SAMUEL JOHNSON was born on September 18, 1709, in the old house that still stands at the corner of the market-place in Lichfield, and died on December 13, 1784, in Bolt Court, Fleet Street. The birth of the son of a small country bookseller passed unnoticed, but 'his death,' said a popular writer of his time,' makes a kind of era in literature 1.' In one, and in one thing only, did fortune favour him. He was bred in the midst of books, for he had the run of his father's shop. One day he climbed up to a shelf in search of some apples which he imagined that his brother had hidden behind a large folio. 'There were no apples; but the large folio proved to be Petrarch, whom he had seen mentioned in some preface as one of the restorers of learning. His curiosity having been thus excited, he sat down with avidity, and read a great part of the book. So widely did he read that when he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, his tutor told him 'he was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there"? He had almost everything against him. His life was too much like Pope's, one 'long disease.' Scrofula had disfigured his face, and deprived him of the use of one eye. He was subject to 'convulsive starts, and odd gesticulations, which tended to excite at once surprise and ridicule 5.' He was often troubled with a melancholy, which at one time was only divided by a thin partition

1 Hannah More, Memoirs, i. 394.

3 Ib.

2 Boswell's Life of Johnson, Clarendon Press ed., i. 57. 'This long disease, my life.'—Prologues to the Satires, 1. 132.

5 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 95.

from madness 1. In his old age he said that his health from his twentieth year had been such as seldom afforded him a day of ease 2. On the other hand, he possessed great bodily strength, a mind that was capable of extraordinary effort, and that worked with uncommon rapidity, and a happy facility of forgetting his troubles in the long hours which he gave to the society of his friends.

Till he received his pension, in his fifty-third year, he had had a never-ceasing struggle with poverty. His father found indeed the means to send him to the University, but could not afford to keep him there long. After a residence of fourteen months' poor Samuel Johnson returned to his native city, destitute, and not knowing how he should gain even a decent livelihood". In the present happier days, when scholarships are open to all, the youth who could turn Pope's Messiah into such Latin verse as Johnson turned it would never be driven by poverty from a wealthy University. By his father's death, which soon followed, Johnson was now forced to seek his livelihood. He tried a place as an usher in a grammar-school; but schools at this time were far too often dens of misery both for undermasters and boys. After a few months 'he relinquished a situation which all his life long he recollected with the strongest aversion, and even a degree of horror.' He sought the post of head-master, but was unsuccessful, on one occasion because he did not possess the degree of Master of Arts, and on another, because, to quote an old letter which still exists, he has the caracter of being a very haughty, ill-natured gent., and yt he has such a way of distorting his Face (which though he can't help) yo gent. think it may affect some young ladds ".' He sought work as an author, and vainly published proposals for printing the Latin Poems of Politian. He was little more successful in his next attempt. He translated from the French Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, and receiving for it five 2 Ib. iv. 147. • Th. vi. xliv.

1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 276, n. 2; 521. • Ib. i. 85.

Ib. i. 79.

guineas was paid at the rate of not quite threepence-farthing a page.

In his twenty-sixth year he married a widow who was full twenty years older than himself. To her he proved a most affectionate and indulgent husband to the last moment of her life'. With the help of the small fortune that she had2, he opened a school at Edial, near Lichfield. We may smile at an 'Academy' which was attended, it is said, by only three pupils in all. Yet what school is there in England that would not be proud, if it could point on its rolls to the name of Samuel Johnson among its masters and David Garrick among its boys? He soon gave up his school, and with a half-finished tragedy in his pocket came up to London. His travelling-companion was Garrick. He got employment as a writer on the Gentleman's Magazine, which. was then in the first years of its long existence. For it he wrote short poems, reviews, essays, biographies of eminent men, and his Parliamentary debates. Of these speeches, though they were put in the mouths of members of both Houses, the form was always his, and very often the substance too. His tragedy of Irene, though Garrick acted in it, met with slight success. It has never since been put on the stage. Nevertheless it brought its author a sum of money which to him must have seemed considerable. His two poems, London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, which have stood the judgment of many generations of readers, though their great merits were at once acknowledged, were miserably rewarded. He was paid for them at the rate of about tenpence a line 3. A single sheet of a paper containing a short letter in his handwriting has within the last few years sold for almost double the sum that he received for these two noble poems. The Life of Richard Savage which he wrote about this time gave our country an example of a new kind of biography. The rapidity with which it was 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 96. 2 Ib. i. 95, n. 3. Ib. ii. 297, n. 2.

3 lb. i. 193, n. I.

composed was astonishing. 'I wrote,' he said, 'forty-eight of the printed octavo pages at a sitting; but then I sat up all night 1 Reynolds, so soon to become famous as a great painter, who did not as yet know its author, 'began to read it while he was standing with his arm leaning against a chimney-piece. It seized his attention so strongly, that not being able to lay down the book till he had finished it, when he attempted to move he found his arm totally benumbed 2. Johnson soon after projected an edition of Shakespeare, and published as a specimen Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth. Twenty years however elapsed before he gave this edition to the world.

It was in the year 1747 that he issued his plan or prospectus of that which is perhaps the greatest of all his works, his Dictionary of the English Language. It was not till the spring of 1755 that it was ready for publication. The plan he had addressed to the Earl of Chesterfield, 'who was at once,' to quote the words of Lord Macaulay, 'the most distinguished orator in the Upper House, and the undisputed sovereign of wit and fashion. By this great nobleman Johnson thought that he was slighted. 'Sir,' said he, ' after making great professions he had for many years taken no notice of me; but when my Dictionary was coming out, he fell a scribbling in The World about it.' Chesterfield's scribble was flippant and indecent. Johnson wrote to him that famous letter which is likely to be read as long as the English language is understood *.

'TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF

CHESTERFIELD.

February 7, 1755.

MY LORD, I have been lately informed, by the proprietor of the World, that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public, were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished, is an honour, which, being very little 2 Ib. i. 165. Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, ed. 1877, i. 325.

3

1 Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 166.

+ Boswell's Life of Johnson, i. 259.