BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

THERE are men celebrated in the world of literature about whose personal characteristics we know almost nothing at all. We know so little of the most famous of the ancients, Homer, that we cannot be sure any such man ever existed. We know so little about Shakespeare, the most famous of the moderns, that certain persons of our day, perhaps not the wisest persons of our day, have ventured to deny to him the authorship of his own works. But Dr. Samuel Johnson, the author of the " History of Rasselas," is not one of these vague personalities, these dusky shadows whom we see flitting through the twilight of a distant past. Thanks to his biographer, Boswell, readers can know as much about Johnson, at one period of his life, as about the most bewritten, the most persistently interviewed, of the public men of to-day. He can know even more; for no interviewer of our time possesses the rare ability, which was Boswell's, of revealing in every deft touch of description, in every scrap of anecdote and shred of conversation, the inmost character of the man whose life he is reporting. Boswell's “Life of Johnson" is one of those books that every man, at some time in his life, should find leisure to read through from cover to cover. There he will see, drawn with infinite patience and minuteness of detail, the character which here can be sketched only in rough outlines.

Samuel Johnson was born on the 18th of September, 1709, in Lichfield, a small town about a hundred miles northwest of London. He was a sickly child, inheriting disorders that made his life, after his twentieth year, one long misery. Disease left its mark upon both mind and body. One serious effect of his ailments was loss of sight in one eye; another was a sort of St. Vitus' dance which at intervals forced him, wherever he might be, to perform a series of ridiculous motions with feet and hands; a third result was a disposition, which sometimes came dangerously near insanity, of profound melancholy. Notwithstanding these maladies, Johnson, unlike Pope, grew into a man of huge bulk and enormous strength. It is related of him that once, finding a stranger in his chair at the theatre, he picked up both man and chair and threw them into the pit. But he never learned to wield his strength with grace, and remained all his life, in outward appearance, clumsy, awkward, and uncouth.

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The son of a bookseller, Johnson picked up, among the volumes in his father's shop, the beginning of a vast store of miscellaneous information. His memory was remarkable. He seemed to absorb without effort whatever came in his way. At the age of eighteen, when he went to Oxford, he knew, so he afterwards said, as much as at fifty-three. He remained but fourteen months at the University — months of bitterness, poverty, and seclusion. “I was miserably poor," was his report of it years afterwards, “and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit." He was as proud as he was poor, and once when some unknown friend left a pair of new shoes at his door, indignantly flung them away. In 1731, when his father died, leaving to his son an inheritance of but twenty pounds, Johnson was thrown upon his own resources. For some years he lived, as Boswell characterized one period of it, a life of "complicated misery." For a time

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he taught in a grammar school, where he was wholly unsuccessful. Now and then he had a chance to do a little writing. His first publication, a translation of Father Lobo's "Travels in Abyssinia," is of peculiar significance for this sketch, inasmuch as it suggested the idea and supplied some of the material for the story of Rasselas. The translation, published in 1735, brought in to the translator a little over threepence a page, a sum total of five guineas. In the same year Johnson married a widow twenty years his senior, whose only recommendations, so far as his friends could see, were that she appreciated his talents and was possessed of a small sum of money. The money was probably soon spent in an unfortunate attempt to found a boys' school at Edial, near Lichfield. At one time but three pupils were in attendance at the academy," one of the three, however, being that David Garrick who is now remembered as the most eminent of English actors. When, after a year and a half, the unsuccessful venture was abandoned, Johnson, with Garrick as his companion, set out for London, in order, as his letter of introduction read, “to try his fate with a tragedy, and to see to get himself employed in some translation." He could not well have sought employment worse paid or more precarious. The lives of poor and unbefriended writers in the great metropolis were at this period miserable in the extreme. The prices paid by the publishers for the work of such men was less than that paid to ordinary day-laborers. The hope of most authors was fixed upon pleasing some wealthy man by dedicating a book to him, thus securing a patron who would give money to his flatterer as to an object of charity. To ignoble devices of this sort, Johnson, always of an independent spirit, maintained an unconquerable aversion. His only resource was hard, unremitting labor, and to this his sluggish, indolent nature was constitutionally indisposed. Living in a