plaint. Johnson must have been for he thought it "curiously charac among the last on whom that cere- teristic," but his editor, Croker, set the mony was performed for which in the idle tale at rest by reminding the old editions of the Books of Common reader that at the time assigned the tory Prayer there was an especial religious preacher was interdicted from preachservice. Queen Anne was the last to ing, and though he had visited Lichpractice this mode of cure. The iden- field in his triumphal progress through tical gold coin or "touch piece" which, the counties, it was when Johnson was according to custom the child Johnson but nine months old. There is also a received on the occasion may now be stupid story of his having recited to seen preserved as a curiosity in the his mother at the same tender age of British Museum. The Johnson family three, four bad lines of his composiwere inveterate tories and were in- tion, an epitaph on a duckling which clined to believe to the end in the effi- he had trod upon and killed. cacy of kings. Johnson professed to retain a recollection of this introduction to royalty, remembering a boy crying at the palace when he went to be touched and the appearance though shadowy of Queen Anne. He had, he told Mrs. Thrale, "a confused, but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood." Another incident of about the same time, savoring also of toryism, is of a decidedly apocryphal character, though circumstantially related to Boswell by a lady of Lichfield whose grandfather witnessed the scene and which is also represented on a bas-relief of the monument to Johnson in front of his birth-place. In this he is pictured as a child of three years old held on his father's shoulders listening to the preaching of the famous highchurch Doctor Sacheverell. It was impossible, the tale runs, to keep the boy at home, for "young as he was he believed he had caught the public spirit and zeal for Sacheverell and would have staid for ever in the church, satisfied with beholding him." Boswell gave the story in his book, Passing beyond these mythical inventions to the sober facts of biogra phy we come upon a Dame Oliver, a schoolmistress, such as Shenstone has described, who taught the young Samuel to read English, a dame so wonderfully gifted that she could peruse black letter, calling upon her pupil to borrow from his father's stock a Bible for her in that character. Then came a preceptor, Tom Brown, who published a spelling-book which he dedicated to the universe; and after him Hawkins, the usher of the Lichfield school, with whom Johnson learned much, passing to the upper form, literally into the hands of Mr. Hunter; for this head master "whipt me very well," as his great pupil af terwards stated with pride, being prone as a moralist to defend this method of implanting learning in the youthful mind. He thought it much better than the emulation system which, he would say, created jealousy among friends, while the flogging settled the matter at once and the knowl edge was secured. Johnson, however, was an apt scholar and, notwithstand ing his admiration of the birch, was probably very little indebted to it for his education. He early showed great powers of memory, an indication of a strong and fertile mind, that faculty implying both sunshine and replenishing of the soil. He would help his fellow pupils in their studies, and was so popular with them that they would call for him at his home and carry him to school in a sort of triumphal procession, one stooping to bear him upon his back while two others supported him on either side. His eyesight, which was defective from his birth, kept him from the usual boyish sports, but he contrived wonderfully well, as he afterwards said, "to be idle without them." Though capable of great exertions, with a mind always actively employed, he was constitutionally encouraged to fits of indolence which sometimes got the better of him, as he was often in the habit of confessing and lamenting. As a boy he liked to wander idly in the fields, talking to himself and had an immoderate fondness for losing himself in old romances such as the vicar ejected from Don Quixote's library. At the age of fifteen he was sent to the Grammar School of Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, where he passed about twelve months, returning home to spend a couple of years "loitering," says his biographer, "in a state very unworthy his uncommon abilities." He was, however, all the while an omnivorous reader, browsing on the miscellaneous stock of his father's books, one day lighting upon the Latin works of Petrarch, which he devoured with avidity-certainly not the proof of an idle employment of his time. He had, moreover, already in his school exercises proved his ability in various poetical translations of Virgil and Horace, so that, when in his nineteenth year he was, with the promised assistance of a gentleman of Shropshire, entered a commoner of Pembroke College, Oxford, he carried with him a stock of attainments which at once gave him a creditable position at that University. On the night of his arrival he was introduced with his father, "who had anxiously accompanied him," to his intended tutor, Mr. Jorden, when, spite of his ungainly appearance, for he even then appears to have had something of that uncouthness of person and manner afterwards so much commented upon, he impressed the company favorably by his ready citation of a passage from Macrobius, an out-of-the-way author for a novice to be acquainted with. But Johnson was no novice in learned. reading; and though he showed some waywardness in attendance upon routine duties, he soon gained the respect of the authorities by his talent, and especially attracted their attention by an easily executed brilliant translation into Latin verse of the Messiah of Pope, who is said to have remarked, on being shown the production by a son of Dr Arbuthnot, then a student at Oxford, "The writer of this poem will leave it a question for posterity, whether his or mine be the original." Johnson passed about three years at the University, his course being greatly impeded by his poverty, for the assistance which had been promised failed to be given, and the waning for tunes of his father enabled him to eke out for his son but a scanty support, which finally failed altogether and compelled him to leave without a degree. So extreme was his want of resources that he could hardly maintain the ordinary decencies of the place, going about, or rather, shrinking from view, with worn-out shoes, through which his feet were painfully visible, and when some friendly hand placed a new pair at his door, throwing them away with indignation as an insult to his poverty. Such was the pride of Johnson, an honest pride often shown in his career through life, which preserved his independence and kept him free from the baseness with which he might, from the associations into which he was inevitably thrown, have otherwise been entangled. His association with Oxford was doubtless one of the important influences of his life, though it bore no immediate fruit in academic honors. He acquired there no inconsiderable knowledge of Greek, must have added largely to his stores of reading and, lover of learning as he ever was, been proportionately impressed with the genius of the place. He had some reputation while there as a gay and frolicsome fellow," it is said, and was disposed to be satirical and censorious. This he long afterwards characteristically explained: "Ah, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority." In truth there was seriousness enough in his life at this time. During his first vacation, passed at his home at Lichfield, he became the prey of so oppres 66 sive a melancholy that existence was almost insupportable to him under the anticipation of impending insanity. It was but little relief to the evil at the time that the burden was imaginary, and that he showed the absurdity of his fears by engrossing them to the admiration of his physician with remarkable ability in most excellent Latin. The hypochondria, like the ter rors of a dream, produced much suffering; but it was of a kind over which he learned to gain control, though its shadows accompanied him through life. It was also while at Oxford that he became the subject of those deep religious convictions which, with a dash of superstition, never departed from him. The seeds of piety were early implanted in him by his mother's teachings; but, as we have seen, the method was not always well judged, and in his youth he was disposed to some laxity of opinion which was restrained by the habits of Oxford and extinguished by a famous book of evangelical piety which he met with there-"Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life." He took it up, he tells us, "expecting to find it a dull book, as such books generally are, and perhaps to laugh at it, but I found Law quite an` even match for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in ear nest of religion, after I became capable of rational enquiry." Religion thenceforth became intimately associated with his thoughts and actions. A few months after Johnson left Oxford his father died at Lichfield, at the age of seventy-six, leaving scant property to his family; for out of his effects the portion which came to his Leaving Market-Bosworth with no other engagement in view, Johnson accepted an invitation from Mr. Hector his school-fellow at Lichfield, to visit him at Birmingham. Johnson passed some time in this city, and there wrote his first book, a translation from the French of a Voyage to Abyssinia by father Lobo, a Jesuit missionary, for which he received from the bookseller Warren with whom he lodged the payment of five guineas. With praiseworthy industry and sagacity, Boswell, with the assistance of Burke examined this book to ascertain if it bore any marks of that peculiarly rich and effective style which became known to the son Samuel, excluding that which he might ultimately derive from his mother, was but twenty pounds. With this he was to begin the world at the age of twenty-two. But the regard in which his father had been held was something of an inheritance to him, and the knowledge which, according to the old proverb, survives houses and lands, was to prove its excellence. He looked to his scholarship as his first means of support. The prospect of advantage from it was for a long time not a cheering one. He began by accepting the humblest position as a teacher, that of usher or under-master in the school of Market-Bosworth, in Leicestershire, to which he proceeded on foot. The situation was necessarily world as the peculiar manner of irksome to one of his temperament, who always grasped at knowledge with impatience, seldom during his life reading a book through, but, with an instinctive sagacity, hastily "plucking out the heart of its mystery." He was in his capacity of usher condemned to the painful iteration of the rules of grammar, the inflections of nouns and the moods of verbs, with boys to whom to-day's lesson was a reflection of that of yesterday, and identical with that of the morrow-a melancholy drudgery for the quick-minded Johnson; it was doubtless also aggravated according to the manner of boys by half concealed ridicule of his peculiarities, and, when the whole was supplemented by what he considered "intolerable harshness" on the part of the titled patron of the school, he threw up the employment in disgust. A few months were sufficient for this unhappy experiment. Johnson. So far as the translation itself was concerned they found only traces of the idiom of the original; but when they came to the preface their search was rewarded. In the words of Boswell "the Johnsonian style begins to appear." Imbedded like rich nuggets in the flowing stream were some brilliant specimens of genuine Johnsonese, a foretaste of that inimitable generalization supported by picturesque detail and animating suggestions, enlivened by epigram and antithesi, a pomp of words in stately music supporting a burthen of thought-the comprehension of the poet, the wit and philosopher. After a residence of about a year at Birmingham, he returned to Lichfield, where he made an ineffectual attempt at literary occupation by issu ing proposals for publishing by subscription the Latin poems of Politian, with a life of the author, an under- Garrick, of illustrious memory, and taking which found few to encourage it though the price was small; so, nothing came of it. Two years now passed without any distinct employment to further his prospects in life, when in July, 1736, he was married to a Mrs. Porter, the widow of a mercer at Birmingham with whom he had become acquainted in his former stay in that city during the life-time of her first husband. There was a great disparity in the age of the pair, Johnson, at the time of the marriage, being in his twenty-seventh year and the bride in her forty-eighth. Nor was she remarkable for her personal charms, or any refinement in her appearance, if we may credit the account of Garrick in his description of her to Boswell. But the mar riage, notwithstanding all inequalities, proved a happy one. However the lady might appear to the youthful Garrick and the world, she was an angel of light to her husband, whose poverty she alleviated and consoled, and whose mental ability she had sufficient understanding to appreciate. his brother George, sons of a gentleman, a half-pay captain, at Lichfield. With such scant encouragement it is a marvel that Johnson's patience held out for a year and a half; but it lasted probably as long as his means; and while these continued, spite of the drudgery of teaching, the home must have been to him a comfortable one, fascinated, as the young lover was There was a for Johnson was really a chivalric lover-with the perfections of his "Tetty," as he fondly called his wife Elizabeth. Johnson, who had employed some of his leisure at Edial Hall, as his house is called, in the construction of a portion of his tragedy "Irene," now by the advice of his friend Gilbert Walmsley, a gentleman of Lichfield, Register of its Ecclesiastical Court, a man of reading and influence, resolved to pursue the work with a view to its introduction on the stage. This directed his thoughts to London, the certain refuge of provincial literary aspirants of all times. There if anywhere in England he might turn his literary This alliance brought with it eight talents, his sole capital, to account. hundred pounds, the widow's fortune, His pupil, Garrick, about being sent and, encouraged by this new resource, to a school at Rochester to finish hist Johnson, who had failed in an en- education, Johnson's friend, Walmsley, deavor to procure the mastership of a gave them a joint letter to the head grammar school in Warwickshire, re- master, the Rev. Mr. Colson, a man of Comsolved to set up a species of academy eminence as a mathematician. of his own. He accordingly hired an mending to him the youthful Garrick, imposing looking house, at Edial, in he wrote, "He and another neighbor the vicinity of Lichfield, and invited of mine, one Mr. Samuel Johnson, set the attendance of pupils to board out this morning (March 2, 1737), for with him and be taught the Latin London, together; Davy Garrick to and Greek languages. Only three be with you early the next week, and came, two of whom were David Mr. Johnson to try his fate with a |