Taxation no Tyranny. Received the degree of Doctor in
Civil Law from Oxford.
1779. First four volumes of his Lives of the Poets.
1781. The remaining six volumes of the Lives.
1784. Died December 13.
LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON
(_December, 1856_)
1. Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English
writers of the eighteenth century, was the son of Michael
Johnson, who was, at the beginning of that century, a magistrate
of Lichfield, and a bookseller of great note in the midland
counties. Michael's abilities and attainments seem to 5
have been considerable. He was so well acquainted with
the contents of the volumes which he exposed to sale, that the
country rectors of Staffordshire and Worcestershire thought
him an oracle on points of learning. Between him and the
clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious and political 10
sympathy. He was a zealous churchman, and, though he had
qualified himself for municipal office by taking the oaths to
the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a Jacobite in heart.
At his house, a house which is still pointed out to every
traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 18th of 15
September 1709. In the child, the physical, intellectual, and
moral peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were
plainly discernible; great muscular strength accompanied by
much awkwardness and many infirmities; great quickness of
parts, with a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; 20
a kind and generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper.
He had inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous taint, which
it was beyond the power of medicine to remove. His parents
were weak enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific
for this malady. In his third year he was taken up to London,
inspected by the court surgeon, prayed over by the court
chaplains, and stroked and presented with a piece of gold by
Queen Anne. One of his earliest recollections was that of a
stately lady in a diamond stomacher and a long black hood. 5
Her hand was applied in vain. The boy's features, which
were originally noble and not irregular, were distorted by his
malady. His cheeks were deeply scarred. He lost for a time
the sight of one eye; and he saw but very imperfectly with
the other. But the force of his mind overcame every impediment. 10
Indolent as he was, he acquired knowledge with such
ease and rapidity that at every school to which he was sent he
was soon the best scholar. From sixteen to eighteen he resided
at home, and was left to his own devices. He learned much at
this time, though his studies were without guidance and without 15
plan. He ransacked his father's shelves, dipped into a multitude
of books, read what was interesting, and passed over what
was dull. An ordinary lad would have acquired little or no useful
knowledge in such a way: but much that was dull to ordinary
lads was interesting to Samuel. He read little Greek; for his 20
proficiency in that language was not such that he could take
much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and eloquence.
But he had left school a good Latinist; and he soon acquired,
in the large and miscellaneous library of which he now had the
command, an extensive knowledge of Latin literature. That 25
Augustan delicacy of taste which is the boast of the great public
schools of England he never possessed. But he was early
familiar with some classical writers who were quite unknown
to the best scholars in the sixth form at Eton. He was peculiarly
attracted by the works of the great restorers of learning. 30
Once, while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio
volume of Petrarch's works. The name excited his curiosity;
and he eagerly devoured hundreds of pages. Indeed, the
diction and versification of his own Latin compositions show
that he had paid at least as much attention to modern copies
from the antique as to the original models.
2. While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family
was sinking into hopeless poverty. Old Michael Johnson was
much better qualified to pore upon books, and to talk about 5
them, than to trade in them. His business declined; his debts
increased; it was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his
household were defrayed. It was out of his power to support
his son at either university; but a wealthy neighbour offered
assistance; and, in reliance on promises which proved to be of 10
very little value, Samuel was entered at Pembroke College,
Oxford. When the young scholar presented himself to the
rulers of that society, they were amazed not more by his ungainly
figure and eccentric manners than by the quantity of extensive
and curious information which he had picked up during many 15
months of desultory but not unprofitable study. On the first
day of his residence he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius;
and one of the most learned among them declared that
he had never known a freshman of equal attainments.
3. At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. 20
He was poor, even to raggedness; and his appearance excited
a mirth and a pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty
spirit. He was driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church
by the sneering looks which the members of that aristocratical
society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some charitable person 25
placed a new pair at his door; but he spurned them away in a
fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable.
No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for one-and-twenty,
could have treated the academical authorities with
more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be 30
seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with
his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, over whom, in spite of
his tattered gown and dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave
him an undisputed ascendency. In every mutiny against the
discipline of the college he was the ringleader. Much was
pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities
and acquirements. He had early made himself known
by turning Pope's Messiah into Latin verse. The style and
rhythm, indeed, were not exactly Virgilian; but the translation 5
found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by
Pope himself.
4. The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the
ordinary course of things, have become a Bachelor of Arts:
but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of 10
support on which he had relied had not been kept. His
family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen
were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the
autumn of 1731, he was under the necessity of quitting the
university without a degree. In the following winter his father 15
died. The old man left but a pittance; and of that pittance
almost the whole was appropriated to the support of his widow.
The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more
than twenty pounds.
5. His life, during the thirty years which followed, was 20
one hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that struggle
needed no aggravation, but was aggravated by the sufferings
of an unsound body and an unsound mind. Before the young
man left the university, his hereditary malady had broken forth
in a singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable 25
hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been mad all
his life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth,
eccentricities less strange than his have often been thought grounds
sufficient for absolving felons, and for setting aside wills. His
grimaces, his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and 30
sometimes terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner
table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off
a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly
ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive
an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a
great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set
his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he
walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back
a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influence 5
of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his
imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring
on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At
another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many
miles off, calling him by his name. But this was not the 10
worst. A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave
a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human
destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many
men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was
under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life; 15
but he was afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight
or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion
he found but little comfort during his long and frequent
fits of dejection; for his religion partook of his own character.
The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a 20
direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays had
to struggle through a disturbing medium; they reached him
refracted, dulled and discoloured by the thick gloom which
had settled on his soul; and, though they might be sufficiently
clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him. 25
6. With such infirmities of body and mind, this celebrated
man was left, at two-and-twenty, to fight his way through the
world. He remained during about five years in the midland
counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he
had inherited some friends and acquired others. He was kindly 30
noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family, who
happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar
of the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished
parts, learning, and knowledge of the world, did
himself honour by patronising the young adventurer, whose
repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid garb moved
many of the petty aristocracy of the neighbourhood to laughter
or to disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no
way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar 5
school in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion
in the house of a country gentleman; but a life of dependence
was insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham,
and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery.
In that town he printed a translation, little noticed at the 10
time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia.
He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription the
poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern
Latin verse: but subscriptions did not come in; and the volume
never appeared. 15
7. While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson
fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs. Elizabeth
Porter, a widow who had children as old as himself. To ordinary
spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse
woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, 20
and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were
not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson,
however, whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was
too weak to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom, and who
had seldom or never been in the same room with a woman of 25
real fashion, his Titty, as he called her, was the most beautiful,
graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration
was unfeigned cannot be doubted; for she was as poor as
himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her little
honour, the addresses of a suitor who might have been her 30
son. The marriage, however, in spite of occasional wranglings,
proved happier than might have been expected. The lover
continued to be under the illusions of the wedding-day till the
lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument he
placed an inscription extolling the charms of her person and
of her manners; and when, long after her decease, he had
occasion to mention her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half
ludicrous, half pathetic, "Pretty creature!"
8. His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself 5
more strenuously than he had hitherto done. He took a
house in the neighbourhood of his native town, and advertised
for pupils. But eighteen months passed away; and only three
pupils came to his academy. Indeed, his appearance was so
strange, and his temper so violent, that his schoolroom must 10
have resembled an ogre's den. Nor was the tawdry painted
grandmother whom he called his Titty well qualified to make
provision for the comfort of young gentlemen. David Garrick,
who was one of the pupils, used, many years later, to throw
the best company of London into convulsions of laughter by 15
mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary pair.
9. At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age,
determined to seek his fortune in the capital as a literary
adventurer. He set out with a few guineas, three acts of the
tragedy of Irene in manuscript, and two or three letters of 20
introduction from his friend Walmesley.
10. Never, since literature became a calling in England, had
it been a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson
took up his residence in London. In the preceding generation
a writer of eminent merit was sure to be munificently 25
rewarded by the government. The least that he could expect
was a pension or a sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude
for politics, he might hope to be a member of parliament,
a lord of the treasury, an ambassador, a secretary of state. It
would be easy, on the other hand, to name several writers 30
of the nineteenth century of whom the least successful has
received forty thousand pounds from the booksellers. But
Johnson entered on his vocation in the most dreary part of
the dreary interval which separated two ages of prosperity.
Literature had ceased to flourish under the patronage of the
great, and had not begun to flourish under the patronage of
the public. One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had acquired
by his pen what was then considered as a handsome fortune,
and lived on a footing of equality with nobles and ministers of 5
state. But this was a solitary exception. Even an author
whose reputation was established, and whose works were popular,
such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every
library, such an author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a
greater run than any drama since The Beggar's Opera, was 10
sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means
of dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could
wipe his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland
dog. It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations
and privations must have awaited the novice who had 15
still to earn a name. One of the publishers to whom Johnson
applied for employment measured with a scornful eye that
athletic though uncouth frame, and exclaimed, "You had
better get a porter's knot, and carry trunks." Nor was the
advice bad; for a porter was likely to be as plentifully fed, 20
and as comfortably lodged, as a poet.
11. Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson
was able to form any literary connection from which he could
expect more than bread for the day which was passing over
him. He never forgot the generosity with which Hervey, who 25
was now residing in London, relieved his wants during this
time of trial. "Harry Hervey," said the old philosopher
many years later, "was a vicious man; but he was very
kind to me. If you call a dog Hervey I shall love him."
At Hervey's table Johnson sometimes enjoyed feasts which 30
were made more agreeable by contrast. But in general he
dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpenny worth
of meat, and a pennyworth of bread, at an alehouse near
Drury Lane.
12. The effect of the privations and sufferings which he
endured at this time was discernible to the last in his temper
and his deportment. His manners had never been courtly.
They now became almost savage. Being frequently under the
necessity of wearing shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a 5
confirmed sloven. Being often very hungry when he sat down
to his meals, he contracted a habit of eating with ravenous
greediness. Even to the end of his life, and even at the tables
of the great, the sight of food affected him as it affects wild
beasts and birds of prey. His taste in cookery, formed in 10
subterranean ordinaries and alamode beefshops, was far from
delicate. Whenever he was so fortunate as to have near him
a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with
rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his
veins swelled, and the moisture broke out on his forehead. 15
The affronts which his poverty emboldened stupid and low-minded
men to offer to him would have broken a mean spirit
into sycophancy, but made him rude even to ferocity. Unhappily
the insolence which, while it was defensive, was pardonable,
and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into 20
societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness. He
was repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken
liberties with him. All the sufferers, however, were wise
enough to abstain from talking about their beatings, except
Osborne, the most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who 25
proclaimed everywhere that he had been knocked down by the
huge fellow whom he had hired to puff the Harleian Library.
13. About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in
London, he was fortunate enough to obtain regular employment
from Cave, an enterprising and intelligent bookseller, who 30
was proprietor and editor of _The Gentleman's Magazine_. That
journal, just entering on the ninth year of its long existence,
was the only periodical work in the kingdom which then had
what would now be called a large circulation. It was, indeed,
the chief source of parliamentary intelligence. It was not then
safe, even during a recess, to publish an account of the proceedings
of either House without some disguise. Cave, however,
ventured to entertain his readers with what he called
"Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput." France 5
was Blefuscu; London was Mildendo; pounds were sprugs; the
Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac Secretary of State; Lord
Hardwicke was the Hurgo Hickrad; and William Pulteney
was Wingul Pulnub. To write the speeches was, during several
years, the business of Johnson. He was generally furnished 10
with notes, meagre indeed, and inaccurate, of what had been
said; but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence
both for the ministry and for the opposition. He was himself
a Tory, not from rational conviction--for his serious
opinion was that one form of government was just as good or 15
as bad as another--but from mere passion, such as inflamed
the Capulets against the Montagues, or the Blues of the Roman
circus against the Greens. In his infancy he had heard so
much talk about the villanies of the Whigs, and the dangers
of the Church, that he had become a furious partisan when 20
he could scarcely speak. Before he was three he had insisted
on being taken to hear Sacheverell preach at Lichfield Cathedral,
and had listened to the sermon with as much respect,
and probably with as much intelligence, as any Staffordshire
squire in the congregation. The work which had been begun 25
in the nursery had been completed by the university. Oxford,
when Johnson resided there, was the most Jacobitical place
in England; and Pembroke was one of the most Jacobitical
colleges in Oxford. The prejudices which he brought up
to London were scarcely less absurd than those of his own 30
Tom Tempest. Charles II. and James II. were two of the
best kings that ever reigned. Laud, a poor creature who
never did, said, or wrote anything indicating more than the
ordinary capacity of an old woman, was a prodigy of parts and
learning over whose tomb Art and Genius still continued to
weep. Hampden deserved no more honourable name than
that of "the zealot of rebellion." Even the ship money, condemned
not less decidedly by Falkland and Clarendon than by
the bitterest Roundheads, Johnson would not pronounce to 5
have been an unconstitutional impost. Under a government,
the mildest that had ever been known in the world--under a
government, which allowed to the people an unprecedented
liberty of speech and action--he fancied that he was a slave;
he assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted itself, and 10
regretted the lost freedom and happiness of those golden days
in which a writer who had taken but one-tenth part of the
license allowed to him would have been pilloried, mangled
with the shears, whipped at the cart's tail, and flung into a
noisome dungeon to die. He hated dissenters and stock-jobbers, 15
the excise and the army, septennial parliaments, and
continental connections. He long had an aversion to the
Scotch, an aversion of which he could not remember the commencement,
but which, he owned, had probably originated in
his abhorrence of the conduct of the nation during the Great 20
Rebellion. It is easy to guess in what manner debates on
great party questions were likely to be reported by a man
whose judgment was so much disordered by party spirit. A
show of fairness was indeed necessary to the prosperity of the
Magazine. But Johnson long afterwards owned that, though 25
he had saved appearances, he had taken care that the Whig
dogs should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every passage
which has lived, every passage which bears the marks of
his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member
of the opposition. 30
14. A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these
obscure labours, he published a work which at once placed
him high among the writers of his age. It is probable that
what he had suffered during his first year in London had often
reminded him of some parts of that noble poem in which
Juvenal had described the misery and degradation of a needy
man of letters, lodged among the pigeons' nests in the tottering
garrets which overhung the streets of Rome. Pope's
admirable imitations of Horace's Satires and Epistles had 5
recently appeared, were in every hand, and were by many
readers thought superior to the originals. What Pope had
done for Horace, Johnson aspired to do for Juvenal. The
enterprise was bold, and yet judicious. For between Johnson
and Juvenal there was much in common, much more certainly 10
than between Pope and Horace.
15. Johnson's London appeared without his name in
May 1738. He received only ten guineas for this stately and
vigorous poem: but the sale was rapid, and the success complete.
A second edition was required within a week. Those 15
small critics who are always desirous to lower established
reputations ran about proclaiming that the anonymous satirist
was superior to Pope in Pope's own peculiar department of
literature. It ought to be remembered, to the honour of Pope,
that he joined heartily in the applause with which the appearance 20
of a rival genius was welcomed. He made inquiries about
the author of London. Such a man, he said, could not long
be concealed. The name was soon discovered; and Pope,
with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an academical
degree and the mastership of a grammar school for the poor 25
young poet. The attempt failed, and Johnson remained a
bookseller's hack.