genius of Savage, was not the best vehicle for description. Compared again with Parnell's his verse seems careless and slovenly: he far surpasses that poet, however, in strength and depth of feeling. To" solemnity of thought he may unquestionably lay claim it is his most characteristic quality; and the student of London and The Vanity of Human Wishes can hardly fail to perceive that much of the weighty moral style in Johnson's poetry is inspired, or at least stimulated, by the example of Savage. Like Savage, Johnson struggled into eminence through poverty, hunger, and various circumstances of adversity, which helped to form in his mind a pessimist view of life, and left traces of themselves in many of the ethical reflections in his poetry. Almost all of his verse was written before the receipt of his pension in 1762; and I shall therefore briefly sketch only up to this point the incidents of a career which must be familiar to every reader. Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller in Lichfield, where Samuel was born on the 7th of September 1709. From his father he inherited a large frame, Tory opinions, and a tendency to melancholia. He was sent, when eight years old, to the Free School in Lichfield, and at the age of sixteen received a good deal of classical instruction and much practical advice from his cousin, Cornelius Ford. When his father, after an interval, wished to re-enter him at the Lichfield School, the headmaster declined to receive him, and he finished his school education at Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, under a Mr. Wentworth. On the 31st of October 1728 he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, as private tutor to a gentleman named Corbett, who only remained in the University for two years; after which Johnson resided in Pembroke for another year, much straitened for money. His father died in December 1731, leaving him no more than twenty pounds for his support; and to maintain himself he accepted the under-mastership of the Grammar School at Market Bosworth in Leicestershire. Disgusted with this kind of work, he began to turn his mind to literature, and in 1733, being at the time on a visit to his old friend and schoolfellow, Mr. Hector, at Birmingham, he undertook to translate for a bookseller of that town a Portuguese book, written by Jerome Lobo, a missionary, concerning his voyage to Abyssinia. The translation was published in 1735, and in the preface to this, Johnson's first literary enterprise, may be found the germs of that conception of human life which manifests itself so strongly in all his later writings: The reader will here find no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either void of all sense of humanity or consummate in all private and social virtues; here are no Hottentots without religion, polity, or articulate language; no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled in all sciences; he will discover, what will always be discovered by a diligent and impartial enquirer, that, wherever human nature is to be found, there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason; and that the Creator doth not appear partial in his distribution, but has balanced, in most countries, their particular inconveniences by particular favours. From Birmingham in 1734 he returned to Lichfield, where he advertised a proposal-which met with no response for printing the Latin poems of Politian, and began his connection with The Gentleman's Magazine. But as literature did not provide him with sufficient maintenance, he offered himself, without being accepted, as under-master to a Mr. Budworth, master of a grammar school at Brerewood in Staffordshire. About the same time he married Mrs. Porter, widow of a mercer in Birmingham, whose little fortune he employed in setting up a school for himself at Edial near Lichfield. Few pupils came to him, though among those who did was David Garrick, and in 1737 he resolved to come to London. Garrick accompanied him, and soon laid the foundation of his fortune by becoming an actor in the theatre at Goodman's Fields. Johnson, on the other hand, continued his connection with The Gentleman's Magazine, and endeavoured to gain a livelihood by hack literary work. Soon after his arrival in London he made the acquaintance of Savage, whose fortunes were then at as low an ebb as his own, and he himself has described their companionship, and the depths of poverty to which they were reduced. Being an eager opponent of Walpole's foreign policy, he wrote in 1738 his London, an imitation of the third satire of Juvenal. I see no reason to doubt, in spite of what Boswell, backed by Croker, says to the contrary, that the Thales of this satire is Savage.1 The poem, published on the same day as Pope's Seventeen Hundred and Thirty-Eight, made a great impression, and Pope, on being told that the author was an unknown man, said: "He will soon be déterré." The satire was, however, not calculated to procure him preferment, and Johnson continued to seek a struggling subsistence by working for booksellers. In 1743-44 he was employed by Osborne to catalogue the Harleian Miscellany, and in the same year he wrote for Cave his Life of Savage, a work which may be said to have laid a foundation for the Lives of the English Poets. His Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1747, and in that year he wrote for Garrick his famous Prologue at the Opening of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. On his side Garrick undertook to produce Johnson's tragedy Irene, which was put in rehearsal in January 1749. Before it appeared on the stage, Johnson, in order to bring his name once more prominently before the public, composed his Vanity of Human Wishes, in imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal. Irene, as an acting play, did not succeed. While working on his Dictionary, Johnson added to his means of self-support by publishing The Rambler, a weekly paper, the first number 1 See Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson, p. 35. Savage's departure from London was then being projected by his friends, and Swansea was the place fixed for his residence, which doubtless gave Johnson the suggestion of making "Cambria "Cambria" the goal of Thales' retirement. The "injuries" of Thales (London, v. 2) and the reference to the "hermit" (v. 4) seem to be plain allusions to The Wanderer where Savage refers to his own history. The political sympathy between the poet and Thales, as expressed in vv. 19-30, reflects the feelings to which Johnson says the friends gave utterance on the occasion of their wanderings by night round St. James's Square. of which appeared on the 20th of March 1750, and the last on the 14th of March 1752. The Dictionary was published in May 1755. After it came another weekly paper, The Idler, which, starting on the 15th of April 1758, was discontinued after the 5th of April 1760. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, appeared in 1759, the name and the scene of action in the story having been plainly suggested by Johnson's early translation of Lobo's work.1 In May 1762 he received through Lord Bute, who was then Minister, a pension of £300 a year in reward of his literary labours, and henceforth, with the exception of his Lives of the Poets, completed in 1781, he did little work as a writer, beyond producing occasional verses and a few political pamphlets. He died on the 13th of December 1784. The chief characteristic of Johnson's ethical poetry is the depth of feeling with which he illustrates universal truths by individual examples. In London he shows his skill in the vividness of the parallels he draws between his own and ancient times. Without attempting to reproduce the text of Juvenal minutely, he transforms the leading features of its picturesque imagery with so much happiness that it seems as if the civic Genius of old Rome had awakened from an interval of slumber, to find himself, without surprise, in the midst of London society. The reader who compares the following passages with the scattered phrases of the Roman poet, by which they are suggested, will be struck equally by the antiquity of the example and by its modern air : By numbers here from shame or censure free, All crimes are safe but hated poverty. This only this the rigid law pursues, This only this provokes the snarling Muse. The sober trader at a tattered cloak Wakes from his dream, and labours for a joke ; With brisker air the silken courtiers gaze, Of all the griefs that harass the distressed, 1 Rassili Christos was the general of Sultan Sequed mentioned by Lobo. Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart, Has Heaven reserved, in pity to the poor, This mournful truth is everywhere confessed, In The Vanity of Human Wishes the imitation is far more general. Johnson was in deep sympathy with Juvenal's view of life, but his object was to bring out his moral by modern examples and a completely Christian mood of feeling. He made therefore no attempt to invent equivalents for the particular phrases of the original, as he had done with such striking success in London on the other hand, the imitation, as a whole, is 1 This paragraph is quite transformed from the following original : Materiam praebet causasque jocorum Omnibus hic idem, si foeda et scissa lacerna, Si toga sordidula est, et ruptu calceus alter We cannot but remember the incident of the shoes placed outside Johnson's door in Pembroke College, Oxford. How much more close he might have made the imitation had he been so minded! 2 These lines spring out of a very slight hint Agmine facto Debuerant olim tenues migrasse Quirites. 3 The imitation here is grounded on several scattered phrases: Haud facile emergunt quorum virtutibus obsta Res angusta domi; sed Romae durior illis Conatus. Omnia Romae Cum pretio Cogimur et cultis augere peculia servis. |