Chapter I: Part 1

[Transcriber's Note: Printers' errors have been marked with the notation ** . There are a few special characters in the section on Erasmus Darwin; macrons (a straight line over a letter) are denoted [=x] and breves (the bottom half of a circle over a letter) are denoted [)x].]

* * * * *

_By the same Author_,

THE

EARLY FRENCH POETS,

A SERIES OF NOTICES AND TRANSLATIONS:

WITH AN

_Introductory Sketch of the History of French Poetry._

BY THE REV. HENRY CARY, M.A.

MDCCCXLVI.

* * * * *

_Shortly will be published_,

THE ODES OF PINDAR,

IN ENGLISH VERSE.

SECOND EDITION, WITH NOTES,

EDITED BY THE REV. HENRY CARY, M.A.

* * * * *

_Preparing for the Press_,

THE

LITERARY JOURNAL AND LETTERS

OF THE

REV. HENRY FRANCIS CARY.

_WITH A MEMOIR_.

BY HIS SON, THE REV. HENRY CARY, M.A.

* * * * *

LIVES

OF

ENGLISH POETS,

FROM

JOHNSON TO KIRKE WHITE,

DESIGNED AS A CONTINUATION OF JOHNSON'S LIVES.

BY THE LATE

REV. HENRY FRANCIS CARY, M.A.

TRANSLATOR OF DANTE.

MDCCCXLVI.

* * * * *

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

The papers of which this volume is composed originally appeared in the London Magazine, between the years 1821 and 1824. It was the author's intention to continue the series of Lives to a later period, but a change in the proprietorship of the Magazine prevented the completion of his plan. They are now for the first time published in a separate form, and under their author's name.

In seeing the work through the press, the Editor has had occasion only to alter one or two particulars in the Life of Goldsmith, which the labours of that Poet's more recent biographer, Mr. Prior, have subsequently elucidated.

HENRY CARY.

WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD. _Dec_. 1, 1845.

CONTENTS.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

JOHN ARMSTRONG

RICHARD JAGO

RICHARD OWEN CAMBRIDGE

TOBIAS SMOLLETT

THOMAS WARTON

JOSEPH WARTON

CHRISTOPHER ANSTEY

WILLIAM MASON

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

ERASMUS DARWIN

WILLIAM JULIUS MICKLE

JAMES BEATTIE

WILLIAM HAYLEY

SIR WILLIAM JONES

THOMAS CHATTERTON

HENRY KIRKE WHITE

LIVES OF ENGLISH POETS.

* * * * *

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

There is, perhaps, no one among our English writers, who for so great a part of his life has been an object of curiosity to his contemporaries as Johnson. Almost every thing he said or did was thought worthy of being recorded by some one or other of his associates; and the public were for a time willing to listen to all they had to say of him. A mass of information has thus been accumulated, from which it will be my task to select such a portion as shall seem sufficient to give a faithful representation of his fortunes and character, without wearying the attention of the reader. That any important addition should be made to what has been already told of him, will scarcely be expected.

Samuel Johnson, the elder of two sons of Michael Johnson, who was of an obscure family, and kept a bookseller's shop at Lichfield, was born in that city on the 18th of September, 1709. His mother, Sarah Ford, was sprung of a respectable race of yeomanry in Worcestershire; and, being a woman of great piety, early instilled into the mind of her son those principles of devotion for which he was afterwards so eminently distinguished. At the end of ten months from his birth, he was taken from his nurse, according to his own account of himself, a poor diseased infant, almost blind; and, when two years and a half old, was carried to London to be touched by Queen Anne for the evil. Being asked many years after if he had any remembrance of the Queen, he said that he had a confused but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood. So predominant was this superstition relating to the king's evil, that there was a form of service for the occasion inserted in the Book of Common Prayer, and Bishop Bull,[1] in one of his Sermons, calls it a relique and remainder of the primitive gift of healing. The morbidness of constitution natural to him, and the defect in his eye-sight, hindered him from partaking in the sports of other children, and probably induced him to seek for distinction in intellectual superiority. Dame Oliver, who kept a school for little children, in Lichfield, first taught him to read; and, as he delighted to tell, when he was going to the University, brought him a present of gingerbread, in token of his being the best scholar her academy had ever produced. His next instructor in his own language was a man whom he used to call Tom Browne; and who, he said, published a Spelling Book, and dedicated it to the universe. He was then placed with Mr. Hunter the head master of the grammar school in his native city, but, for two years before he came under his immediate tuition, was taught Latin by Mr. Hawkins, the usher. It is just that one, who, in writing the lives of men less eminent than himself, was always careful to record the names of their instructors, should obtain a tribute of similar respect for his own. By Mr. Price, who was afterwards head master of the same school, and whose name I cannot mention without reverence and affection, I have been told that Johnson, when late in life he visited the place of his education, shewed him a nook in the school-room, where it was usual for the boys to secrete the translations of the books they were reading; and, at the same time, speaking of his old master, Hunter, said to him, "He was not severe, Sir. A master ought to be severe. Sir, he was cruel." Johnson, however, was always ready to acknowledge how much he was indebted to Hunter for his classical proficiency. At the age of fifteen, by the advice of his mother's nephew, Cornelius Ford, a clergyman of considerable abilities, but disgraced by the licentiousness of his life, and who is spoken of in the Life of Fenton, he was removed to the grammar-school of Stourbridge, of which Mr. Wentworth was master. Here he did not remain much more than a twelvemonth, and, as he told Dr. Percy, learned much in the school, but little from the master; whereas, with Hunter, he had learned much from the master, and little in the school. The progress he made was, perhaps, gained in teaching the other boys, for Wentworth is said to have employed him as an assistant. His compositions in English verse indicate that command of language which he afterwards attained. The two following years he accuses himself of wasting in idleness at home; but we must doubt whether he had much occasion for self-reproach, when we learn that Hesiod, Anacreon, the Latin works of Petrarch, and "a great many other books not commonly known in the Universities," were among his studies.

His father, though a man of strong understanding, and much respected in his line of life, was not successful in business. He must, therefore, have had a firm reliance on the capacity of his son; for while he chided him for his want of steady application, he resolved on making so great an effort as to send him to the University; and, accompanying him thither, placed him, on the 31st of October, 1728, a commoner at Pembroke College, Oxford. Some assistance was, indeed, promised him from other quarters, but this assistance was never given; nor was his industry quickened by his necessities. He was sometimes to be seen lingering about the gates of his college; and, at others, sought for relief from the oppression of his mind in affected mirth and turbulent gaiety. So extreme was his poverty, that he was prevented by the want of shoes from resorting to the rooms of his schoolfellow, Taylor, at the neighbouring college of Christ Church; and such was his pride, that he flung away with indignation a new pair that he found left at his door. His scholarship was attested by a translation into Latin verse of Pope's Messiah; which is said to have gained the approbation of that poet. But his independent spirit, and his irregular habits, were both likely to obstruct his interest in the University; and, at the end of three years, increasing debts, together with the failure of remittances, occasioned by his father's insolvency, forced him to leave it without a degree. Of Pembroke College, in his Life of Shenstone, and of Sir Thomas Browne, he has spoken with filial gratitude. From his tutor, Mr. Jorden, whom he described as a "worthy man, but a heavy one," he did not learn much. What he read solidly, he said, was Greek; and that Greek, Homer and Euripides; but his favourite study was metaphysics, which we must suppose him to have investigated by the light of his own meditation, for he did not read much in it. With Dr. Adams, then a junior fellow, and afterwards master of the College, his friendship continued till his death.

Soon after his return to Lichfield, his father died; and the following memorandum, extracted from the little register which he kept in Latin, of the more remarkable occurrences that befel him, proves at once the small pittance that was left him, and the integrity of his mind: "1732, Julii 15. Undecim aureos deposui: quo die quicquid ante matris funus (quod serum sit precor) de paternis bonis sperare licet, viginti scilicet libras accepi. Usque adeo mihi fortuna fingenda est. Interea ne paupertate vires animi languescant nec in flagitium egestas abigat, cavendum.--1732, July 15. I laid down eleven guineas. On which day, I received the whole of what it is allowed me to expect from my father's property, before the decease of my mother (which I pray may be yet far distant) namely, twenty pounds. My fortune therefore must be of my own making. Meanwhile, let me beware lest the powers of my mind grow languid through poverty, or want drive me to evil." On the following day we find him setting out on foot for Market Bosworth, in Leicestershire, where he had engaged himself as an usher to the school of which Mr. Crompton was master. Here he described to his old school-fellow, Hector, the dull sameness of his life, in the words of the poet: Vitam continct una dies: that it was as unvaried as the note of the cuckoo, and that he did not know whether it were more disagreeable for him to teach, or for the boys to learn the grammar rules. To add to his misery, he had to endure the petty despotism of Sir Wolstan Dixie, one of the patrons of the school. The trial of a few months disgusted him so much with his employment, that he relinquished it, and, removing to Birmingham, became the guest of his friend Mr. Hector, who was a chirurgeon in that town, and lodged in the house of a bookseller; having remained with him about six months, he hired lodgings for himself. By Mr. Hector he was stimulated, not without some difficulty, to make a translation from the French, of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, for which he received no more than five guineas from the bookseller, who, by an artifice not uncommon, printed it at Birmingham, with the date of London in the title-page. To Mr. Hector, therefore, is due the impulse which first made Johnson an author. The motion being once given did not cease; for, having returned to Lichfield in 1735, he sent forth in August proposals for printing by subscription Politian's Latin Poems, with a Life of the Author, Notes, and a History of Latin Poetry, from the age of Petrarch to that of Politian. His reason for fixing on this era it is not easy to determine. Mussato preceded Petrarch, the interval between Petrarch and Politian is not particularly illustrated by excellence in Latin poetry; and Politian was much surpassed in correctness and elegance, if not in genius, by those who came after him--by Flaminio, Navagero, and Fracastorio. Yet in the hands of Johnson, such a subject would not have been wanting in instruction or entertainment. Such as were willing to subscribe, were referred to his brother, Nathaniel Johnson, who had succeeded to his father's business in Lichfield; but the design was dropped, for want of a sufficient number of names to encourage it, a deficiency not much to be wondered at, unless the inhabitants of provincial towns were more learned in those days than at present.

In this year, he made another effort to obtain the means of subsistence by an offer of his pen to Cave, the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine; but the immediate result of the application is not known; nor in what manner he supported himself till July 1736, when he married Elizabeth Porter, the widow of a mercer at Birmingham, and daughter of William Jervis, Esq. of Great Peatling, in Leicestershire. This woman, who was twenty years older than himself, and to whose daughter he had been an unsuccessful suitor, brought him eight hundred pounds; but, according to Garrick's report of her, was neither amiable nor handsome, though that she was both in Johnson's estimation appears from the epithets "formosae, cultae, ingeniosae," which he inscribed on her tombstone. Their nuptials were celebrated at Derby, and to that town they went together on horseback from Birmingham; but the bride assuming some airs of caprice on the road, like another Petruchio he gave her such effectual proofs of resolution, as reduced her to the abjectness of shedding tears. His first project after his marriage was to set up a school; and, with this intention, he hired a very commodious house, at the distance of about two miles from Lichfield, called Edial Hall, which has lately been taken down, and of which a representation is to be seen in the History of Lichfield, by Mr. Harwood. One of my friends, who inhabited it for the same purpose, has told me that an old countryman who lived near it, and remembered Johnson and his pupil Garrick, said to him, "that Johnson was not much of a scholar to look at, but that master Garrick was a strange one for leaping over a stile." It is amusing to observe the impressions which such men make on common minds. Unfortunately the prejudice occasioned by Johnson's unsightly exterior was not confined to the vulgar, insomuch that it has been thought to be the reason why so few parents committed their children to his care, for he had only three pupils. This unscholarlike appearance it must have been that made the bookseller in the Strand, to whom he applied for literary employment, eye him archly, and recommend it to him rather to purchase a porter's knot. But, as an old philosopher has said, every thing has two handles. It was, perhaps, the contrast between the body and the mind, between the incultum corpus, and the ingenium, which afterwards was one cause of his being received so willingly in those circles of what is called high life, where any thing that is exceedingly strange and unusual is apt to carry its own recommendation with it. Failing in his attempt at Edial, he was disposed once more to engage in the drudgery of an usher, and offered himself in that capacity to the Rev. William Budworth, master of the grammar-school at Brewood, in Staffordshire, celebrated for having been the place in which Bishop Hurd received his education, under that master. But here again nature stood in his way; for Budworth was fearful lest a strange motion with the head, the effect probably of disease, to which Johnson was habitually subject, might excite the derision of his scholars, and for that reason declined employing him. He now resolved on trying his fortune in the capital.

Among the many respectable families in Lichfield, into whose society Johnson had been admitted, none afforded so great encouragement to his literary talents as that of Mr. Walmsley, who lived in the Bishop's palace, and was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, and whom he has so eloquently commemorated in his Lives of the Poets. By this gentleman he was introduced in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Colson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and the master of an academy, "as a very good scholar, and one who he had great hopes would turn out a fine dramatic writer, who intended to try his fate with a tragedy, and to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French." The tragedy on which Mr. Walmsley founded his expectations of Johnson's future eminence as a dramatic poet, was the Irene. A shrewd sally of humour, to which the reading of this piece gave rise, evinces the terms of familiarity on which he was with his patron; for, on Walmsley's observing, when some part of it had been read, that the poet had already involved his heroine in such distress, that he did not see what further he could do to excite the commiseration of the audience, Johnson replied, "that he could put her into the Ecclesiastical Court." Garrick, who was to be placed at Colson's academy, accompanied his former instructor on this expedition to London, at the beginning of March, 1737. It does not appear that Mr. Walmsley's recommendation of him to Colson, whom he has described under the character of Gelidus[2], in the twenty-fourth paper of the Rambler, was of much use. He first took lodgings in Exeter-street in the Strand, but soon retired to Greenwich, for the sake of completing his tragedy, which he used to compose, walking in the Park.

From Greenwich, he addressed another letter to Cave, with proposals for translating Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent, with the notes of Le Courayer. Before the summer was expired, he returned for Mrs. Johnson, whom he had left at Lichfield, and remaining there three months, at length finished Irene. On his second visit to London, his lodgings were first in Woodstock-street, near Hanover Square, and then in Castle-street, near Cavendish Square. His tragedy, which was brought on the stage twelve years after by Garrick, having been at this time rejected by the manager of the playhouse, he was forced to relinquish his hopes of becoming a dramatic writer, and engaged himself to write for the Gentleman's Magazine. The debates in Parliament were not then allowed to be given to the public with the same unrestricted and generous freedom with which it is now permitted to report them. To elude this prohibition, and gratify the just curiosity of the country, the several members were designated by fictitious names, under which they were easily discoverable; and their speeches in both Houses of Parliament, which was entitled the Senate of Lilliput, were in this manner imparted to the nation in the periodical work above-mentioned. At first, Johnson only revised these reports; but he became so dexterous in the execution of his task, that he required only to be told the names of the speakers, and the side of the question to be espoused, in order to frame the speeches himself; an artifice not wholly excusable, which afterwards occasioned him some self-reproach, and even at the time pleased him so little, that he did not consent to continue it. The whole extent of his assistance to Cave is not known. The Lives of Paul Sarpi, Boerhaave, Admirals Drake and Blake, Barretier, Burman, Sydenham, and Roscommon, with the Essay on Epitaphs, and an Essay on the Account of the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough, were certainly contributed to his Miscellany by Johnson. Two tracts, the one a Vindication of the Licenser of the Stage from the Aspersions of Brooke, Author of Gustavus Vasa; the other, Marmor Norfolciense, a pamphlet levelled against Sir Robert Walpole and the Hanoverian succession, were published by him, separately, in 1739.

For his version of Sarpi's History, he had received from Cave, before the 21st of April in this year, fifty pounds, and some sheets of it had been committed to the press, when, unfortunately, the design was stopped, in consequence of proposals appearing for a translation of the same book, by another person of the same name as our author, who was curate of St. Martin's in the Fields, and patronized by Dr. Pearce, the editor of Longinus. Warburton [3] afterwards expressed a wish that Johnson would give the original on one side, and his translation on the other. His next engagement was to draw up an account of the printed books in the Earl of Oxford's library, for Osborne, the bookseller, who had purchased them for thirteen thousand pounds. Such was the petulant impatience of Osborne, during the progress of this irksome task, that Johnson was once irritated so far as to beat him.

In May, 1738, appeared his "London," imitated from the Third Satire of Juvenal, for which he got ten guineas from Dodsley. The excellence of this poem was so immediately perceived, that it reached a second edition in the course of a week. Pope having made some ineffectual inquiries concerning the author, from Mr. Richardson, the son of the painter, observed that he would soon be _deterre_. In the August of 1739, we find him so far known to Pope, that at his intercession, Earl Gower applied to a friend of Swift to assist in procuring from the University the degree of Master of Arts, that he might be enabled to become a candidate for the mastership of a school then vacant; the application was without success.

His own wants, however pressing, did not hinder him from assisting his mother, who had lost her other son. A letter to Mr. Levett, of Lichfield, on the subject of a debt, for which he makes himself responsible on her account, affords so striking a proof of filial tenderness, that I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of transcribing it.

_December_, 1, 1743.

Sir,--I am extremely sorry that we have encroached so much upon your
forbearance with respect to the interest, which a great perplexity of
affairs hindered me from thinking of with that attention that I ought,
and which I am not immediately able to remit to you, but will pay it
(I think twelve pounds) in two months. I look upon this, and on the
future interest of that mortgage, as my own debt; and beg that you
will be pleased to give me directions how to pay it, and not mention
it to my dear mother. If it be necessary to pay this in less time, I
believe I can do it; but I take two months for certainty, and beg an
answer whether you can allow me so much time. I think myself very much
obliged for your forbearance, and shall esteem it a great happiness to
be able to serve you. I have great opportunities of dispersing any
thing that you may think it proper to make public. I will give a note
for the money payable at the time mentioned, to any one here that you
shall appoint.

I am, Sir, your most obedient,

and most humble servant,

SAM. JOHNSON.

_At Mr. Osborne's, Bookseller, in Gray's Inn_.

In the following year (1744) he produced his Life of Savage, a work that gives the charm of a romance to a narrative of real [**re in original] events; and which, bearing the stamp of that eagerness [**ea ness in original] and rapidity with which it was thrown off the mind of the writer, exhibits rather the fervour of an eloquent advocate, than the laboriousness of a minute biographer. The forty-eight octavo pages, as he told Mr. Nichols [4], were written in one day and night. At its first appearance it was warmly praised, in the Champion, probably either by Fielding, or by Ralph, who succeeded to him in a share of that paper; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, when it came into his hand, found his attention so powerfully arrested, that he read it through without changing his posture, as he perceived by the torpidness of one of his arms that had rested on a chimney-piece by which he was standing. For the Life of Savage [5], he received fifteen guineas from Cave. About this time he fell into the company of Collins, with whom, as he tells us in his life of that poet, he delighted to converse.

His next publication (in 1745) was a pamphlet, called "Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, with Remarks on Sir T.H. (Sir Thomas Hanmer's) Edition of Shakspeare," to which were subjoined, proposals for a new edition of his plays. These observations were favourably mentioned by Warburton, in the preface to his edition; and Johnson's gratitude for praise bestowed at a time when praise was of value to him, was fervent and lasting. Yet Warburton, with his usual intolerance of any dissent from his opinions, afterwards complained in a private letter [6] to Hurd, that Johnson's remarks on his commentaries were full of insolence and malignant reflections, which, had they not in them "as much folly as malignity," he should have had reason to be offended with.

In 1747, he furnished Garrick, who had become joint-patentee and manager of Drury Lane, with a Prologue on the opening of the house. This address has been commended quite as much as it deserves. The characters of Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are, indeed, discriminated with much skill; but surely something might have been said, if not of Massinger and Beaumont and Fletcher, yet at least of Congreve and Otway, who are involved in the sweeping censure passed on "the wits of Charles."

Of all his various literary undertakings, that in which he now engaged was the most arduous, a Dictionary of the English language. His plan of this work was, at the desire of Dodsley, inscribed to the Earl of Chesterfield, then one of the Secretaries of State; Dodsley, in conjunction with six other book-sellers, stipulated fifteen hundred and seventy-five pounds as the price of his labour; a sum, from which, when the expenses of paper and transcription were deducted, a small portion only remained for the compiler. In other countries, this national desideratum has been supplied by the united exertions of the learned. Had the project for such a combination in Queen Anne's reign been carried into execution, the result might have been fewer defects and less excellence: the explanation of technical terms would probably have been more exact, the derivations more copious, and a greater number of significant words now omitted [7], have been collected from our earliest writers; but the citations would often have been made with less judgment, and the definitions laid down with less acuteness of discrimination.

From his new patron, whom he courted without the aid of those graces so devoutly worshipped by that nobleman, he reaped but small advantage; and, being much exasperated at his neglect, Johnson addressed to him a very cutting, but, it must be owned, an intemperate letter, renouncing his protection, though, when the Dictionary was completed, Chesterfield had ushered its appearance before the public in two complimentary papers in the World; but the homage of the client was not to be recalled, or even his resentment to be appeased. His great work is thus spoken of at its first appearance, in a letter from Thomas Warton to his brother [8]. "The Dictionary is arrived; the preface is noble. There is a grammar prefixed, and the history of the language is pretty full; but you may plainly perceive strokes of laxity and indolence. They are two most unwieldy volumes. I have written to him an invitation. I fear his preface will disgust, by the expressions of his consciousness of superiority, and of his contempt of patronage." In 1773, when he gave a second edition, with additions and corrections, he announced in a few prefatory lines that he had expunged some superfluities, and corrected some faults, and here and there had scattered a remark; but that the main fabric continued the same. "I have looked into it," he observes, in a letter to Boswell, "very little since I wrote it, and, I think, I found it full as often better as worse than I expected."

To trace in order of time the various changes in Johnson's place of residence in the metropolis, if it were worth the trouble, would not be possible. A list of them, which he gave to Boswell, amounting to seventeen, but without the correspondent dates, is preserved by that writer. For the sake of being near his printer, while the Dictionary was on the anvil, he took a convenient house in Gough Square, near Fleet-street, and fitted up one room in it as an office, where six amanuenses were employed in transcribing for him, of whom Boswell recounts in triumph that five were Scotchmen. In 1748, he wrote, for Dodsley's Preceptor, the Preface, and the Vision of Theodore the Hermit, to which Johnson has been heard to give the preference over all his other writings. In the January of the ensuing year, appeared the Vanity of Human Wishes, being the Tenth Satire of Juvenal imitated, which he sold for fifteen guineas; and, in the next month, his Irene was brought on the stage, not without a previous altercation between the poet and his former pupil, concerning some changes which Garrick's superior knowledge of the stage made him consider to be necessary, but which Johnson said the fellow desired only that they might afford him more opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his heels. He always treated the art of a player with illiberal contempt; but was at length, by the intervention of Dr. Taylor, prevailed on to give way to the suggestions of Garrick. Yet Garrick had not made him alter all that needed altering; for the first exhibition of Irene shocked the spectators with the novel sight of a heroine who was to utter two verses with the bow-string about her neck. This horror was removed from a second representation; but, after the usual course of ten nights, the tragedy was no longer in request. Johnson thought it requisite, on this occasion, to depart from the usual homeliness of his habit, and to appear behind the scenes, and in the side boxes, with the decoration of a gold-laced hat and waistcoat. He observed, that he found himself unable to behave with the same ease in his finery, as when dressed in his plain clothes. In the winter of this year, he established a weekly club, at the King's Head, in Ivy Lane, near St. Paul's, of which the other members were Dr. Salter, a Cambridge divine; Hawkesworth; Mr. Ryland, a merchant; Mr. John Payne, the bookseller; Mr. John Dyer, a man of considerable erudition, and a friend of Burke's; Doctors Macghie, Baker, and Bathurst, three physicians; and Sir John Hawkins.

He next became a candidate for public favour, as the writer of a periodical work, in the manner of the Spectator; and, in March, 1750, published the first number of the Rambler, which was continued for nearly two years; but, wanting variety of matter, and familiarity of style, failed to attract many readers, so that the largest number of copies that were sold of any one paper did not exceed five hundred. The topics were selected without sufficient regard to the popular taste. The grievances and distresses of authors particularly were dwelt on to satiety; and the tone of eloquence was more swelling and stately than he had hitherto adopted. The papers allotted to criticism are marked by his usual acumen; but the justice of his opinions is often questionable. In the humourous pieces, when our laughter is excited, I doubt the author himself, who is always discoverable under the masque of whatever character he assumes, is as much the object as the cause of our merriment; and, however moral and devout his more serious views of life, they are often defective in that most engaging feature of sound religion, a cheerful spirit. The only assistance he received was from Richardson, Mrs. Chapone, Miss Talbot, and Mrs. Carter, the first of whom contributed the 97th number; the second, four billets in the 10th; the next, the 30th; and the last, the 44th and 100th numbers.

Three days after the completion of the Rambler (March 17, 1752), he was deprived of his wife, whom, notwithstanding the disparity in their age, and some occasional bickerings, he had tenderly loved. Those who are disposed to scrutinize narrowly and severely into the human heart, may question the sincerity of his sorrow, because he was collected enough to write her funeral sermon. But the shapes which grief puts on in different minds are as dissimilar as the constitution of those minds. Milton, in whom the power of imagination was predominant, soothed his anguish for the loss of his youthful friend, in an irregular, but most beautiful assemblage of those poetic objects which presented themselves to his thoughts, and consecrated them to the memory of the deceased; and Johnson, who loved to act the moralizer and the rhetorician, alleviated his sufferings by declaiming on the instability of human happiness.

During this interval he also wrote the Prologue to Comus, spoken by Garrick, for the benefit of Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, grand-daughter to Milton; the Prologue and Postscript to Lander's impudent forgeries concerning that poet, by which Johnson was imposed on, as well as the rest of the world; a letter to Dr. Douglas, for the same impostor, after he had been detected, acknowledging and expressing contrition for the fraud; and the Life of Cheynel, in the Student.

Soon after his wife's death, he became intimate with Beauclerk and Langton, two young men of family and distinction, who were fellow collegians at Oxford, and much attached to each other; and the latter of whom admiration of the Rambler had brought to London with the express view of being introduced to the author. Their society was very agreeable to him; and he was, perhaps, glad to forget himself by joining at times in their sallies of juvenile gaiety. One night, when he had lodgings in the Temple, he was roused by their knocking at his door; and appearing in his shirt and nightcap, he found they had come together from the tavern where they had supped, to prevail on him to accompany them in a nocturnal ramble. He readily entered into their proposal; and, having indulged themselves till morning in such frolics as came in their way, Johnson and Beauclerk were so well pleased with their diversion, that they continued it through the rest of the day; while their less sprightly companion left them, to keep an engagement with some ladies at breakfast, not without reproaches from Johnson for deserting his friends "for a set of unidea'd girls."

In 1753, he gave to Dr. Bathurst, the physician, whom he regarded with much affection, and whose practice was very limited, several essays for the Adventurer, which Hawkesworth was then publishing; and wrote for Mrs. Lenox a Dedication to the Earl of Orrery, of her Shakspeare illustrated; and, in the following year, inserted in the Gentleman's Magazine a Life of Cave, its former editor.

Previously to the publication of his Dictionary, it was thought advisable by his friends that the degree of Master of Arts should be obtained for him, in order that his name might appear in the title page with that addition; and it was accordingly, through their intercession, conferred on him by the University of Oxford. The work was presented by the Earl of Orrery, one of his friends then at Florence, to the Delia Crusca Academy, who, in return, sent their Dictionary to the author. The French Academy paid him the same compliment. But these honours were not accompanied by that indispensable requisite, "provision for the day that was passing over him." He was arrested for debt, and liberated by the kindness of Richardson, the writer of Clarissa, who became his surety. To prevent such humiliation, the efforts of his own industry were not wanting. In 1756, he published an Abridgement of his Dictionary, and an Edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Christian Morals, to which he prefixed a Life of that writer; he contributed to a periodical miscellany, called the Universal Visitor, by Christopher Smart,[9] and yet more largely to another work of the same kind, entitled, the Literary Magazine; and wrote a dedication and preface for Payne's Introduction to the Game of Draughts, and an Introduction to the newspaper called the London Chronicle, for the last of which he received a single guinea. Yet either conscientious scruples, or his unwillingness to relinquish a London life, induced him to decline the offer of a valuable benefice in Lincolnshire, which was made him by the father of his friend, Langton, provided he could prevail on himself to take holy orders, a measure that would have delivered him from literary toil for the remainder of his days. But literary toil was the occupation for which nature had designed him. In the April of 1758, he commenced the Idler, and continued to publish it for two years in the Universal Chronicle. Of these Essays, he was supplied with Nos. 33, 93, and 96, by Thomas Warton; with No. 67 by Langton, and with Nos. 76, 79, and 82 by Reynolds. Boswell mentions twelve papers being given by his friends, but does not say who were the contributors of the remaining five. The Essay on Epitaphs, the Dissertation on Pope's Epitaphs, and an Essay on the Bravery of the English common Soldiers, were subjoined to this paper, when it was collected into volumes. It does not differ from the Rambler, otherwise than as the essays are shorter, and somewhat less grave and elaborate.

Another wound was inflicted on him by the death of his mother, who had however reached her ninetieth year. His affection and his regret will best appear from the following letter to the daughter of his deceased wife.

_To Miss Porter, in Lichfield_.

You will conceive my sorrow for the loss of my mother, of the best
mother. If she were to live again, surely I should behave better to
her.
But she is happy, and what is past is nothing to her: and, for me,
since I cannot repair my faults to her, I hope repentance will efface
them. I return you, and all those that have been good to her, my
sincerest thanks, and pray God to repay you all with infinite
advantage. Write to me, and comfort me, dear child. I shall be glad
likewise, if Kitty will write to me. I shall send a bill of twenty
pounds in a few days, which I thought to have brought to my mother,
but God suffered it not. I have not power nor composure to say much
more. God bless you, and bless us all.

I am, dear Miss,

Your affectionate humble servant,

SAM. JOHNSON.

Her attention to his mother, as it is reported in the following words, by Miss Seward, ensured to Johnson the sympathy of Lucy Porter.

From the age of twenty till her fortieth year, when affluence came to her by the death of her eldest brother, she had boarded in Lichfield with Dr. Johnson's mother, who still kept that little bookseller's shop, by which her husband had supplied the scanty means of existence. Meanwhile, Lucy Porter kept the best company of our little city, but would make no engagement on market-days, lest Granny, as she called Mrs. Johnson, should catch cold by serving in the shop. There Lucy Porter took her place, standing behind the counter, nor thought it a disgrace to thank a poor person who purchased from her a penny battledore [10].

To defray the expenses of his mother's funeral, he had recourse to his pen; and, in the evenings of one week produced the Rasselas, for which he received one hundred pounds, and was presented by the purchasers with twenty-five more on its reaching a second edition. Rasselas is a noble monument of the genius of its author. Reflections so profound, and so forcible a draught of some of the great outlines of the human intellect and passions, are to be found in few writers of any age or country. The mind is seldom presented with any thing so marvellous as the character of the philosopher, who has persuaded himself that he is entrusted with the management of the elements. Johnson's dread of insanity was, perhaps, relieved by embodying this mighty conception. He had seen the shadowy form in the twilight, and might have dissipated or eased his apprehensions by coming up to it more closely, and examining into the occasion of his fears. In this tale, the censure which he has elsewhere passed on Milton, that he is a lion who has no skill in dandling the kid, recoils upon himself. His delineation of the female character is wanting in delicacy.

In this year he supplied Mr. Newbery with an Introduction to the World Displayed, a Collection of Voyages and Travels: till the publication of his Shakspeare, in 1765, the only writings acknowledged by himself were a Review of Tytler's Vindication of Mary Queen of Scots, in the Gentleman's Magazine; an Introduction to the Proceedings of the Committee for Clothing the French Prisoners; the Preface to Bolt's Dictionary of Trade and Commerce; a Dedication to the King, of Kennedy's Complete System of Astronomical Chronology, unfolding the Scriptures; and a Dedication to the Queen, of Hoole's Tasso.

In the course of this period, he made a short visit to Lichfield, and thus communicates his feelings on the occasion, in a letter dated July 20, 1762, to Baretti, his Italian friend, who was then at Milan.

Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets
much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by
a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My play-fellows
were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I am no longer young. My
only remaining friend had changed his principles, and was become the
tool of the predominant faction. My daughter-in-law, from whom I
expected most, and whom I met with sincere benevolence, had lost the
beauty and gaiety of youth, without having gained much of the wisdom
of age. I wandered about for five days, and took the first convenient
opportunity of returning to a place, where, if there is not much
happiness, there is at least such a diversity of good and evil, that
slight vexations do not fix upon the heart.

I think in a few weeks to try another excursion; though to what end?
Let me know, my Baretti, what has been the result of your return to
your own country; whether time has made any alteration for the better,
and, whether, when the first rapture of salutation was over, you did
not find your thoughts confessed their disappointment.

Henceforward Johnson had no longer to struggle with the evils of extreme poverty. A pension of £300 was granted to him, in 1762, by His Majesty. Before his acceptance of it, in answer to a question put by him to the Earl of Bute, in these words, "Pray, my Lord, what am I to do for the pension?" he was assured by that nobleman that it was not given him for any thing he was to do, but for what he had done. The definition he had given of the word pension, in his dictionary, that in England it was generally understood to mean pay, given to a state hireling, for treason to his country, raised some further scruples whether he ought himself to become a pensioner; but they were removed by the arguments, or the persuasion of Mr. Reynolds, to whom he had recourse for advice in this dilemma. What advice Reynolds would give him he must have known pretty well before-hand; but this was one of the many instances in which men, having first determined how to act, are willing to imagine that they are going for clearer information, where they in truth expect nothing but a confirmation of their own resolve. The liberality of the nation could not have been extended to one who had better deserved it. But he had a calamity yet more dreadful than poverty to encounter. The depression of his spirits was now become almost intolerable. "I would have a limb amputated," said he to Dr. Adams, "to recover my spirits." He was constantly tormented by harassing reflections on his inability to keep the many resolutions he had formed of leading a better life; and complained that a kind of strange oblivion had overspread him, so that he did not know what was become of the past year, and that incidents and intelligence passed over him without leaving any impression.

Neither change of place nor the society of friends availed to prevent or to dissipate this melancholy. In 1762, he made an excursion into Devonshire, with Sir Joshua Reynolds; the next year he went to Harwich, with Boswell; in the following, when his malady was most troublesome, the meeting which acquired the name of the Literary Club was instituted, and he passed a considerable time in Lincolnshire, with the father of Langton; and, in the year after, visited Cambridge, in the company of Beauclerk. Of the Literary Club, first proposed by Reynolds, the other members at its first establishment were Burke, Dr. Nugent, Beauclerk, Langton, Goldsmith, Chamier, and Sir John Hawkins. They met at the Turk's Head, in Gerrard-street, Soho, one evening in the week, and usually remained together till a late hour. The society was afterwards extended, so as to comprise a large number of those who were most eminent, either for their learning or their station in life, and the place of meeting has been since at different times changed to other parts of the town, nearer to the Parliament House, or to the usual resorts of gaiety. A club was the delight of Johnson. We lose some of our awe for him, when we contemplate him as mimicked by his old scholar Garrick, in the act of squeezing a lemon into the punch-bowl, and asking, as he looks round the company, in his provincial accent, of which he never got entirely rid, "Who's for _poonch_?" If there was any thing likely to gratify him more than a new club, it was the public testimony of respect from a learned body; and this he received from Trinity College, Dublin, in a diploma for the degree of Doctor of Laws, an honour the more flattering, as it came without solicitation.

At the beginning of 1766, his faithful biographer, James Boswell, who had known him for three years, found him in a good house in Johnson's court, Fleet-street, to which he had removed from lodgings in the Temple. By the advice of his physician, he had now begun to abstain from wine, and drank only water or lemonade. He had brought two companions into his new dwelling, such as few other men would have chosen to enliven their solitude. On the ground floor was Miss Anna Williams, daughter of Zechariah Williams, a man who had practised physic in Wales, and, having come to England to seek the reward proposed by Parliament for the discovery of the longitude, had been assisted by Johnson in drawing up an account of the method he had devised. This plan was printed with an Italian translation, which is supposed to be Baretti's, on the opposite page; and a copy of the pamphlet, presented by Johnson to the Bodleian, is deposited in that library. Miss Williams had been a frequent visitor at Johnson's before the death of his wife, and having after that event, come under his roof to undergo an operation for a cataract on her eyes with more convenience than could have been had in her own lodgings, continued to occupy an apartment in his house, whenever he had one, till the time of her death. Her disease ended in total blindness, which gave her an additional claim on his benevolence. When he lived in the Temple, it was his custom, however late the hour, not to retire to rest until he had drunk tea with her in her lodgings in Bolt-court. One night when Goldsmith and Boswell were with him, Goldsmith strutted off in the company of Johnson, exclaiming with an air of superiority, "I go to Miss Williams," while Boswell slunk away in silent disappointment; but it was not long, as Boswell adds, before he himself obtained the same mark of distinction. Johnson prevailed on Garrick to get her a benefit at the playhouse, and assisted her in preparing some poems she had written for the press, by both which means she obtained the sum of about £300. The interest of this, added to some small annual benefactions, probably hindered her from being any pecuniary burden to Johnson; and though she was apt to be peevish and impatient, her curiosity, the retentiveness of her memory, and the strength of her intellect, made her, on the whole, an agreeable companion to him. The other inmate, whose place was in one of his garrets, was Robert Levett, a practiser of physic among the lower people, grotesque in his appearance, formal in his manners, and silent before company: though little thought of by others, this man was so highly esteemed for his abilities by Johnson, that he was heard to say, he should not be satisfied though attended by all the College of Physicians, unless he had Levett with him. He must have been a useful assistant in the chemical processes with which Johnson was fond of amusing himself; and at one of which Murphy, on his first visit, found him in a little room, covered with soot like a chimney-sweeper, making aether. Beauclerk, with his lively exaggeration, used to describe Johnson at breakfast, throwing his crusts to Levett after he had eaten the crumb. The pathetic verses written by Johnson on his death, which happened suddenly three years before his own, shew with what tenderness of affection he regarded Levett. Some time after (1778), to this couple, who did not live in much harmony together, were added Mrs. Desmoulins, the daughter of Dr. Swinfen his god-father, and widow of a writing-master; Miss Carmichael, and, as Boswell thought, a daughter also of Mrs. Desmoulins, all of whom were lodged in his house. To the widow he allowed half-a-guinea a week, the twelfth part, as Boswell observes, of his pension. It was sometimes more than he could do, to reconcile so many jarring interests. "Williams," says he, in a letter to Mrs. Thrale, "hates every body: Levett hates Desmoulins and does not love Williams: Desmoulins hates them both. Poll loves none of them." Poll was Miss Carmichael, of whom I do not find that any thing else is recorded. Boswell ventured to call this groupe the seraglio of Johnson, and escaped without a rebuke.

From these domestic feuds he would sometimes withdraw himself to the house of Mr. Thrale, at Streatham, an opulent brewer, with whom his acquaintance had begun in 1765. With this open-hearted man he was always sure of a welcome reception for as long a time as he chose; and the mistress of the house, though after the death of her first husband and her subsequent marriage to an Italian she somewhat ungraciously remembered the petty annoyances which Johnson's untoward habits had occasioned her, was evidently pleased by his hearty expressions of regard, and flattered by his conversation on subjects of literature, in which she was herself well able to take a part.