felt no evil but poverty, no sooner lived to study than his life was assailed by more dreadful calamities, disease and insanity." A visit to France failed to cheer his mind. Relapsing into habitual melancholia, he was placed in an asylum at Chelsea, and he recovered so far as to be able to return to Chichester and revise his Eclogues. Johnson sympathised profoundly with the man (" whose state I have often been near myself "), though he could not appreciate his poetry. It is related that he used to wander through the aisles of Chichester Cathedral accompanying the organ with his moans. He died aged thirty-eight at his sister Elizabeth's house adjoining the cloisters.1 A monument by Flaxman (with Hayley's inscription) was erected in the Cathedral about 1790.

Among the friends and poetic allies and abettors in literary antiquarianism of the school which Collins heralded, we must not omit to reckon with the Wartons. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of Thomas Warton, vicar of Basingstoke, who had been a fellow of Magdalen, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Joseph was a school fellow of Collins at Winchester. He eventually became master of Winchester, and died there in 1800, at. 78. Thomas was born at Basingstoke on January 9th, 1728, and, after coaching by his father, distinguished himself at Oxford (Trinity College), where he remained a familiar figure of a don for nearly fifty years. For romping with schoolboys, for heavily shotted jests in the common-room, for rousing buffoonery in the tavern, there was not such another as Tom Warton. Joseph made himself known by his candid criticism of Pope in his Essay on the Genius of that poet in 1757. Both brothers were enthusiastic for Spenser and

1 He was buried opposite the pulpit in St. Andrew's Church, as an inscription records: "Wm. Collins, gent, d. June 15, 1759." The Poems of Collins are in the Aldine and in the Muses' Library (Johnson, Goldsmith, Gray, and Collins), 1905.

the older poetry. They were alike saturated with Milton, and their verse bears traces of the Sonnets, Lycidas, L'Allegro, and, above all, Il Penseroso in almost every line. They attempted to revive old verse-forms (the sonnet), old tastes (medieval architecture), and old studies (British mythology), and to enlarge the moping owl and mortuary convention and vocabulary which were so inexpressibly dear to all these crepuscular romanticists. Thomas Warton not only championed "ode and elegy and sonnet," but wrote some very delicately tinted sonnets himself, and thereby won the praise of Southey and of Charles Lamb. Ridiculed by "Ursa Major" the Wartons became warm adherents of Gray in all his pet connoisseurships, and Thomas received as a direct legacy from the Cambridge professor (Gray was Regius Professor of History) a large quantity of critical material which he ultimately embodied in his epochmaking History of English Poetry (1774-81), forming a treasure-house of those clues by means of which students. of poetry found their way back to the magic uplands of Romance. Joseph Warton died at Winchester in 1800, Thomas at Oxford in 1790. Five years earlier he had given to the world his priceless edition of Milton's Early Poems, one of the landmarks of English verse-craft. Of the Wartons it is well said that they did as much as any of their contemporaries to discover the enchanted horn which hangs suspended outside the halls of romance. But to wind a blast of the horn was beyond the reach of their art. That they had to leave poets of a more vigorous inspiration to striplings, lusty as Coleridge, or with the youthful lungs of Chatterton and Keats.

If the Wartons represent the enthusiasms, they also represent the extravagances of the interesting but very unspontaneous poets of what we might call the laboratory school of English verse. In order to sustain their fight against the tyranny of the Pope-standard these poets be

came audibly dependent upon spells distilled from Milton and Spenser. The result is that their workmanship is but too often suggestive of the distorting effects of the mirror. Collins is undoubtedly the most exquisite and most lyrical of the group, Gray the finest scholar, Shenstone the least inspired though perhaps the most versatile. But Thomson was the most original, and that in a poem which he avowedly imitated from Spenser.1

1 The early editions of Gray by Mason, Mitford, and Gilfillan have been eclipsed by the more recent editions of Bradshaw (Aldine), Gosse (Works in 4 vols.), D. C. Tover (Gray's English Poems, 1898, and W. L. Phelps (Selections, 1894, with short Bibliography). The best biographical sketch is that by Whitwell Elwin in his Remains. The poet is represented in a most agreeable light in his Letters, the most comprehensive edition of which is that commenced by D. C. Tovey in 1900, and in the little book on The Poet Gray as a Naturalist (1903) by Charles Eliot Norton, containing the most exquisite drawings by Gray of birds and insects. His rooms at college were completely filled with books, but in each window was a small garden, Hidden away under the books was an old harpsichord. Successive portfolios indicated the growth of his taste as a connoisseur of engravings. Shakespeare and Linnæus contended for his soul." Such was Gray, the author of a poem which has given to multitudes " more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in the glorious treasury of English verse."

66

CHAPTER VII

SAMUEL JOHNSON

the bravest of the brave.
more merciful, tenderly affec-
He was called the Bear; and

"The last of the Tories Few men on record have had a tionate nature than old Samuel. did indeed too often look, and roar, like one; being forced to it in his own defence; yet within that shaggy exterior of his there beat a heart warm as a mother's, soft as a little child's. Tears trickling down the granite rock: a soft

well of Pity springs within!"-CARLYLE.

"The best proof that Johnson was an extraordinary character is that his character instead of being degraded has, on the whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all his vices and weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than they were ever exposed by Churchill or by Kenrick. . . . The memory of other authors is kept alive by their works. But the memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive."-MACAULAY.

Education-Early struggle in London-The Dictionary-The Rambler-The Lives of the Poets-Dictator of the ClubLetter to Lord Chesterfield.

DR. JOHNSON's very appearance is more familiar to us through portraits and descriptions than that of any other person of past generations. His massive figure still haunts Fleet Street, and he has "stamped his memory upon the remote Hebrides." His personal habits, his tricks of speech, his outlook upon life, all have become part of our national consciousness, and have encouraged both men in the past and men now living to support life with a manlier fortitude and an enlarged hope. The courage and beneficence of his own life, confirmed by the reports of all who knew him best, have justly become a treasured possession of the English race, of whose good points and of whose foibles he was an epitome. His intellect was not unworthy of his

other qualities, the strength and weakness of which it reflected with fidelity. His conversation was even more remarkable than his writings, admirable though the best of these were, and has conferred upon him a species of fame which no Englishman shares with him in any considerable degree. The exceptional traits which were combined in his personality have met in the person of Boswell with a delineator unrivalled in patience, dexterity, and dramatic insight. The result has been a portrait of a man of letters more lifelike than that which any other age or nation has bequeathed to us.

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield on September 18th, 1709. His father had a shop in Lichfield and a stall where he sold books at Birmingham, Uttoxeter, and other towns. He understood his trade, and was in addition a man of some learning. Of Mrs. Johnson we know little, save that she was pious and overanxious. In March, 1712, the youthful Samuel was taken up to London and touched by Queen Anne for the King's Evil (in other words, for the scrofulous malady which affected his eyesight and prejudiced his general health).

Johnson's progress as a scholar does not seem to have been prejudiced either by his ailment or by the repeated floggings which he had to undergo. After his return from school to Lichfield he loitered at home for two years, reading in a desultory and discursive fashion all the ancient writers in his father's shop. In 1728 he went into residence at Pembroke College, Oxford, as companion and private teacher to an old schoolfellow. He seems to have been a truant from university lectures, but was feared and respected for his immense memory, precocious wit and independence of mind, and out-of-the-way learning. But he had to leave Oxford, owing to lack of resources, at Christmas, 1729, and returned to Lichfield in a very hypochondriacal state without taking his degree. He could