versation. This must be the result of a calm and candid review of his history, after all due allowance shall be made for the undoubted effects of manner and singularity in exalting the impres sion of both his writings and his talk.

Samuel Johnson was born 18th of September, 1709, at Lichfield, where his father, originally from Derbyshire, was a bookseller and stationer in a small way of business. His mother was of a yeoman's family named Ford, for many generations settled in Warwickshire. He inherited from his father a large and robust bodily frame, with a disposition towards melancholy and hypochondriacism, which proved the source of wretchedness to him through life. From his nurse he is supposed (though probably it was hereditary too,) to have caught a scrofulous disorder, of whose ravages he always bore the scars, which deprived him of the sight of one eye, and which, under the influence of the vulgar supposition so long prevalent, made his parents bring him to London that he might be touched by Queen Anne. His father was a man of respectable character and good abilities; and while he devoted himself to his trade, frequenting various parts of the country to sell his books, he seems to have had much pleasure in the diffusion of knowledge, and to have been himself knowing in several branches of ordinary learning. His mother was uneducated, but had a strong natural understanding, and a deep sense of religion, which she early instilled into her son. There was only one other child, a younger brother, who followed the father's business, and died at the age of five-and-twenty. The family were of strong high church principles, and continued through all fortunes attached to the House of Stuart.

Johnson at a very early age showed abilities far above those of his comrades. His quickness of apprehension made learning exceedingly easy to him, and he had an extraordinary power of me. mory, which stood by him through life. His school companions well remembered in after life his great superiority over them all; they would relate how when only six or seven years old, he used to help them in their tasks as well as to amuse them by his jokes and his narratives, and how they were wont to carry him of a morning to school, attending him in a kind of triumph. The seminary in which he was educated for several years after, was Mr. Hunter's, and although he always considered the severity of that teacher as excessive, he yet candidly admitted that but for the strict discipliue maintained, he should never have learnt much; for his nature was extremely indolent owing to his feeble spirits and broken health, and his habits of application were then, as ever after, very desultory and irregular. The school was, moreover, famous for a succession of ushers and schoolmasters hardly equalled in any other; six or seven who attained eminence in after life, all about the time of Johnson, having either taught or learnt under Mr. Hunter.

In his fifteenth year he went to Mr. Westworth's school at Stourbridge, by the advice of his maternal cousin, Mr. Ford, a clergyman represented as of better capacity than life; and after a year

passed there to no good purpose, he returned to Lichfield, where he whiled away his time for two years and upwards, reading, in a desultory manner, whatever books came in his way; a habit which clung to him through life, insomuch that fond as he was of poetry, he confessed that he never had read any one poem to an end. The result, however, of the time thus spent, and of his very retentive memory, was his acquiring a variety of knowledge exceedingly rare in very young men, and becoming acquainted with many writers whose works are little read by any one.

In 1728, being in his nineteenth year, he was sent to Oxford, and entered of Pembroke College. His father's circumstances were so narrow that this step never could have been taken without the prospect of some assistance from his friends; and as few men who raise themselves from humble beginnings are found very anxious to claim the praise which all are so ready to bestow, so we find among the biographers of Johnson, a reluctance of the same kind, with respect to their hero, and a disposition to involve in obscurity, the contribution which must have been made to his college education. Mr. Corbet, a gentleman of Shropshire, is supposed by Sir John Hawkins to have supported him for the first year as his son's teacher; though this is denied by Mr. Boswell, who yet admits his father's inability to maintain him at Oxford. Some gentlemen of the cathedral at Lichfield afterwards contributed to his support. But that he suffered much from poverty during the time of his residence is certain; and his inability to attend some course of instruction which he greatly wished to follow, from the want of fit shoes, is a fact related by those who remarked his feet appearing through those he wore, and who also have recorded his proud refusal of assistance while in such distress. The pecuniary difficulties of his father increasing, or the aid of his friends being withdrawn, he could not longer remain at college, even in that poor condition; and after three years' residence he was under the necessity of retiring to Lichfield without taking a degree. But his veneration for the University, and above all, his love for Pembroke, remained by him ever after. When noting the number of poets who had belonged to it, he would cry out with exultation, “Sir, we are a nest of singing birds;" and to the latest period of his life, his choicest relaxation was to repair from London and pass a few days at the Master's Lodge.

During his residence, he passed the periods of vacation at Lichfield; and there is something peculiarly distressing in the account handed down, and indeed proceeding chiefly from himself, of the wretchedness which he suffered about this early age, in consequence of his morbid state of mind. The first of the violent attacks of hypochondria which he experienced was in 1729, in his twentieth year; and it seized upon him with such irritation and fretfulness, with such dejection and gloom, that he described his existence as a misery. The judgment appears never to have been clouded, nor the imagination to have acquired greater power over the reason, than to impress him with fearful apprehensions of insanity; for he never was under any thing re

sembling delusion; and although a torpor of the facelties would often supervene, insomuch that there were days when he said he could not exert himself so as to tell the hour aộon the town clock. yet even while suffering severely he had the power of drawing up a most clear, acute, and elegant account of Lis cisease in Lata for the opinion of his godfather, Dr. Swinien, who was so much struck with it, that he, perhaps indiscreetly, showed it to others; an act never forgiven by the author. He had recourse te various expedients to drive away this frightful malady, but in vain. Sometimes he would take violent bodily exercise, walking to Birmingham and back again; sometimes, but this was rather at a late period, he had recourse to drinking; and though he never admitted that this resource failed entirely, yet it may be presumed it did, both because such a practice always exacerbates the mischief in others, and because he for many years of his life entirely gave up the use of fermented liquors. He attained by experience some little control over the disease, probably by steering a judicious course between idleness and overwork, by being moderate in the enjoyment of sleep, and by attention to diet. But he never at any period of his long life was free from the infliction, so that melancholy was the general habit, and its remission was only by intervals comparatively short. What haunted him was the dread of insanity; and he was ever accustomed to regard his malady as a partial visitation of that dreadful calamity. He never believed himself deranged, but he never hesitated both in writing and speaking to call his mental disease by the name of madness without any circumlocution, though he only meant to express that it was a morbid affection.

The accounts which we have, and also upon his own authority, of his early religious history, are interesting. Although his mother's precepts and example gave him as strong a bias towards religion as most children can have, yet he considered her to have somewhat overdone her work, especially by requiring the Sabbath to be spent in "heaviness," in confinement, and in reading the "Whole Duty of Man," which neither interested nor attracted him. From nine to fourteen years of age, he was wholly indifferent to sacred subjects, and had a great reluctance to attend the service of the Church. From that time till he went to Oxford, five years later, he was a general "talker against religion," as he described himself," for he did not much think against it." At Oxford he took up Law's "Serious Call to a Holy Life," expecting to find a subject of ridicule; but he "found Law quite an overmatch for him," and from that time his belief was uninterrupted, and even strong. The nature of his melancholy, and the hardships of his life, worked with his convictions to make him place his reliance upon a future state of happiness, and few men have perhaps ever lived in whose thoughts religion had a larger or more practical share.

While at Oxford his reading continued to be desultory, though extensive, and his college tutor being a person of amiable character, but moderate endowments, he was left much to himself in the conduct of his studies. The only application which he appears to

have given was to Greek, and his attention even here was confined to Homer and Euripides. Before he came to college he had exercised himself much in writing verses, and especially in translating from the Latin; the specimens which remain show sufficiently his command of both languages, and their closeness is worthy of praise. His translation of Pope's " Messiah" into Latin verse has been much commended, and by Pope himself among others; but Johnson never regarded it as possessing any value. Pope's observation was indeed highly laudatory. "The writer of this poem," said he, "will leave it doubtful in after-times which was the original, his verses or mine."

On his return to Lichfield he found his father's affairs in a state of hopeless insolvency; and before the end of the year (1731) he died. A few months more were spent in the place; and he frequented now, as he had done before, a circle of excellent provincial society, of which accomplished and well-bred women of family formed an important part. The accounts of his conversation at this time all agree in representing it as intelligent, but modest; his manner awkward enough as far as regarded external qualities, but civilized; and his whole demeanour free from that roughness and even moroseness which it afterwards acquired, partly from living much alone during his struggles for subsistence, partly from the effects of his mental and nervons malady; in no little degree, also, from the habit of living in a small circle of meek and submissive worshippers.

In the summer of 1732 he accepted an appointment as usher to a school at Market Bosworth; but to the labour of teaching he never could inure himself; and it was rendered more intolerable by the duty which devolved upon him of acting as kind of laychaplain to Sir Walter Dixie, the patron of the school, a situation in which he was treated with haughtiness and even harshness. To the few months which he thus passed, he ever after looked back, not merely with aversion, but with a kind of horror.

He now removed to Birmingham, where he was employed by Warren, a bookseller, and the first who settled in that great town. He carried on a newspaper in which Johnson wrote, who also translated from the French Father Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia.' This work has been carefully examined, to discover if any traces can be perceived of his peculiar style; but nothing of the kind appears. The preface, however, is as completely clothed in his 'diction as any of his subsequent productions; and shows that he had then, in his twenty-fifth year, formed the habit of sturdily thinking for himself and rejecting all marvellous stories, at least in secular matters, which ever after distinguished him, as well as of tersely and epigrammatically expressing his thoughts. Mr. Boswell and Mr. Burke examined this piece together, and the following portion of the passage on which they pitched as a proof of his early maturity in that manner, may serve to gratify the reader, and to prove the truth of the foregoing remark.

"This traveller has consulted his senses and not his imagination. He meets with no basilisks that destroy with their eyes;

his crocodiles devour their prey without tears; and his cataracts fall from the rocks without deafening the neighbouring inhabi tants. The reader here will find no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness or blessed with spontaneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom or unceasing sunshine; nor are the natives here described either devoid of all sense of humanity or consummate in all private or social virtues Here are no Hottentots without religious piety or articulable language, no Chinese perfectly polite and completely skilled in all sciences; he will discover what will always be discovered by a diligent and impartial inquirer, that where human nature is to be found, there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason; and that the Creator doth not appear partial in his distributions, but has balanced in most countries their particular inconveniences by particular favours."

For the next three years he lived between Birmingham and Lichfield, and having formed the acquaintance of Mr. Porter, a mercer in the latter town, he became, after his decease, attached to his widow, whom he married in the summer of 1736. She is described as of vulgar and affected manners, and of a person not merely without attraction, but repulsive, plain in her features, which, though naturally florid, she loaded with red paint as well as refreshed with cordials, large in her stature, and disposed to corpulence. To this picture drawn by Garrick, one of her friends has added, that she was a person of good understanding and great sentimentality, with a disposition towards sarcasm; and it is certain that the empire over her husband, which occasioned their marriage, subsisted to her decease, sixteen years after, and so far survived her that he continued for the rest of his life to offer up prayers for her soul, besides ever keeping the day of her death as a fast with pious veneration.

As she brought him but a few hundred pounds of fortune, her husband having died insolvent, it was necessary that the imprudence of the match should be compensated by some exertion to obtain a living. They therefore opened an academy at Edial, near Lichfield; but only three pupils presented themselves, of whom Garrick and his brother were two; and after a few months of vainly waiting for more, Johnson and Garrick set forward to try their fortune in London, whither Mrs. Johnson followed him some months later.

It was in the spring of 1737 that he came to reside in London; and he now entered upon a life of as complete dependence on literary labour as is to be found in the history of letters. No man ever was more an author by profession than he appears to have been for a quarter of a century; and he suffered during that period all the evils incident to that precarious employment. Of these the principal certainly is, that there being no steady demand for the productions of the pen, the author is perpetually obliged to find out subjects on which he may be employed, and to entice employers; thus, unlike most other labourers, stimulating the demand as well as furnishing the supply. Hence we find Johnson constantly suggesting works on which he is willing to be employed, and often