexity of that final moment, Johnson’s poem achieves its moral stature, triumphs over the solipsism which lies in wait for moral language, and administers to its reader an impetus to moral reformation. At the same time, Johnson comes close to his subject: he, too, displays ‘the power of art without the show’.

In Idler No. 41 Johnson, recently smitten by the death of his mother, had already reflected on the paradoxes arising from our distracted awareness of the inevitability of death:

That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must some time be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect… Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year.42

The purpose of moral writing is forcibly to awaken us from this condition of impotent awareness. It is therefore a kind of assault upon us – in just the way that Johnson reported to Boswell that he himself had been assaulted and awakened, when a young man, from an unexpected quarter. The ‘religious progress’ of the young Johnson had, it seems, been fitful and uneven:

I fell into an inattention to religion, or an indifference about it, in my ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in which we had a seat, wanted reparation, so I was to go and find a seat in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I used to go and read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till my fourteenth year; and still I find a great reluctance to go to church. I then became a sort of lax talker against religion, for I did not much think against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would not be suffered. When at Oxford, I took up Law’s ‘Serious Call to a Holy Life’, expecting to find it a dull book, (as such books generally are), and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion, after I became capable of rational enquiry.43

When Johnson says that Law was an ‘overmatch’ for him, he draws a metaphor from wrestling, which hints to us that the benefit which flowed from Johnson’s reading of Law’s Serious Call arose precisely from the energy of its attack upon the dullness of his spiritual apprehension.