A Biographical Sketch of Dr Samuel Johnson was written by Thomas Tyers for The Gentleman's Magazine's December 1784 issue.
[11] Likewise, Walter Jackson Bate relies on how Tyers was able to partly capture Johnson's "bisociative" ability to bring "together two different frames of experience".
[12] Tyers, when saying Johnson "said the most common things in the newest manner", describes Johnson's "unpredictability" and a "further process of mind in which the original shuffling of perspectives, already surprising us with elements we had overlooked or forgotten, is joined by considerations drawn from other matrices of experience that can only be described as 'moral,' that is, having to do with the condition of man - with human hopes and fears; with values, purpose or aim; with the shared sense, never forgotten, of the 'doom of man'; and with an unsleeping practical urgency in considering concretely what to do and how to live.
"[12]Tyers concludes his work by saying: "At the end of this sketch, it may be hinted (sooner might have been prepossession) that Johnson told this writer, for he saw he always had his eye and ear upon him, that at some time or other he might be called upon to assist a posthumous account of him.
His little bit of gold he has worked into as much gold-leaf as he could[13]James Boswell, in his Life of Samuel Johnson, wrote: "[Tyers] abounded in anecdote, but was no sufficiently attentive to accuracy.