Read Ebook: Lives of the English Poets From Johnson to Kirke White Designed as a Continuation of Johnson's Lives by Cary Henry Francis

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SAMUEL JOHNSON

JOHN ARMSTRONG

RICHARD JAGO

RICHARD OWEN CAMBRIDGE

TOBIAS SMOLLETT

THOMAS WARTON

JOSEPH WARTON

CHRISTOPHER ANSTEY

WILLIAM MASON

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

ERASMUS DARWIN

WILLIAM JULIUS MICKLE

JAMES BEATTIE

WILLIAM HAYLEY

SIR WILLIAM JONES

THOMAS CHATTERTON

HENRY KIRKE WHITE

LIVES OF ENGLISH POETS.

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

There is, perhaps, no one among our English writers, who for so great a part of his life has been an object of curiosity to his contemporaries as Johnson. Almost every thing he said or did was thought worthy of being recorded by some one or other of his associates; and the public were for a time willing to listen to all they had to say of him. A mass of information has thus been accumulated, from which it will be my task to select such a portion as shall seem sufficient to give a faithful representation of his fortunes and character, without wearying the attention of the reader. That any important addition should be made to what has been already told of him, will scarcely be expected.

His father, though a man of strong understanding, and much respected in his line of life, was not successful in business. He must, therefore, have had a firm reliance on the capacity of his son; for while he chided him for his want of steady application, he resolved on making so great an effort as to send him to the University; and, accompanying him thither, placed him, on the 31st of October, 1728, a commoner at Pembroke College, Oxford. Some assistance was, indeed, promised him from other quarters, but this assistance was never given; nor was his industry quickened by his necessities. He was sometimes to be seen lingering about the gates of his college; and, at others, sought for relief from the oppression of his mind in affected mirth and turbulent gaiety. So extreme was his poverty, that he was prevented by the want of shoes from resorting to the rooms of his schoolfellow, Taylor, at the neighbouring college of Christ Church; and such was his pride, that he flung away with indignation a new pair that he found left at his door. His scholarship was attested by a translation into Latin verse of Pope's Messiah; which is said to have gained the approbation of that poet. But his independent spirit, and his irregular habits, were both likely to obstruct his interest in the University; and, at the end of three years, increasing debts, together with the failure of remittances, occasioned by his father's insolvency, forced him to leave it without a degree. Of Pembroke College, in his Life of Shenstone, and of Sir Thomas Browne, he has spoken with filial gratitude. From his tutor, Mr. Jorden, whom he described as a "worthy man, but a heavy one," he did not learn much. What he read solidly, he said, was Greek; and that Greek, Homer and Euripides; but his favourite study was metaphysics, which we must suppose him to have investigated by the light of his own meditation, for he did not read much in it. With Dr. Adams, then a junior fellow, and afterwards master of the College, his friendship continued till his death.

In this year, he made another effort to obtain the means of subsistence by an offer of his pen to Cave, the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine; but the immediate result of the application is not known; nor in what manner he supported himself till July 1736, when he married Elizabeth Porter, the widow of a mercer at Birmingham, and daughter of William Jervis, Esq. of Great Peatling, in Leicestershire. This woman, who was twenty years older than himself, and to whose daughter he had been an unsuccessful suitor, brought him eight hundred pounds; but, according to Garrick's report of her, was neither amiable nor handsome, though that she was both in Johnson's estimation appears from the epithets "formosae, cultae, ingeniosae," which he inscribed on her tombstone. Their nuptials were celebrated at Derby, and to that town they went together on horseback from Birmingham; but the bride assuming some airs of caprice on the road, like another Petruchio he gave her such effectual proofs of resolution, as reduced her to the abjectness of shedding tears. His first project after his marriage was to set up a school; and, with this intention, he hired a very commodious house, at the distance of about two miles from Lichfield, called Edial Hall, which has lately been taken down, and of which a representation is to be seen in the History of Lichfield, by Mr. Harwood. One of my friends, who inhabited it for the same purpose, has told me that an old countryman who lived near it, and remembered Johnson and his pupil Garrick, said to him, "that Johnson was not much of a scholar to look at, but that master Garrick was a strange one for leaping over a stile." It is amusing to observe the impressions which such men make on common minds. Unfortunately the prejudice occasioned by Johnson's unsightly exterior was not confined to the vulgar, insomuch that it has been thought to be the reason why so few parents committed their children to his care, for he had only three pupils. This unscholarlike appearance it must have been that made the bookseller in the Strand, to whom he applied for literary employment, eye him archly, and recommend it to him rather to purchase a porter's knot. But, as an old philosopher has said, every thing has two handles. It was, perhaps, the contrast between the body and the mind, between the incultum corpus, and the ingenium, which afterwards was one cause of his being received so willingly in those circles of what is called high life, where any thing that is exceedingly strange and unusual is apt to carry its own recommendation with it. Failing in his attempt at Edial, he was disposed once more to engage in the drudgery of an usher, and offered himself in that capacity to the Rev. William Budworth, master of the grammar-school at Brewood, in Staffordshire, celebrated for having been the place in which Bishop Hurd received his education, under that master. But here again nature stood in his way; for Budworth was fearful lest a strange motion with the head, the effect probably of disease, to which Johnson was habitually subject, might excite the derision of his scholars, and for that reason declined employing him. He now resolved on trying his fortune in the capital.

For his version of Sarpi's History, he had received from Cave, before the 21st of April in this year, fifty pounds, and some sheets of it had been committed to the press, when, unfortunately, the design was stopped, in consequence of proposals appearing for a translation of the same book, by another person of the same name as our author, who was curate of St. Martin's in the Fields, and patronized by Dr. Pearce, the editor of Longinus. Warburton afterwards expressed a wish that Johnson would give the original on one side, and his translation on the other. His next engagement was to draw up an account of the printed books in the Earl of Oxford's library, for Osborne, the bookseller, who had purchased them for thirteen thousand pounds. Such was the petulant impatience of Osborne, during the progress of this irksome task, that Johnson was once irritated so far as to beat him.

His own wants, however pressing, did not hinder him from assisting his mother, who had lost her other son. A letter to Mr. Levett, of Lichfield, on the subject of a debt, for which he makes himself responsible on her account, affords so striking a proof of filial tenderness, that I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of transcribing it.

Sir,--I am extremely sorry that we have encroached so much upon your forbearance with respect to the interest, which a great perplexity of affairs hindered me from thinking of with that attention that I ought, and which I am not immediately able to remit to you, but will pay it in two months. I look upon this, and on the future interest of that mortgage, as my own debt; and beg that you will be pleased to give me directions how to pay it, and not mention it to my dear mother. If it be necessary to pay this in less time, I believe I can do it; but I take two months for certainty, and beg an answer whether you can allow me so much time. I think myself very much obliged for your forbearance, and shall esteem it a great happiness to be able to serve you. I have great opportunities of dispersing any thing that you may think it proper to make public. I will give a note for the money payable at the time mentioned, to any one here that you shall appoint.

I am, Sir, your most obedient,

and most humble servant,

SAM. JOHNSON.

In the following year he produced his Life of Savage, a work that gives the charm of a romance to a narrative of real events; and which, bearing the stamp of that eagerness and rapidity with which it was thrown off the mind of the writer, exhibits rather the fervour of an eloquent advocate, than the laboriousness of a minute biographer. The forty-eight octavo pages, as he told Mr. Nichols , were written in one day and night. At its first appearance it was warmly praised, in the Champion, probably either by Fielding, or by Ralph, who succeeded to him in a share of that paper; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, when it came into his hand, found his attention so powerfully arrested, that he read it through without changing his posture, as he perceived by the torpidness of one of his arms that had rested on a chimney-piece by which he was standing. For the Life of Savage , he received fifteen guineas from Cave. About this time he fell into the company of Collins, with whom, as he tells us in his life of that poet, he delighted to converse.

His next publication was a pamphlet, called "Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, with Remarks on Sir T.H. Edition of Shakspeare," to which were subjoined, proposals for a new edition of his plays. These observations were favourably mentioned by Warburton, in the preface to his edition; and Johnson's gratitude for praise bestowed at a time when praise was of value to him, was fervent and lasting. Yet Warburton, with his usual intolerance of any dissent from his opinions, afterwards complained in a private letter to Hurd, that Johnson's remarks on his commentaries were full of insolence and malignant reflections, which, had they not in them "as much folly as malignity," he should have had reason to be offended with.

In 1747, he furnished Garrick, who had become joint-patentee and manager of Drury Lane, with a Prologue on the opening of the house. This address has been commended quite as much as it deserves. The characters of Shakspeare and Ben Jonson are, indeed, discriminated with much skill; but surely something might have been said, if not of Massinger and Beaumont and Fletcher, yet at least of Congreve and Otway, who are involved in the sweeping censure passed on "the wits of Charles."

He next became a candidate for public favour, as the writer of a periodical work, in the manner of the Spectator; and, in March, 1750, published the first number of the Rambler, which was continued for nearly two years; but, wanting variety of matter, and familiarity of style, failed to attract many readers, so that the largest number of copies that were sold of any one paper did not exceed five hundred. The topics were selected without sufficient regard to the popular taste. The grievances and distresses of authors particularly were dwelt on to satiety; and the tone of eloquence was more swelling and stately than he had hitherto adopted. The papers allotted to criticism are marked by his usual acumen; but the justice of his opinions is often questionable. In the humourous pieces, when our laughter is excited, I doubt the author himself, who is always discoverable under the masque of whatever character he assumes, is as much the object as the cause of our merriment; and, however moral and devout his more serious views of life, they are often defective in that most engaging feature of sound religion, a cheerful spirit. The only assistance he received was from Richardson, Mrs. Chapone, Miss Talbot, and Mrs. Carter, the first of whom contributed the 97th number; the second, four billets in the 10th; the next, the 30th; and the last, the 44th and 100th numbers.

Three days after the completion of the Rambler , he was deprived of his wife, whom, notwithstanding the disparity in their age, and some occasional bickerings, he had tenderly loved. Those who are disposed to scrutinize narrowly and severely into the human heart, may question the sincerity of his sorrow, because he was collected enough to write her funeral sermon. But the shapes which grief puts on in different minds are as dissimilar as the constitution of those minds. Milton, in whom the power of imagination was predominant, soothed his anguish for the loss of his youthful friend, in an irregular, but most beautiful assemblage of those poetic objects which presented themselves to his thoughts, and consecrated them to the memory of the deceased; and Johnson, who loved to act the moralizer and the rhetorician, alleviated his sufferings by declaiming on the instability of human happiness.

During this interval he also wrote the Prologue to Comus, spoken by Garrick, for the benefit of Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, grand-daughter to Milton; the Prologue and Postscript to Lander's impudent forgeries concerning that poet, by which Johnson was imposed on, as well as the rest of the world; a letter to Dr. Douglas, for the same impostor, after he had been detected, acknowledging and expressing contrition for the fraud; and the Life of Cheynel, in the Student.

Soon after his wife's death, he became intimate with Beauclerk and Langton, two young men of family and distinction, who were fellow collegians at Oxford, and much attached to each other; and the latter of whom admiration of the Rambler had brought to London with the express view of being introduced to the author. Their society was very agreeable to him; and he was, perhaps, glad to forget himself by joining at times in their sallies of juvenile gaiety. One night, when he had lodgings in the Temple, he was roused by their knocking at his door; and appearing in his shirt and nightcap, he found they had come together from the tavern where they had supped, to prevail on him to accompany them in a nocturnal ramble. He readily entered into their proposal; and, having indulged themselves till morning in such frolics as came in their way, Johnson and Beauclerk were so well pleased with their diversion, that they continued it through the rest of the day; while their less sprightly companion left them, to keep an engagement with some ladies at breakfast, not without reproaches from Johnson for deserting his friends "for a set of unidea'd girls."

In 1753, he gave to Dr. Bathurst, the physician, whom he regarded with much affection, and whose practice was very limited, several essays for the Adventurer, which Hawkesworth was then publishing; and wrote for Mrs. Lenox a Dedication to the Earl of Orrery, of her Shakspeare illustrated; and, in the following year, inserted in the Gentleman's Magazine a Life of Cave, its former editor.

Another wound was inflicted on him by the death of his mother, who had however reached her ninetieth year. His affection and his regret will best appear from the following letter to the daughter of his deceased wife.

You will conceive my sorrow for the loss of my mother, of the best mother. If she were to live again, surely I should behave better to her. But she is happy, and what is past is nothing to her: and, for me, since I cannot repair my faults to her, I hope repentance will efface them. I return you, and all those that have been good to her, my sincerest thanks, and pray God to repay you all with infinite advantage. Write to me, and comfort me, dear child. I shall be glad likewise, if Kitty will write to me. I shall send a bill of twenty pounds in a few days, which I thought to have brought to my mother, but God suffered it not. I have not power nor composure to say much more. God bless you, and bless us all.

I am, dear Miss,

Your affectionate humble servant,

SAM. JOHNSON.

Her attention to his mother, as it is reported in the following words, by Miss Seward, ensured to Johnson the sympathy of Lucy Porter.

From the age of twenty till her fortieth year, when affluence came to her by the death of her eldest brother, she had boarded in Lichfield with Dr. Johnson's mother, who still kept that little bookseller's shop, by which her husband had supplied the scanty means of existence. Meanwhile, Lucy Porter kept the best company of our little city, but would make no engagement on market-days, lest Granny, as she called Mrs. Johnson, should catch cold by serving in the shop. There Lucy Porter took her place, standing behind the counter, nor thought it a disgrace to thank a poor person who purchased from her a penny battledore .

To defray the expenses of his mother's funeral, he had recourse to his pen; and, in the evenings of one week produced the Rasselas, for which he received one hundred pounds, and was presented by the purchasers with twenty-five more on its reaching a second edition. Rasselas is a noble monument of the genius of its author. Reflections so profound, and so forcible a draught of some of the great outlines of the human intellect and passions, are to be found in few writers of any age or country. The mind is seldom presented with any thing so marvellous as the character of the philosopher, who has persuaded himself that he is entrusted with the management of the elements. Johnson's dread of insanity was, perhaps, relieved by embodying this mighty conception. He had seen the shadowy form in the twilight, and might have dissipated or eased his apprehensions by coming up to it more closely, and examining into the occasion of his fears. In this tale, the censure which he has elsewhere passed on Milton, that he is a lion who has no skill in dandling the kid, recoils upon himself. His delineation of the female character is wanting in delicacy.

In the course of this period, he made a short visit to Lichfield, and thus communicates his feelings on the occasion, in a letter dated July 20, 1762, to Baretti, his Italian friend, who was then at Milan.

Last winter I went down to my native town, where I found the streets much narrower and shorter than I thought I had left them, inhabited by a new race of people, to whom I was very little known. My play-fellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I am no longer young. My only remaining friend had changed his principles, and was become the tool of the predominant faction. My daughter-in-law, from whom I expected most, and whom I met with sincere benevolence, had lost the beauty and gaiety of youth, without having gained much of the wisdom of age. I wandered about for five days, and took the first convenient opportunity of returning to a place, where, if there is not much happiness, there is at least such a diversity of good and evil, that slight vexations do not fix upon the heart.

I think in a few weeks to try another excursion; though to what end? Let me know, my Baretti, what has been the result of your return to your own country; whether time has made any alteration for the better, and, whether, when the first rapture of salutation was over, you did not find your thoughts confessed their disappointment.

Henceforward Johnson had no longer to struggle with the evils of extreme poverty. A pension of ?300 was granted to him, in 1762, by His Majesty. Before his acceptance of it, in answer to a question put by him to the Earl of Bute, in these words, "Pray, my Lord, what am I to do for the pension?" he was assured by that nobleman that it was not given him for any thing he was to do, but for what he had done. The definition he had given of the word pension, in his dictionary, that in England it was generally understood to mean pay, given to a state hireling, for treason to his country, raised some further scruples whether he ought himself to become a pensioner; but they were removed by the arguments, or the persuasion of Mr. Reynolds, to whom he had recourse for advice in this dilemma. What advice Reynolds would give him he must have known pretty well before-hand; but this was one of the many instances in which men, having first determined how to act, are willing to imagine that they are going for clearer information, where they in truth expect nothing but a confirmation of their own resolve. The liberality of the nation could not have been extended to one who had better deserved it. But he had a calamity yet more dreadful than poverty to encounter. The depression of his spirits was now become almost intolerable. "I would have a limb amputated," said he to Dr. Adams, "to recover my spirits." He was constantly tormented by harassing reflections on his inability to keep the many resolutions he had formed of leading a better life; and complained that a kind of strange oblivion had overspread him, so that he did not know what was become of the past year, and that incidents and intelligence passed over him without leaving any impression.

From these domestic feuds he would sometimes withdraw himself to the house of Mr. Thrale, at Streatham, an opulent brewer, with whom his acquaintance had begun in 1765. With this open-hearted man he was always sure of a welcome reception for as long a time as he chose; and the mistress of the house, though after the death of her first husband and her subsequent marriage to an Italian she somewhat ungraciously remembered the petty annoyances which Johnson's untoward habits had occasioned her, was evidently pleased by his hearty expressions of regard, and flattered by his conversation on subjects of literature, in which she was herself well able to take a part.

In this year, his long promised edition of Shakspeare made its appearance, in eight volumes octavo. That by Steevens was published the following year; and a coalition between the editors having been effected, an edition was put forth under their joint names, in ten volumes 8vo., 1773. For the first, Johnson received ?375; and for the second ?100. At the beginning of the Preface, he has marked out the character of our great dramatist with such a power of criticism, as there was perhaps no example of in the English language. Towards the conclusion, he has, I think, successfully defended him from the neglect of what are called the unities. The observation, that a quibble was the Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it, is more pointed than just. Shakspeare cannot be said to have lost the world; for his fame has not only embraced the circle of his own country, but is continually spreading over new portions of the globe; nor is there any reason to conclude that he would have acquiesced in such a loss. Like most other writers, he indulged himself in a favourite propensity, aware, probably, that if it offended some, it would win him the applause of others. One avenue of knowledge, that was open to Shakspeare in common with the rest of mankind, none of his commentators appear to have sufficiently considered. We cannot conceive him to have associated frequently with men of larger acquirements than himself, and not to have made much of their treasures his own. The conversation of such a man as Ben Jonson alone, supposing him to have made no more display of his learning than chance or vanity would occasionally produce, must have supplied ample sources of information to a mind so curious, watchful, and retentive, that it did not suffer the slightest thing to escape its grasp. Johnson is distinguished in his notes from the other commentators, chiefly by the acute remarks on many of the characters, and on the conduct of some of the fables, which he has subjoined to the different plays. In other respects he is not superior to the rest; in some, particularly in illustrating his author from antecedent or contemporary writers, he is inferior to them. A German critic of our own days, Schlegel, has surpassed him even in that which he has done best.

From Boswell I have collected an account of the little journeys with which he from time to time relieved the uniformity of his life. They will be told in order as they occur, and I hope will not weary the reader. The days of a scholar are frequently not distinguished by varieties even as unimportant as these. Johnson found his mind grow stagnant by a constant residence in the neighbourhood of Charing-cross itself, where he thought human happiness at its flood: and once, when moving rapidly along the road in a carriage with Boswell, cried out to his fellow-traveller, "Sir, life has few things better than this." In the winter of 1766 he went to Oxford, where he resided for a month, and formed an intimacy with Chambers, afterwards one of the judges in India. During this period, no publication appeared under his own name; but he furnished Miss Williams with a Preface to her Poems, and Adams with another for his Treatise on the Globes; and wrote the dedication to the King, prefixed to Gough's London and Westminster Improved. He seems to have been always ready to supply a dedication for a friend, a task which he executed with more than ordinary courtliness. In this way, he told Boswell, that he believed he "had dedicated to all the royal family round." But in his own case, either pride hindered him from prefixing to his works what he perhaps considered as a token of servility, or his better judgment restrained him from appropriating, by a particular inscription to one individual, that which was intended for the use of mankind.

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