96

Molly Aston.

(A.D. 1782.

not seem to be very accurately known, a lady hopes that the following information may not be unacceptable.

She remembers Dr. Johnson on a visit to Dr. Taylor, at Ashbourn, some time between the end of the year 37, and the middle of the year 40; she rather thinks it to have been after he and his wife were removed to London'. During his stay at Ashbourn, he made frequent visits to Mr. Meynell', at Bradley, where his company was much desired by the ladies of the family, who were, perhaps, in point of elegance and accomplishments, inferiour to few of those with whom he was afterwards acquainted. Mr. Meynell's eldest daughter was afterwards married to Mr. Fitzherbert', father to Mr. Alleyne Fitzherbert, lately minister to the court of Russia. Of her, Dr. Johnson said, in Dr. Lawrence's study, that she had the best understanding he ever met with in any human being. At Mr. Meynell's he also commenced that friendship with Mrs. Hill Boothby, sister to the present Sir Brook Boothby, which continued till her death. The young woman whom he used to call Molly Aston, was sister to Sir Thomas Aston, and daughter to a Baronet;

1 Hawkins (Life, p. 61) says that in August, 1738 (? 1739), Johnson went to Appleby, in Leicestershire, to apply for the mastership of Appleby School. This was after he and his wife had removed to London. It is likely that he visited Ashbourne.

''Old Meynell' is mentioned, post, 1780, in Mr. Langton's 'Collection,' as the author of 'the observation, " For anything I see, foreigners are fools;"' and 'Mr. Meynell,' post, April 1, 1779, as saying that 'The chief advantage of London is, that a man is always so near his burrow!' See post, under March 16, 1759, note, and April 21, 1773. Mr. Alleyne Fitzherbert was created Lord St. Helens.

See post, 1780, end of Mr. Langton's 'Collection.'

Johnson, writing to Dr. Taylor on July 31, 1756, said, I find myself very unwilling to take up a pen, only to tell my friends that I am well, and indeed I never did exchange letters regularly but with dear Miss Boothby.' Notes and Queries, 6th S. v. 304. At the end of the Piozzi Letters are given some of his letters to her. They were republished together with her letters to him in An Account of the Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1805.

The words of Sir John Hawkins, p. 316. BOSWELL. When Mr. Thrale once asked Johnson which had been the happiest period of his past life, he replied, "it was that year in which he spent one whole evening with Molly Aston. That, indeed," said he, "was not happiness, it was rapture; but the thoughts of it sweetened the whole year." I must add that the evening alluded to was not passed tête-à

she

Aetat. 23.]

Johnson an Usher.

97

she was also sister to the wife of his friend Mr. Gilbert Walmsley'. Besides his intimacy with the above-mentioned persons who were surely people of rank and education, while he was yet at Lichfield he used to be frequently at the house of Dr. Swinfen, a gentleman of a very ancient family in Staffordshire, from which, after the death of his elder brother, he inherited a good estate. He was, besides, a physician of very extensive practice; but for want of due attention to the management of his domestick concerns, left a very large family in indigence. One of his daughters, Mrs. Desmoulins, afterwards found an asylum in the house of her old friend, whose doors were always open to the unfortunate, and who well observed the precept of the Gospel, for he to the unthankful and to the evil".""

was kind

In the forlorn state of his circumstances, he accepted of an offer to be employed as usher in the school of MarketBosworth, in Leicestershire, to which it appears, from one of his little fragments of a diary, that he went on foot, on the 16th of July.—Julii 16. Bosvortiam pedes petiï'.' But it

tête, but in a select company of which the present Lord Kilmorey was one. Molly," says Dr. Johnson, "was a beauty and a scholar, and a wit and a whig; and she talked all in praise of liberty; and so I made this epigram upon her-She was the loveliest creature I ever saw'Liber ut esse velim suasisti pulchra Maria; Ut maneam liber-pulchra Maria vale.'

'Will it do this way in English, Sir,' said I :

'Persuasions to freedom fall oddly from you;
If freedom we seek-fair Maria, adieu !'

'It will do well enough,' replied he; 'but it is translated by a lady, and the ladies never loved Molly Aston.' Piozzi's Anec. p. 157. See post, May 8, 1778.

Sir Thomas Aston, Bart., who died in January 1724-5, left one son, named Thomas also, and eight daughters. Of the daughters, Catherine married Johnson's friend, the Hon. Henry Hervey [post, 1737]; Margaret, Gilbert Walmsley. Another of these ladies married the Rev. Mr. Gastrell [the man who cut down Shakspeare's mulberry tree, post, March 25, 1776]; Mary, or Molly Aston, as she was usually called, became the wife of Captain Brodie of the navy. MALONE. ? Luke vi. 35.

'If this was in 1732 it was on the morrow of the day on which he received his share of his father's property, ante, p. 93. A letter pub

I.-7

is

98

Johnson an usher.

[A.D. 1732.

is not true, as has been erroneously related, that he was assistant to the famous Anthony Blackwall, whose merit has been honoured by the testimony of Bishop Hurd', who was his scholar; for Mr. Blackwall died on the 8th of April, 17302, more than a year before Johnson left the University'.

This employment was very irksome to him in every respect, and he complained grievously of it in his letters to his friend Mr. Hector, who was now settled as a surgeon at Birmingham. The letters are lost; but Mr. Hector recollects his writing 'that the poet had described the dull sameness of his existence in these words, "Vitam continet una dies" (one day contains the whole of my life); that it was unvaried as the note of the cuckow; and that he did not know whether it was more disagreeable for him to teach, or the boys to learn, the grammar rules.' His general aversion to this painful drudgery was greatly enhanced by a disagreement between him and Sir Wolstan Dixey, the patron of the school, in whose house, I have been told, he officiated as a kind of domestick chaplain, so far, at least, as to say grace at table, but was treated with what he represented as intolerable harshness'; and, after suffering for a few months such complicated misery', he relinquished a situation which

lished in Notes and Queries, 6th S. x. 421, shews that for a short time he was tutor to the son of Mr. Whitby of Heywood.

'Bishop Hurd does not praise Blackwall, but the Rev. Mr. Budworth, headmaster of the grammar school at Brewood, who had himself been bred under Blackwall. MALONE. Mr. Nichols relates (post, Dec. 1784) that Johnson applied for the post of assistant to Mr. Budworth. See Gent. Mag. Dec. 1784, p. 957. BOSWELL.

See ante, P. 91.

• The patron's manners were those of the neighbourhood. Hutton, writing of this town in 1770, says,—' The inhabitants set their dogs at me merely because I was a stranger. Surrounded with impassable roads, no intercourse with man to humanize the mind, no commerce to smooth their rugged manners, they continue the boors of nature.' Life of W. Hutton, p. 45.

• It appears from a letter of Johnson's to a friend, dated Lichfield, July 27, 1732, that he had left Sir Wolstan Dixie's house recently, before that letter was written,

MALONE.

all

Aetat. 23.]

His life in Birmingham.

99 all his life afterwards he recollected with the strongest aversion, and even a degree of horrour'. But it is probable that at this period, whatever uneasiness he may have endured, he laid the foundation of much future eminence by application to his studies.

Being now again totally unoccupied, he was invited by Mr. Hector to pass some time with him at Birmingham, as his guest, at the house of Mr. Warren, with whom Mr. Hector lodged and boarded. Mr. Warren was the first established bookseller in Birmingham, and was very attentive to Johnson, who he soon found could be of much service to him in his trade, by his knowledge of literature; and he even obtained the assistance of his pen in furnishing some numbers of a periodical Essay printed in the newspaper, of which Warren was proprietor. After very diligent inquiry, I have not been able to recover those early specimens of that particular mode of writing by which Johnson afterwards so greatly distinguished himself.

He continued to live as Mr. Hector's guest for about six months, and then hired lodgings in another part of the

14

The despicable wretchedness of teaching,' wrote Carlyle, in his twenty-fourth year, when he was himself a teacher, 'can be known only to those who have tried it, and to Him who made the heart and knows it all. One meets with few spectacles more afflicting than that of a young man with a free spirit, with impetuous though honourable feelings, condemned to waste the flower of his life in such a calling; to fade in it by slow and sure corrosion of discontent; and at last obscurely and unprofitably to leave, with an indignant joy, the miseries of a world which his talents might have illustrated and his virtues . adorned. Such things have been and will be. But surely in that better life which good men dream of, the spirit of a Kepler or a Milton will find a more propitious destiny.' Conway's Carlyle, p. 176.

This newspaper was the Birmingham Journal. In the office of the Birmingham Daily Post is preserved the number (No. 28) for May 21, 1733. It is believed to be the only copy in existence. Warren is described by W. Hutton (Life, p. 77) as one of the 'three eminent booksellers' in Birmingham in 1750. His house was "over against the Swan Tavern," in High Street; doubtless in one of the old halftimbered houses pulled down in 1838 [1850].' Timmins's Dr. Johnson in Birmingham, p. 4.

town,

100

Lobo's VOYAGE TO ABYSSINIA.

[A.D. 1733.

town', finding himself as well situated at Birmingham' as he supposed he could be any where, while he had no settled plan of life, and very scanty means of subsistence. He made some valuable acquaintances there, amongst whom were Mr. Porter, a mercer, whose widow he afterwards married, and Mr. Taylor', who by his ingenuity in mechanical inventions, and his success in trade, acquired an immense fortune. But the comfort of being near Mr. Hector, his old school-fellow and intimate friend, was Johnson's chief inducement to continue here.

In what manner he employed his pen at this period, or whether he derived from it any pecuniary advantage, I have not been able to ascertain. He probably got a little money from Mr. Warren; and we are certain, that he executed here one piece of literary labour, of which Mr. Hector has favoured me with a minute account. Having mentioned that he had read at Pembroke College a Voyage to Abyssinia, by Lobo, a Portuguese Jesuit, and that he thought an abridgment and translation of it from the French into English might be an useful and profitable publication, Mr. Warren and Mr. Hector joined in urging him to undertake it.

''In the month of June 1733, I find him resident in the house of a person named Jarvis, at Birmingham.' Hawkins, p. 21. His wife's maiden name was Jarvis or Jervis.

In 1741, Hutton, a runaway apprentice, arrived at Birmingham. He says, I had never seen more than five towns, Nottingham, Derby, Burton, Lichfield and Walsall. The outskirts of these were composed of wretched dwellings, visibly stamped with dirt and poverty. But the buildings in the exterior of Birmingham rose in a style of elegance. Thatch, so plentiful in other places, was not to be met with in this. The people possessed a vivacity I had never beheld. I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake. Their very step along the street showed alacrity. Every man seemed to know what he was about. The faces of other men seemed tinctured with an idle gloom; but here with a pleasing alertness. Their appearance was strongly marked with the modes of civil life.' Life of W. Hutton, p. 41.

* Hutton, in his account of the Birmingham riots of 1791, describing the destruction of a Mr. Taylor's house, says,-'The sons of plunder forgot that the prosperity of Birmingham was owing to a Dissenter, father to the man whose property they were destroying;' ib. p. 181.

He