September 7.--The birth-day of Dr. Samuel Johnson. He was born in 1709,
in the city of Litchfield, where his father was a bookseller. Having
received the elements of a classical education principally at the
grammar school of his native place, he was sent at the age of nineteen
to Pembroke College, Oxford, by a gentleman who engaged to maintain him
there as a companion to his son. After some time, however, this person
withdrew his aid; and Johnson, having made an ineffectual attempt to
subsist on his own resources, found himself obliged to discontinue his
residence before obtaining a degree. He had already, however, during the
period he spent at the university, obtained a high reputation for
scholarship and abilities. For many succeeding years the life of this
distinguished luminary of English literature was one of those hard
struggles with poverty which learning and genius have so often been
called on to sustain. About the time that he left college, namely, in
1731, his father died, leaving scarcely twenty pounds behind him. Thus
situated, Johnson was constrained to accept the office of usher at the
grammar-school of Market Bosworth. But the treatment to which he was
subjected soon forced him to give up this appointment. He now attempted
in succession various projects of a literary nature, in order to escape
from the extremest indigence. In 1735 he married a Mrs. Porter, the
widow of a mercer, who brought him a fortune of about 800_l._; and with
this money he opened a boarding-school at Edial. But the scheme met with
no success. He then determined to set out for London; and here
accordingly he arrived in March, 1737, accompanied by a young friend,
who had been one of his pupils, David Garrick, who afterwards became the
greatest actor that the modern world had seen. The first employment
which he obtained was from the proprietors of the Gentleman’s Magazine.
But the emoluments he derived from this source were very insufficient to
afford him a respectable subsistence; and he was often without a
shilling to procure him bread during the day, or a lodging wherein to
lay his head at night. These difficulties clung to him for a long while,
but they did not prevent him from gradually working his way to literary
distinction. His reports of parliamentary debates, inserted in the
Gentleman’s Magazine, which were often almost entirely original
compositions of his own, attracted a great deal of notice; but it was
not till long afterwards that their authorship was generally known. The
year after his arrival in the metropolis, he published his poem,
entitled ‘London’, in imitation of the third Satire of Juvenal. This
production had the honour of being commended in very warm terms by Pope.
In 1744 appeared his eloquent and striking life of his friend Savage.
Three years after he was engaged by an association of booksellers to
prepare a new Dictionary of the English Language. This celebrated work
occupied the greater part of his time for seven years, and at last
appeared in 1755, after the money, 1500 guineas, which it had been
agreed he should receive for his labour, was all spent. It brought him,
however, a large share of public applause, and at once placed his name
among the first of the living cultivators of English literature.
Meanwhile, even before the appearance of his Dictionary, he had by
various occasional productions been steadily advancing himself in
reputation, although not in wealth. In 1749 he gave to the world his
imitation of Juvenal’s tenth Satire, under the title of ‘The Vanity of
Human Wishes.’ The same year his tragedy of Irene, which he had brought
with him when he first came to town, was produced at Drury Lane by his
friend Garrick. In March, 1750, he commenced the publication of ‘The
Rambler,’ which he continued for two years at the rate of two papers
every week, the whole, with the exception of only five numbers, being
the production of his own pen. These, and other works, however, failed
in relieving him from the pressure of great pecuniary difficulties, as
is proved by the fact, that in 1756 he was arrested for a debt of about
five pounds, and only obtained his liberty by borrowing the money from a
friend. In 1758 he began a new periodical publication, to which he gave
the name of ‘The Idler,’ and which, like the ‘Rambler,’ he carried on
for about two years. In 1759 his mother, to whom he was tenderly
attached, died at an advanced age; and having gone down to Litchfield to
superintend her funeral, he there wrote his beautiful romance of
Rasselas in a single week, while his parent lay unburied, in order to
obtain the means of defraying the expenses of her interment. This may
well be characterised as the finest anecdote that is to be told of Dr.
Johnson; for the whole range of biography scarcely records anything more
noble or affecting. At last, in 1762, the Crown was advised to bestow
upon him a pension of 300_l._ per annum; an act of bounty which placed
him for the rest of his life in ease and affluence. After this he
distinguished himself as much by the brilliancy and power of his
conversation in the literary circles and general society which he
frequented, as by his labours with his pen; but still he was far from
relinquishing authorship. In 1765 appeared a new edition of Shakspeare,
in the superintendence of which he had been long engaged, and the
splendid preface to which is one of the most celebrated of his
productions. In 1773 he published the well-known account of his ‘Journey
to the Western Isles of Scotland,’ which he had just accomplished in
company with his friend Boswell. In 1775 he received the degree of LL.D.
from the University of Oxford; and in 1781 he brought to a close the
last, and perhaps, upon the whole, the greatest of his works, his ‘Lives
of the Poets,’ in four volumes octavo. He survived this publication only
a few years, and having died on the 13th of December, 1784, in the
seventy-sixth year of his age, he was interred with great solemnity in
Westminster Abbey, in a grave near to that of his friend Garrick.
Notwithstanding considerable heat of temper and arrogance of manner, as
well as some weak prejudices and singularities by which he was marked,
it is impossible to deny that the moral character of Dr. Johnson
abounded in noble points, or to regard it upon the whole with other
feelings than those of admiration and reverence. A scrupulous respect
for virtue, evinced both by the language and scope of all his writings
and by the unvarying tenor of his conduct, a lofty scorn of injustice
and baseness, a spirit of independence and self-reliance which no trials
and sufferings could tame down either to despair or servility, a warm
sympathy with human sorrow wheresoever found or howsoever caused, the
intrepidity to do a good action in the face even of the world’s laugh,
and charity in relieving the unfortunate to the utmost verge of his
means, and even to his own painful inconvenience,--all these
dispositions, based on religious principle, and adorned and crowded by
the most fervid piety, are sufficient to cast into the shade far deeper
traits of frailty than any with which his nature can fairly be said to
have been marked. The question of the intellectual rank properly
belonging to Dr. Johnson has given rise to more difference of opinion.
He was certainly neither a very original nor a very subtle thinker; and
his eminence, indeed, will probably be maintained even by his warmest
admirers on the ground rather of his powers of expression than of
thought. His poetry rarely ascends beyond the height of rhetoric in
rhyme; and his metaphysical and philosophical speculations are
throughout extremely common-place and unrefined. But in what may be
called the _art_ of criticism, the detection of conventional beauties
and defects, and the delineation of the merely _literary_ character of a
writer’s productions, he is a great master. His style is undoubtedly a
bad one in the main; for, to say nothing of its being more Latin than
English, and so studiously regulated on the principle of mere
sonorousness that it almost entirely wants picturesqueness and the other
higher qualities which contribute to effective expression, it is suited
at the best to only one kind of writing, the grave didactic. Still, with
all its faults, even this style has great qualities. Its dignity is
often very imposing, and its inventor is certainly entitled to the
praise of having set the example of a grammatical accuracy and general
finish of composition not to be found in the works of our best authors
before his time, but which have since been copied by all.
[Illustration: Johnson.]
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_The Firemen’s Dog._--A gentleman connected with one of the principal
London fire-insurance offices has sent us the following account of the
dog whose singular propensities we described in Number 23. Our
correspondent has been induced to make particular inquiries in
consequence of our notice:--“His home, if it can be called so, is in one
of the recesses of Blackfriars Bridge; and it is supposed he has
acquired his taste for blazes in consequence of being noticed by the
firemen who so frequently pass over that bridge. It has been remarked
that he invariably follows close upon the heels of every fireman he sees
until driven away. This induces me to believe that it is for the men and
not for the fires that he entertains so strong a regard. On one occasion
he followed the engines to a fire at Greenwich, and remained there until
the last of the engines had packed up its apparatus to depart. On
another occasion (the fire at Mr. Tyler’s premises, in Warwick Lane) he
remained with the men sixteen days, during which they were employed in
rescuing property from the smouldering ruins. He is perfectly well known
to every fireman in London. He is called ‘Tyke,’ and is exceedingly ugly
in his appearance, being one of the worst formed specimens of the
turnspit breed.”
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_Division of Time used by the Inhabitants of the Feroe Islands._--They
have one method of dividing time peculiar to themselves: they reckon the
day and night by eight _ökter_ of three hours each; the _ökters_ again
are reduced into halves, and they are named according to the point of
the compass where the sun is at the time: for example, East-North-East
is half past four in the morning; East is six; East-South-East, half
past seven.--_Landt’s Description._
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