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SAMUEL JOHNSON.

(DECEMBER 1856.)

and he saw but very imperfectly with the other. But the force of his mind overcame every impediment. Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with emi-such ease and rapidity that at every school to which he was sent he was soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he resided at home, and was left to his own devices. He learned much at this time, though his studies were without guidance and without plan. He ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude of books, read what was interesting, and passed over what was dull. An ordinary lad would have acquired little or no useful knowledge in such a way: but much that was dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel. He read little Greek; for his proficiency in that language was not such that he could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and elo

SAMUEL JOHNSON, one of the most nent English writers of the eighteenth century, was the son of Michael Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and a bookseller of great note in the midland counties. Michael's abilities and attainments seem to have been considerable. He was so well acquainted with the contents of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought him an oracle on points of learning. Between him and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious and political sympathy. He was a zealous churchman, and, though he had qualified himself for municipal office by taking the oaths to the sove-quence. But he had left school a good reigns in possession, was to the last a Latinist; and he soon acquired, in the Jacobite in heart. At his house, a large and miscellaneous library of which house which is still pointed out to every he now had the command, an extensive traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel knowledge of Latin literature. That was born on the 18th of September 1709. Augustan delicacy of taste which is the In the child, the physical, intellectual, boast of the great public schools of and moral peculiarities which after- England he never possessed. But he wards distinguished the man were was early familiar with some classical plainly discernible; great muscular writers who were quite unknown to the strength accompanied by much awk- best scholars in the sixth form at Eton. wardness and many infirmities; great He was peculiarly attracted by the quickness of parts, with a morbid pro-works of the great restorers of learning. pensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper. He had inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was beyond the power of medicine to remove. His parents were weak enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific for this malady. In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and stroked and presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne. One of his earliest recollections was that of a stately lady in a diamond stomacher and a long black hood. Her hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his malady. His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time the sight of one eye;

Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited his curiosity; and he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the diction and versification of his own Latin compositions show that he had paid at least as much attention to modern copies from the antique as to the original models.

While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was much better qualified to pore upon books, and to talk about them, than to trade in them. His business declined; his debts increased; it was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his household were defrayed. It was out of his power to support his son at either university;

but a wealthy neighbour offered assistance; and, in reliance on promises which proved to be of very little value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford. When the young scholar presented himself to the rulers of that society, they were amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners than by the quantity of extensive and curious information which he had picked up during many months of desultory but not unprofitable study. On the first day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and one of the most learned among them declared that he had never known a freshman of equal attainments.

Arts: but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of support

on which he had relied had not been kept. His family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731, he was under the necessity of quitting the university without a degree. In the following winter his father died. The old man left but a pittance; and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the support of his widow. The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds.

His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard struggle At Oxford, Johnson resided during with poverty. The misery of that about three years. He was poor, even struggle needed no aggravation, but to raggedness; and his appearance ex- was aggravated by the sufferings of cited a mirth and a pity which were an unsound body and an unsound equally intolerable to his haughty mind. Before the young man left the spirit. He was driven from the qua- university, his hereditary malady had drangle of Christ Church by the sneer- broken forth in a singularly cruel form. ing looks which the members of that He had become an incurable hypoaristocratical society cast at the holes chondriac. He said long after that he in his shoes. Some charitable person had been mad all his life, or at least placed a new pair at his door; but he not perfectly sane; and, in truth, spurned them away in a fury. Dis- eccentricities less strange than his tress made him, not servile, but reck- have often been thought grounds sufless and ungovernable. No opulent ficient for absolving felons, and for gentleman commoner, panting for one-setting aside wills. His grimaces, his and-twenty, could have treated the aca- gestures, his mutterings, sometimes didemical authorities with more gross verted and sometimes terrified people disrespect. The needy scholar was who did not know him. At a dinner generally to be seen under the gate of table he would, in a fit of absence, Pembroke, a gate now adorned with stoop down and twitch off a lady's his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, shoe. He would amaze a drawing over whom, in spite of his tattered room by suddenly ejaculating a clause gown and dirty linen, his wit and au- of the Lord's Prayer. He would condacity gave him an undisputed ascend-ceive an unintelligible aversion to a ency. In every mutiny against the particular alley, and perform a great discipline of the college he was the circuit rather than see the hateful ringleader. Much was pardoned, how-place. He would set his heart on ever, to a youth so highly distinguished touching every post in the streets by abilities and acquirements. He had through which he walked. If by any early made himself known by turning Pope's Messiah into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly Virgilian; but the translation found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope himself.

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course of things, have become a Bachelor of

chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who

was many miles off, calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life; but he was afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion he found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of dejection; for his religion partook of his own character. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and discoloured by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul; and, though they might bo sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him.

town he printed a translation, little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia. He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse: but subscriptions did not come in; and the volume never appeared.

While leading this vagrant and miserable life. Johnson fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the same room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, With such infirmities of body and as he called her, was the most beautiof mind, this celebrated man was left, ful, graceful and accomplished of her at two-and-twenty, to fight his way sex. That his admiration was unthrough the world. He remained feigned cannot be doubted; for she during about five years in the midland was as poor as himself. She accepted, counties. At Lichfield, his birth-place with a readiness which did her little and his early home, he had inherited honour, the addresses of a suitor who some friends and acquired others. He might have been her son. The marwas kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, riage, however, in spite of occasional a gay officer of noble family, who hap- wranglings, proved happier than might pened to be quartered there. Gilbert have been expected. The lover conWalmesley, registrar of the ecclesias- tinued to be under the illusions of the tical court of the diocese, a man of wedding-day till the lady died in her distinguished parts, learning, and sixty-fourth year. On her monument knowledge of the world, did himself he placed an inscription extolling the honour by patronising the young ad- charms of her person and of her manventurer, whose repulsive person, un-ners; and, when, long after her depolished manners and squalid garb cease, he had occasion to mention her, moved many of the petty aristocracy he exclaimed, with a tenderness half of the neighbourhood to laughter or to ludicrous, half pathetic, "Pretty creadisgust. At Lichfield, however, John-ture!"

son could find no way of earning a His marriage made it necessary for livelihood. He became usher of a him to exert himself more strenuously grammar school in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In that

than he had hitherto done. He took a house in the neighbourhood of his native town, and advertised for pupils. But eighteen months passed away; and only three pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his appearance was so strange, and his temper so violent, that his

cookshop underground, where he could wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations and privations must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a name. One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for employment measured with a scornful eye that ath

claimed, "You had better get a porter's knot, and carry trunks." Nor was the advice bad; for a porter was likely to be as plentifully fed, and as comfortably lodged, as a poet.

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was able to form any

expect more than bread for the day which was passing over him. He never forgot the generosity with which Hervey, who was now residing in London, relieved his wants during this time of trial. "Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher many years later, "was a vicious man; but he was very kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey I shall love him." At Hervey's table Johnson sometimes enjoyed feasts which were made more agreeable by contrast. But in general he dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpenny worth of meat, and a pennyworth of bread, at an alehouse near Drury Lane.

schoolroom must have resembled an coat, the means of dining on tripe at a ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted grandmother whom he called his Titty well qualified to make provision for the comfort of young gentlemen. David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used, many years later, to throw the best company of London into convulsions of laughter by mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary pair. At length Johnson, in the twenty-letic though uncouth frame, and exeighth year of his age, determined to seek his fortune in the capital as a literary adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, three acts of the tragedy of Irene in manuscript, and two or three letters of introduction from his. friend Walmesley. Never, since literature became a call-literary connection from which he could ing in England, had it been a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his residence in London. In the preceding generation a writer of eminent merit was sure to be munificently rewarded by the government. The least that he could expect was a pension or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he might hope to be a member of parliament, a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It would be easy, on the other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth century of whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from the booksellers. But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity. Literature had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the great, and had not begun to flourish under the patronage of the public. One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired by his pen what was then considered as a handsome fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles and ministers of state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an author whose reputation was established, and whose works were popular, such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every library, such an author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a greater run than any drama since The Beggar's Opera, was sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best

The effect of the privations and sufferings which he endured at this time was discernible to the last in his temper and his deportment. His manners had never been courtly. They now became almost savage. Being frequently under the necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness. Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries and alamode beefshops, was far from delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with

rancid butter, he gorged himself with | conviction-for his serious opinion was such violence that his veins swelled, that one form of government was just and the moisture broke out on his as good or as bad as another-but from forehead. The affronts which his po- mere passion, such as inflamed the verty emboldened stupid and low- Capulets against the Montagues, or the minded men to offer to him would Blues of the Roman circus against the have broken a mean spirit into syco- Greens. In his infancy he had heard phancy, but made him rude eyen to fe- so much talk about the villanies of the rocity. Unhappily the insolence which, Whigs, and the dangers of the Church, while it was defensive, was pardonable, that he had become a furious partisan and in some sense respectable, accom- when he could scarcely speak. Before panied him into societies where he was he was three he had insisted on being treated with courtesy and kindness. taken to hear Sacheverell preach at He was repeatedly provoked into strik-Lichfield Cathedral, and had listened ing those who had taken liberties with to the sermon with as much respect, him. All the sufferers, however, were and probably with as much intelligence, wise enough to abstain from talking as any Staffordshire squire in the conabout their beatings, except Osborne, gregation. The work which had been the most rapacious and brutal of book-begun in the nursery had been comsellers, who proclaimed everywhere | pleted by the university. Oxford, when that he had been knocked down by Johnson resided there, was the most the huge fellow whom he had hired to Jacobitical place in England; and puff the Harleian Library.

Pembroke was one of the most JacoAbout a year after Johnson had be- bitical colleges in Oxford. The pregun to reside in London, he was fortu- judices which he brought up to London nate enough to obtain regular employ- were scarcely less absurd than those of ment from Cave, an enterprising and in- his own Tom Tempest. Charles II. telligent bookseller, who was proprietor and James II. were two of the best and editor of the "Gentleman's Maga-kings that ever reigned. Laud, a poor zine." That journal, just entering on creature who never did, said, or wrote the ninth year of its long existence, was anything indicating more than the the only periodical work in the king- ordinary capacity of an old woman, dom which then had what would now was a prodigy of parts and learning be called a large circulation. It was, over whose tomb Art and Genius still indeed, the chief source of parliamen- continued to weep. Hampden detary intelligence. It was not then safe, served no more honourable name even during a recess, to publish an ac- than that of "the zealot of rebellion." count of the proceedings of either House Even the ship money, condemned not without some disguise. Cave, however, less decidedly by Falkland and Clarenventured to entertain his readers with don than by the bitterest Roundheads, what he called "Reports of the Debates Johnson would not pronounce to have of the Senate of Lilliput." France been an unconstitutional impost. Under was Blefuseu; London was Mildendo: a government, the mildest that had ever pounds were sprugs: the Duke of been known in the world-under a Newcastle was the Nardac secretary government, which allowed to the of State Lord Hardwicke was the people an unprecedented liberty of Hurgo Hickrad; and William Pulteney speech and action-he fancied that he was Wingul Pulnub. To write the was a slave; he assailed the ministry speeches was, during several years, the with obloquy which refuted itself, and business of Johnson. He was gene- regretted the lost freedom and happirally furnished with notes, meagre in-ness of those golden days in which a deed, and inaccurate, of what had been writer who had taken but one-tenth said; but sometimes he had to find part of the license allowed to him arguments and eloquence both for the would have been pilloried, mangled ministry and for the opposition. He with the shears, whipped at the cart's was himself a Tory, not from rational tail, and flung into a noisome dungeon

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