within, must have been hard indeed to bear, and certainly deepened the shadow that clouded that fine intellect. There is no relief to the gloom of his own account of this part of his early trials. Ah, Sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor. From Oxford Johnson brought away with him much of the materials of the Vanity of Human Wishes, and it was in no fit of speculative passion, but from hard experience that he wrote 'Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes, Leaving Oxford, Johnson found himself turned loose upon the world. From his father, who had died in the meantime, he had but twenty guineas as sole fortune, of which he felt himself in duty bound to put aside eleven, as a provision against the death of his mother, whom he fondly loved, that he might not be without the means of providing for her funeral : thus depriving himself of necessaries to lay by for the pecuniary accompaniments of a deep sorrow. He tried to obtain a living as an usher in a school, an occupation for which he was totally unfit, and which accordingly resulted in such complicated misery' that even Johnson's courage could not long endure it. He therefore, with a decreased store of money and a much increased melancholy, came to Birmingham in 1733. Here he lived awhile as the guest of his old school-fellow Hector, and here he published his translation of the work from which he afterwards drew the idea of his Rasselas-Father Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia. In this translation but little of Johnson's own style appears, though it is clearly visible in the preface. Lobo was a Portuguese Jesuit, who started as a missionary to Abyssinia in 1622, and who, having conquered all difficulties and made his way thither, proceeds to give an account of it, together with his own ideas on many matters of interest in connection with the country, and in particular as to the sources of the Nile and the reason of its floods. A tale is told of Johnson, when engaged on this work, which is very characteristic, and which proves how completely fixed his habits, both 1 Vanity of Human Wishes, 1st ed., 1. 157. of body and mind, had become, even at that comparatively early date. Johnson lingered over the task till Mr. Hector pointed out to him that through his dilatoriness, the printer who was setting it up was losing work. To approach Johnson through his benevolence was generally to succeed. In this case, though really indisposed, he lay in bed dictating to Hector, and finished the work as quickly as possible. We trace in this anecdote the same characteristics that accompanied him through life, and of which he was himself painfully aware. There is a full confession of his faults in this respect in his own account of the Lives of the Poets. Some time in March I finished the Lives of the Poets, which I wrote in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste.' For this translation he received five guineas. Such work for such pay could not support him, and we soon find him making the last effort at earning a living in the provinces, preparatory to the great plunge into London which such a man was sure sooner or later to make. Johnson returned to Lichfield, and in 1735 married the widow of a mercer named Porter, a lady twenty years his senior, fat, florid, and affected, but withal of sense and judgment. Upon Johnson's declaration, ‘Sir, it was a love match on both sides,' subsequent writers have exhausted much small wit; as if they held that intensity of love could be a monopoly of graceful limbs and regular features. Certain it is that Johnson remembered his wife with undying affection through a widowhood of thirty years. With his wife he obtained a little fortune of £800, and set up a school at Edial near Lichfield. The school failed, though Johnson obtained one celebrated pupil in David Garrick; and once more he had the world before him. It was not a bright world for him to enter upon. Times were almost at their very worst for professional writers. Pope, to whom, as to so many successful men, poverty was necessarily disreputable, and ill-success a crime, has given us, in more than one of his satires, pictures, drawn with only too cruel accuracy, of the lives of literary men. To go to bed supperless is bad enough; but it is worse to be supperless and have no bed to go to, to wander hungry through the streets all night, with nothing to keep one warm but talk on politics with some equally destitute companion. Such however was then the fate of many a man who was dependent on his writings for a livelihood. Such was the fate which Johnson knowingly faced when he left Lichfield and took the road to London, with Garrick for his companion, and an unfinished tragedy for all his capital. Such too was the fate he was to meet during the first few hard years of struggle in London. Of these years we know but few details ; Johnson himself once tried, long after he was beyond the reach of want, to narrate this portion of his own history; but the large heart was too full, and a sudden flood of tears forced him to leave the tale untold. Some few things we know, and some more we can infer. We know that he signed a letter 'Tuus impransus,' and we conclude that when he could not earn, he would not eat. We know that sometimes, when in want of a lodging, he would walk the streets all night with his friend Savage, and a smile struggles through our sadness when we hear of this ill-fed, ill-clad, houseless pair, declaiming through the night against Walpole, and swearing to stand by the country. The resolution was not so absurd as it seems. Walpole had expended over fifty thousand pounds in ten years in the hire of mercenary pens, and Johnson could doubtless have had no inconsiderable share of this spoil if he would have consented to sell his genius. It is perhaps more than doubtful whether Walpole ever expressly declared his belief that every man had his price, but it is tolerably certain that he found a price for many men. Yet he never found the sum at which he could purchase false allegiance from Samuel Johnson, though such price would have saved him from actual starvation. In accounting for many of the phenomena observable in Johnson's later career, it would seem that far too much stress had been laid on his hereditary disorders of body and mind, as compared with the little account taken of what may be called the Grub Street years of his existence. Because details of this period are almost wholly wanting, there has been a tendency to pass it over almost in silence. There can hardly be a greater error. To the reader of Rasselas there is a vast significance in the fact that Johnson, who was willing to talk of anything but of his prospects in another world, broke down when he tried to narrate the sufferings of this time. When we hear of his unpleasant habit of voracious eating, we are too apt to forget that he thereby disgusted those who had not, like himself, felt the real pangs of hunger. When in Rasselas and the Vanity of Human Wishes he pours out his tale of the broken idols of humanity, we must remember that whilst literary knaves and fools-Arnalls and Ralphs et hoc genus omne—were growing fat on bribery, and cultureless cunning was ruling the kingdom, Samuel Johnson was tramping the streets at night, with the wind creeping through his coat and the water through his boots. 1 Nor were the manners of the time at all inclined towards a gentle consideration of 'worth by poverty depressed.' It was hardly more than a generation since the poetry of Dryden had been paid for by the booksellers by bulk alone. (Cf. note, p. 291.) Johnson himself allows 1 that since that time the general conduct of traders had improved. But even yet the manners of the men who had the money towards those who had the brains, bore few traces of softening culture. We have an amusing instance of this in the fact that Osborne, by whom Johnson had been employed in cataloguing the Harleian Library, presumed too far on the young writer's poverty, and having addressed him in insolent terms, was promptly knocked down with a folio. Such was literary London when Johnson entered it in 1737. The next year he became connected with the Gentleman's Magazine, and this periodical was for some time his chief support. Parliamentary debates were not then regularly reported, and Johnson wrote for this magazine, under the title 'The Senate of Lilliput,' speeches which appeared to be actual reports. The substance was brought to him by persons who had attended the debates, and he composed the speeches for both sides. 'I saved appearances tolerably well,' he said, when applauded for his impartiality, ‘but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.' This scheme Johnson abandoned when he found that people were really deceived by it, and were taking the speeches to be genuine. In this same year (1738) appeared his poem 'London,' in imitation of Juvenal's Third Satire. This poem was purchased by Dodsley for ten guineas, got into a second edition in a week, and made Johnson at once famous. From this poem, however, though Johnson was compelled, by the fact of imitating 1 p. 58. 1 Juvenal's great satire upon Rome, to aim most of his shafts at the city, as distinguished from the country, it must not be supposed that in this particular he was expressing his real sentiments. The poem is simply a vent for his hatred of the Whigs, and for his own gloomy fortune. This last, though its expression never falls beneath the dignity of general complaint, and has no personal references to himself, is conveyed bitterly enough :— "Since worth," he cries, "in these degenerate days, And again, in closer reference to his own lot :— This mournful truth is everywhere confess'd, SLOW RISES WORTH BY POVERTY DEPRESS'D.' Ten years later, in 1749, appeared his other great poem, also an imitation of Juvenal, under the title, The Vanity of Human Wishes; and we can again trace the deepening gloom of the author's mind by the tones in which he sings the ever-old evernew strain, Vanitas Vanitatum. This is the poem of which the Rasselas may be truly described as a prose version. The ten years intervening between its publication and that of 'London,' had found Johnson just able to keep the wolf from the door; probably, thanks to his connection with the Gentleman's Magazine, beyond actual want so long as his health and strength enabled him to be ceaselessly at work, but never able to enjoy that boon so precious to a man of his temperament, an untaxed holiday. Johnson loved leisure, but rest meant the loss of money which he could not afford to do without. Johnson was not exactly a pessimist in the ordinary sense of the term. Life had been a very hard thing to him, and he declared its hardness with perfect fearlessness of the consequences of his reasoning. In fact he did not see what those consequences were. He drew no |