and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known
to us than any other man in history. Every thing about him, his 30
coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's
dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs
which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his
insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with plums, his
inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts
as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of
orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations,
his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings,
his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his 5
vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his
queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat
Hodge and the negro Frank, all are as familiar to us as the
objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood.
But we have no minute information respecting those years of 10
Johnson's life during which his character and his manners
became immutably fixed. We know him, not as he was known
to the men of his own generation, but as he was known to men
whose father he might have been. That celebrated club of
which he was the most distinguished member contained few 15
persons who could remember a time when his fame was not
fully established and his habits completely formed. He had
made himself a name in literature while Reynolds and the
Wartons were still boys. He was about twenty years older
than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton, about thirty 20
years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton, and about
forty years older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and
Windham. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from
whom we derive most of our knowledge respecting him, never
saw him till long after he was fifty years old, till most of his 25
great works had become classical, and till the pension bestowed
on him by the Crown had placed him above poverty. Of those
eminent men who were his most intimate associates towards the
close of his life, the only one, as far as we remember, who knew
him during the first ten or twelve years of his residence in the 30
capital, was David Garrick; and it does not appear that, during
those years, David Garrick saw much of his fellow-townsman.
9. Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when
the condition of a man of letters was most miserable and
degraded. It was a dark night between two sunny days. The
age of patronage had passed away. The age of general curiosity
and intelligence had not arrived. The number of readers
is at present so great that a popular author may subsist in
comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the 5
reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First,
even such men as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have
been able to live like gentlemen by the mere sale of their
writings. But the deficiency of the natural demand for literature
was, at the close of the seventeenth and at the beginning 10
of the eighteenth century, more than made up by artificial
encouragement, by a vast system of bounties and premiums.
There was, perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of
literary merit were so splendid, at which men who could write
well found such easy admittance into the most distinguished 15
society, and to the highest honours of the state. The chiefs
of both the great parties into which the kingdom was divided
patronised literature with emulous munificence. Congreve,
when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for
his first comedy with places which made him independent for 20
life. Smith, though his Hippolytus and Phædra failed, would
have been consoled with three hundred a year but for his own
folly. Rowe was not only Poet Laureate, but also land-surveyor
of the customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to
the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the 25
Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissions
of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative
Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and
of the Board of Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint.
Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity 30
and importance. Gay, who commenced life as an apprentice
to a silk mercer, became a secretary of legation at five-and-twenty.
It was to a poem on the Death of Charles the Second,
and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed
his introduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and
his Auditorship of the Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable
prejudice of the queen, would have been a bishop.
Oxford, with his white staff in his hand, passed through the
crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that ingenious 5
writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of
stamps and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was
a commissioner of the customs, and auditor of the imprest.
Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison
was secretary of state. 10
10. This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it
seems, by the magnificent Dorset, almost the only noble versifier
in the court of Charles the Second who possessed talents
for composition which were independent of the aid of a coronet.
Montague owed his elevation to the favour of Dorset, and 15
imitated through the whole course of his life the liberality to
which he was himself so greatly indebted. The Tory leaders,
Harley and Bolingbroke in particular, vied with the chiefs of
the Whig party in zeal for the encouragement of letters. But
soon after the accession of the House of Hanover a change 20
took place. The supreme power passed to a man who cared
little for poetry or eloquence. The importance of the House
of Commons was constantly on the increase. The government
was under the necessity of bartering for Parliamentary support
much of that patronage which had been employed in fostering 25
literary merit; and Walpole was by no means inclined to
divert any part of the fund of corruption to purposes which he
considered as idle. He had eminent talents for government
and for debate. But he had paid little attention to books,
and felt little respect for authors. One of the coarse jokes of 30
his friend, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, was far more pleasing
to him than Thomson's Seasons or Richardson's Pamela.
He had observed that some of the distinguished writers
whom the favour of Halifax had turned into statesmen had
been mere encumbrances to their party, dawdlers in office,
and mutes in Parliament. During the whole course of his
administration, therefore, he scarcely befriended a single man
of genius. The best writers of the age gave all their support
to the opposition, and contributed to excite that discontent 5
which, after plunging the nation into a foolish and unjust war,
overthrew the minister to make room for men less able and
equally immoral. The opposition could reward its eulogists
with little more than promises and caresses. St. James's would
give nothing: Leicester House had nothing to give. 10
11. Thus, at the time when Johnson commenced his literary
career, a writer had little to hope from the patronage of
powerful individuals. The patronage of the public did not
yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices
paid by booksellers to authors were so low that a man of 15
considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more
than provide for the day which was passing over him. The
lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered
ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich harvests
was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is 20
squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word
Poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow,
familiar with compters and spunging-houses, and perfectly
qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common
Side in the King's Bench prison and of Mount Scoundrel 25
in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him; and they well
might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject,
their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of
insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up four pair of
stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to 30
translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hunted
by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another,
from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's
Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's church, to sleep on a
bulk in June and amidst the ashes of a glass-house in December,
to die in a hospital and to be buried in a parish vault,
was the fate of more than one writer who, if he had lived
thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings
of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus club, would have sat in Parliament, 5
and would have been intrusted with embassies to the
High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have
found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle
Street or in Paternoster Row.
12. As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk 10
of life has its peculiar temptations. The literary character,
assuredly, has always had its share of faults, vanity, jealousy,
morbid sensibility. To these faults were now superadded the
faults which are commonly found in men whose livelihood is
precarious, and whose principles are exposed to the trial of 15
severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar
were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the
wretched lottery of book-making were scarcely less ruinous than
the blanks. If good fortune came, it came in such a manner
that it was almost certain to be abused. After months of 20
starvation and despair, a full third night or a well-received
dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed
poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with
the images of which his mind had been haunted while he
was sleeping amidst the cinders and eating potatoes at the 25
Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week of taverns soon qualified
him for another year of night-cellars. Such was the life
of Savage, of Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes
blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in
bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper 30
cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking
Champagne and Tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes
standing at the window of an eating-house in Porridge island,
to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste;
they knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew
comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a
regular and frugal life with the same aversion which an old
gipsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a stationary abode, and for
the restraints and securities of civilised communities. They 5
were as untameable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom,
as the wild ass. They could no more be broken in to
the offices of social man than the unicorn could be trained to
serve and abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like
beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered 10
to their necessities. To assist them was impossible; and the
most benevolent of mankind at length became weary of giving
relief which was dissipated with the wildest profusion as soon
as it had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the
wretched adventurer, such as, properly husbanded, might 15
have supplied him for six months, it was instantly spent in
strange freaks of sensuality, and before forty-eight hours had
elapsed, the poet was again pestering all his acquaintance for
twopence to get a plate of shin of beef at a subterraneous
cook-shop. If his friends gave him an asylum in their houses, 20
those houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and taverns.
All order was destroyed; all business was suspended. The
most good-natured host began to repent of his eagerness to
serve a man of genius in distress when he heard his guest
roaring for fresh punch at five o'clock in the morning. 25
13. A few eminent writers were more fortunate. Pope had
been raised above poverty by the active patronage which, in
his youth, both the great political parties had extended to his
Homer. Young had received the only pension ever bestowed,
to the best of our recollection, by Sir Robert Walpole, as the 30
reward of mere literary merit. One or two of the many poets
who attached themselves to the opposition, Thomson in particular
and Mallet, obtained, after much severe suffering, the
means of subsistence from their political friends. Richardson,
like a man of sense, kept his shop; and his shop kept him,
which his novels, admirable as they are, would scarcely have
done. But nothing could be more deplorable than the state
even of the ablest men, who at that time depended for subsistence
on their writings. Johnson, Collins, Fielding, and 5
Thomson, were certainly four of the most distinguished persons
that England produced during the eighteenth century.
It is well known that they were all four arrested for debt.
14. Into calamities and difficulties such as these Johnson
plunged in his twenty-eighth year. From that time till he was 10
three or four and fifty, we have little information respecting
him; little, we mean, compared with the full and accurate
information which we possess respecting his proceedings and
habits towards the close of his life. He emerged at length
from cock-lofts and sixpenny ordinaries into the society of the 15
polished and the opulent. His fame was established. A pension
sufficient for his wants had been conferred on him: and
he came forth to astonish a generation with which he had
almost as little in common as with Frenchmen or Spaniards.
15. In his early years he had occasionally seen the great; 20
but he had seen them as a beggar. He now came among
them as a companion. The demand for amusement and
instruction had, during the course of twenty years, been gradually
increasing. The price of literary labour had risen; and
those rising men of letters with whom Johnson was henceforth 25
to associate were for the most part persons widely different
from those who had walked about with him all night in the
streets for want of a lodging. Burke, Robertson, the Wartons,
Gray, Mason, Gibbon, Adam Smith, Beattie, Sir William
Jones, Goldsmith, and Churchill, were the most distinguished 30
writers of what may be called the second generation of the
Johnsonian age. Of these men Churchill was the only one
in whom we can trace the stronger lineaments of that character
which, when Johnson first came up to London, was common
among authors. Of the rest, scarcely any had felt the pressure
of severe poverty. Almost all had been early admitted
into the most respectable society on an equal footing. They
were men of quite a different species from the dependents of
Curll and Osborne. 5
16. Johnson came among them the solitary specimen of
a past age, the last survivor of the genuine race of Grub
Street hacks; the last of that generation of authors whose
abject misery and whose dissolute manners had furnished
inexhaustible matter to the satirical genius of Pope. From 10
nature he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the
earlier years of his manhood had been passed had given to
his demeanour, and even to his moral character, some peculiarities
appalling to the civilised beings who were the companions 15
of his old age. The perverse irregularity of his hours,
the slovenliness of his person, his fits of strenuous exertion,
interrupted by long intervals of sluggishness, his strange abstinence,
and his equally strange voracity, his active benevolence,
contrasted with the constant rudeness and the occasional 20
ferocity of his manners in society, made him, in the opinion
of those with whom he lived during the last twenty years of
his life, a complete original. An original he was, undoubtedly,
in some respects. But if we possessed full information
concerning those who shared his early hardships, we should 25
probably find that what we call his singularities of manner
were, for the most part, failings which he had in common
with the class to which he belonged. He ate at Streatham
Park as he had been used to eat behind the screen at
St. John's Gate, when he was ashamed to show his ragged 30
clothes. He ate as it was natural that a man should eat, who,
during a great part of his life, had passed the morning in
doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. The
habits of his early life had accustomed him to bear privation
with fortitude, but not to taste pleasure with moderation.
He could fast; but, when he did not fast, he tore his dinner
like a famished wolf, with the veins swelling on his forehead,
and the perspiration running down his cheeks. He
scarcely ever took wine. But when he drank it, he drank it 5
greedily and in large tumblers. These were, in fact, mitigated
symptoms of that same moral disease which raged with such
deadly malignity in his friends Savage and Boyse. The
roughness and violence which he showed in society were to
be expected from a man whose temper, not naturally gentle, 10
had been long tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want
of meat, of fire, and of clothes, by the importunity of creditors,
by the insolence of booksellers, by the derision of fools,
by the insincerity of patrons, by that bread which is the
bitterest of all food, by those stairs which are the most toilsome 15
of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the
heart sick. Through all these things the ill-dressed, coarse,
ungainly pedant had struggled manfully up to eminence and
command. It was natural that, in the exercise of his power,
he should be "eo immitior, quia toleraverat," that, though his 20
heart was undoubtedly generous and humane, his demeanour
in society should be harsh and despotic. For severe distress
he had sympathy, and not only sympathy, but munificent
relief. But for the suffering which a harsh world inflicts
upon a delicate mind he had no pity; for it was a kind of 25
suffering which he could scarcely conceive. He would carry
home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the
streets. He turned his house into a place of refuge for a
crowd of wretched old creatures who could find no other
asylum; nor could all their peevishness and ingratitude weary 30
out his benevolence. But the pangs of wounded vanity
seemed to him ridiculous; and he scarcely felt sufficient
compassion even for the pangs of wounded affection. He
had seen and felt so much of sharp misery, that he was not
affected by paltry vexations; and he seemed to think that
every body ought to be as much hardened to those vexations
as himself. He was angry with Boswell for complaining of
a headache, with Mrs. Thrale for grumbling about the dust
on the road, or the smell of the kitchen. These were, in 5
his phrase, "foppish lamentations," which people ought to
be ashamed to utter in a world so full of sin and sorrow.
Goldsmith crying because the Good-natured Man had failed,
inspired him with no pity. Though his own health was not
good, he detested and despised valetudinarians. Pecuniary 10
losses, unless they reduced the loser absolutely to beggary,
moved him very little. People whose hearts had been softened
by prosperity might weep, he said, for such events; but
all that could be expected of a plain man was not to laugh.
He was not much moved even by the spectacle of Lady 15
Tavistock dying of a broken heart for the loss of her lord.
Such grief he considered as a luxury reserved for the idle and
the wealthy. A washerwoman, left a widow with nine small
children, would not have sobbed herself to death.
17. A person who troubled himself so little about small 20
or sentimental grievances was not likely to be very attentive
to the feelings of others in the ordinary intercourse of society.
He could not understand how a sarcasm or a reprimand
could make any man really unhappy. "My dear doctor,"
said he to Goldsmith, "what harm does it do to a man to call 25
him Holofernes?" "Pooh, ma'am," he exclaimed to Mrs.
Carter, "who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?"
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small
things. Johnson was impolite, not because he wanted benevolence,
but because small things appeared smaller to him than 30
to people who had never known what it was to live for fourpence
halfpenny a day.
18. The characteristic peculiarity of his intellect was the
union of great powers with low prejudices. If we judged of
him by the best parts of his mind, we should place him almost
as high as he was placed by the idolatry of Boswell; if by
the worst parts of his mind, we should place him even below
Boswell himself. Where he was not under the influence of
some strange scruple, or some domineering passion, which 5
prevented him from boldly and fairly investigating a subject,
he was a wary and acute reasoner, a little too much inclined
to scepticism, and a little too fond of paradox. No man was
less likely to be imposed upon by fallacies in argument or by
exaggerated statements of fact. But if, while he was beating 10
down sophisms and exposing false testimony, some childish
prejudices, such as would excite laughter in a well-managed
nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment.
His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic
elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been 15
admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished
at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman
in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature
had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might
seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to 20
the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless
slave of the charm of Solomon.
19. Johnson was in the habit of sifting with extreme severity
the evidence for all stories which were merely odd. But when
they were not only odd but miraculous, his severity relaxed. 25
He began to be credulous precisely at the point where the
most credulous people begin to be sceptical. It is curious to
observe, both in his writings and in his conversation, the contrast
between the disdainful manner in which he rejects unauthenticated
anecdotes, even when they are consistent with the 30
general laws of nature, and the respectful manner in which he
mentions the wildest stories relating to the invisible world.
A man who told him of a waterspout or a meteoric stone
generally had the lie direct given him for his pains. A man
who told him of a prediction or a dream wonderfully accomplished
was sure of a courteous hearing. "Johnson," observed
Hogarth, "like king David, says in his haste that all men are
liars." "His incredulity," says Mrs. Thrale, "amounted almost
to disease." She tells us how he browbeat a gentleman, who 5
gave him an account of a hurricane in the West Indies, and a
poor quaker who related some strange circumstance about the
red-hot balls fired at the siege of Gibraltar. "It is not so.
It cannot be true. Don't tell that story again. You cannot
think how poor a figure you make in telling it." He once said, 10
half jestingly we suppose, that for six months he refused to
credit the fact of the earthquake at Lisbon, and that he still
believed the extent of the calamity to be greatly exaggerated.
Yet he related with a grave face how old Mr. Cave of St. John's
Gate saw a ghost, and how this ghost was something of a shadowy 15
being. He went himself on a ghost hunt to Cock Lane, and
was angry with John Wesley for not following up another scent
of the same kind with proper spirit and perseverance. He rejects
the Celtic genealogies and poems without the least hesitation;
yet he declares himself willing to believe the stories of 20
the second sight. If he had examined the claims of the Highland
seers with half the severity with which he sifted the evidence
for the genuineness of Fingal, he would, we suspect, have
come away from Scotland with a mind fully made up. In his
Lives of the Poets, we find that he is unwilling to give credit 25
to the accounts of Lord Roscommon's early proficiency in his
studies; but he tells with great solemnity an absurd romance
about some intelligence preternaturally impressed on the mind
of that nobleman. He avows himself to be in great doubt
about the truth of the story, and ends by warning his readers 30
not wholly to slight such impressions.