and according to the testimony of Dr. Adams, his fellow-collegian, was the best qualified young man he had ever known admitted. He had not been long at the university before he had an opportunity of displaying his poetical genius, in a Latin translation of Pope's Messiah; which at once established his fame as a classical scholar, and procured him a compliment from the great author of that poem himself.

But amidst his growing reputation as a scholar, he felt the penury of his circumstances insupportable. Humiliating as it must have been to a person of Johnson's independent and elevated mind, his finances did not even enable him to make a decent appearance in dress, much less to defray the expense of academical institution or elegant society. At last the insolvency of his father completed his distress; and he relinquished his prospects at the university, after a short and interrupted residence of three years.

Returning to Lichfield, he was for some time dependant on the hospitality of benevolent friends. At this period the morbid melancholy of his constitution, heightened by his forlorn circumstances, made him fancy that he was approaching to insanity, and he actually consulted a physician on this subject: who found that his imagination and spirits alone were affected, and that his judgment was sound and vigorous. From this habitual despondency he never was perfectly relieved, and all his amusements and his studies were only so many temporary alleviations of its influence.

Being without permanent protection or provision, he gladly accepted the offer of the place of usher at a school at Market Bosworth, immediately after his father's death ; on which latter event a sum of twenty pounds was the only inheritance which fell to his share. This situation he soon found intolerable; from the tyrannical behaviour of a patron, in whose house he lodged. His prospects

were now worse than ever; and he was obliged to the friendship of Mr. Hector, his former companion, who was now settled at Birmingham, for a temporary refuge. At this place he commenced his career as an author, in the service of the editor of a newspaper; and here he published a translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, for which he received five guineas. This first prosaic production of his pen contains none of that characteristic style which he afterwards formed, and which is peculiarly his own.

Johnson had been early sensible of the influence of female charms; and after a transient passion for miss Lucy Porter, paid his addresses to her mother, the widow of a mercer in Birmingham, which were accepted; and in 1735 she made him happy with her hand, and a portion of eight hundred pounds. The object of his choice was nearly double his own age, and not extremely amiable either in person or manners: yet he says it was a lovematch on both sides; and he entertained a sincere affection for her, which did not terminate with her life.

As he was now in a state of comparative independence, he attempted to establish a boarding-school at Edial, near Lichfield; but this scheme proved unsuccessful for want of encouragement; and in 1737 he determined to try fortune in London, the grand mart of genius and industry, and where talents of every kind have the amplest scope.

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Accordingly he set out, in company with Garrick; who had been his pupil, and now became his fellowadventurer. That two men who afterwards rose to such celebrity, should be thus launched into life at the same time, and not only as townsmen but as friends, is a singular circumstance. The prospects of Johnson were certainly the most uninviting; he had been already broken by disappointments, and besides was a married man. The gay fancies of hope danced before the other, and his fine flow of spirits enabled him to view with

How Johnson at first employed his talents, is not well known: he had been however in previous correspondence with Mr. Cave, the proprietor of the Gentleman's Magazine; and for some years after he settled in the metropolis, he derived his principal support from the part he took in that publication. After a few months' trial, in which he might possibly feel his strength, and enlarge his connexions, he returned to Lichfield for a short time; and having now finished his tragedy of Irene, which had long employed his attention, he finally settled in London with his wife, who had hitherto beeu left in the country.

The poor pittances that can be allowed to a mere contributor to a periodical work, however respectable, cannot be supposed adequate to supply the wants of an individual, much less those of a family. Johnson laboured under the utmost pecuniary distress; and meeting with Savage, a man of genius and equally unfortunate, their common misery endeared them to each other. He offered his tragedy to the stage, but it was rejected; and even his exquisite poem entitled " Loudon," imitated from Juvenal, with difficulty he could get accepted for publication. No sooner, however, was it read than admired and if it was not a source of great emolument, it certainly made Johnson known as an author by profession; and facilitated the acceptance of other performances which, in the sequel, he sent into the world.

Still his mind revolted at the idea of a precarious dependance on the profits of authorship; and he endeavoured, but in vain, to obtain the mastership of the grammarschool of Appleby, in Leicestershire. Pope himself, unknown and unsolicited, wished to serve him in this affair; but he could not succeed, and the business was dropped. He then made an attempt to be admitted at

Doctor's Commons, but here too he failed; and being thus frustrated in every endeavour at meliorating his situation, he began to acquiesce in the drudgery of authorship; and seems to have adopted the resolution of attempting to write himself into notice, by an attack upon government. His Marmor Norfolcense, or "Norfolk Marble," was published to vent his spleen against the Brunswick succession, and the adherents and ministers of that illustrious family. It gratified his own political prejudices, and gained him the favour of men of similar principles; but exposed him to the danger of a prosecution.

Passing over that checkered scene of his life in which he may be described as a stipendiary of Cave, we come to a period when he soared to a higher flight in literature; and fully confident of his own powers, which had gradually been developed and slowly rewarded, assumed the rank to which he had long been eminently entitled in the republic of letters.

In 1749 he engaged as a critic and commentator on Shakspeare; and published the plan of his great English Dictionary, addressed to lord Chesterfield in a strain of dignified compliment. The original hint of this great work is said to have been suggested by Dodsley; and that respectable literary character and bookseller, with several others of the profession, contracted for its execution, at the price of fifteen hundred guineas.

His friend Garrick, by his transcendant theatrical abilities, had now raised himself to the situation of joint patentee and manager of Drury-lane theatre; and under his patronage, the long dormant tragedy of Irene was brought upon the stage. But the pompous phraseology and brilliant sentiments of Johnson were not colloquial ough for the drama. He displayed more art than , more description than pathos; and consequently redy was received but coolly by the public. The however, had sense enough to perceive that his

talents did not lie in this direction; he acquiesced in the decision of the public, and ceased to waste his time and labour on a species of composition for which nature had not adapted him.

During the time that he was engaged on his Dictionary, to relieve the tedium of uniform attention to one object, he brought out his Rambler; a work containing the purest morals and justest sentiments, and on which alone his reputation as a fine writer and a good man may safely be rested. At first, however, it was far from being popular: but Johnson persevered with a laudable fortitude, conscious of its merits; and he had afterwards the pleasure to see it run through many editions, and even to be translated into foreign languages.

Soon after those excellent essays were closed, he lost his wife; an event which threw him into the greatest affliction. His friends in general, from her character and behaviour, were disposed to ridicule what in many would have been deemed a feigned sorrow: but Johnson felt all the poignancy of sincere grief, as is evident from his always commemorating the day of her death as a kind of religious fast.

His dictionary was now about to appear; and lord Chesterfield, sensible of neglecting the person who had, in the first instance, claimed the honour of his patronage, paved the way for its favourable reception with the public, by two essays in the periodical paper called The World, expressly devoted to its praise. His lordship, no doubt, expected that launching those two little cockboats, as Johnson contemptuously termed them, to assist him when he was now in port, would obliterate the remembrance of past neglect, and procure him the immortal honour of a dedication. But the dignified lexicographer saw through the artifice; and in a keen letter rejected the advances of his lordship, and thereby afforded a noble lesson to ungracious patrons and insulted authors. After some expressions of general