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CHAPTER XIX.

JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH.

AMUEL JOHNSON was born at Lichfield, in the year 1709. He was the son of a bookseller there. At the age of nineteen, after having been at several schools, he was entered of Pembroke College, Oxford. He had formed a habit in his father's shop of desultory and miscellaneous reading; and he continued this habit at College, and his reading was as curious and out-of-the-way as it was extensive. He was known at Oxford for his power of writing Latin, and making jokes against the authorities. Poverty compelled him to leave Oxford before taking his degree. In 1736 he married a widow, Mrs. Porter, of Birmingham, who brought him a "fortune" of £800; and with this capital he opened a boarding-school at Lichfield. But the boarding-school was a complete failure; and in 1737 he came to London (Irene, a tragedy, in his pocket) with one of his pupils-David Garrick, the celebrated actor-and with the purpose of trying to live by his pen.

2. “This was," says Macaulay, "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." From this year, 1737, he laboured for a quarter of a century to maintain himself; and his life is a story of obscure misery and daily struggle. He was "tried by the bitterest calamities, by the want of mcat, 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 of all paths, by that deferred hope which makes the heart sick." He shared the lot of the poorest literary hacks of his time. "To lodge in a garret up four pair of stairs, to

dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to 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 Kit-cat or the Scriblerus Club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been entrusted 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." Dr. Johnson wrote translations, polished other people's writings, wrote prefaces to them, compiled all kinds of books, wrote abridgments, articles for the magazines, and made himself generally useful. He was chiefly employed by CAVE-the man who founded in 1731 the Gentleman's Magazine, a periodical which still exists.

ence.

3. In 1738 he published his poem called London, a satire, which was praised by Pope. It is full of the bitterness of his own experiIn 1747, his fame was so well established, that a committee of booksellers engaged him to write a Dictionary of the English Language, for which he was to receive £1575. It was completed in 1755; and his university presented him with the honorary degree of M.A. to grace his title-page. In 1749 he published The Vanity of Human Wishes. He began The Rambler in 1750, and continued it till 1752, twice a week; and only in five numbers did he receive help from friends. His wife died in 1752; and his mother in 1759; and he wrote Rasselas to raise money to defray the expenses of her funeral. His life was still a struggle; but in 1762 a pension of £300 a year from George III., who had a great esteem for Dr Johnson, raised him above the necessity of literary drudgery. In 1779-81 appeared his Lives of the Poets. He died in Bolt Court, Fleet Street, in 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to the grave of his friend Garrick, with honours " more in number and in quality than were ever paid to any man of literature."

4. Curiously enough, Dr Johnson is better known to Englishmen by what he has not written, than by what he has written; everybody knows the man himself, few read his books. This kind of immortality-which would have annoyed him greatly could he have foreseen

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it he owes to a Scotch laird, called James Boswell. This gentleman became the humble servant and devoted hanger-on of the great doctor, went with him everywhere, listened with his whole soul to everything he said, and would often sit up for hours after twelve o'clock at night that he might put upon paper his fresh impressions of what he had heard. The result was The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., by James Boswell, Esq.”—one of the most entertaining books in all literature. In Boswell's pages, every one may become acquainted at first-hand with the character of Dr. Johnson. Macaulay says:- Johnson grown old is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, 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 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."

5. His chief works are:

(1.) The Vanity of Human Wishes (a poem). (2.) Rasselas.

(3.) The Dictionary.

(4.) The Lives of the Poets.

(1.) THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES is a poem in imitation of the tenth satire of Juvenal. It is written in the ordinary heroic couplet (5 x a) of the period, and is full of vigorous lines. Like all verses of the kind, it is splendid rhetoric and brilliant declamation, but not poetry in the truest sense. The subject of the poem is the misery of having our desires fulfilled, and the emptiness of mere ambition. He says of Charles XII. of Sweden :

He left the name at which the world grew pale

To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

*"He would carry home on his shoulders a sick and starving girl from the streets."

The moral of the poem is the same as that of Pope's Essay on Man; and the conclusion is a noble piece of writing.

FROM "THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES."

Where1 then shall Hope and Fear their objects find?
Must dull Suspense corrupt the stagnant mind?
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,2

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Which heaven may hear; nor deem religion vain.

Still raise for good the supplicating voice,

But leave to heaven the measure and the choice 7;

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Safe in His pow'r, whose eyes discern afar

The secret ambush of a specious prayer.
Implore His aid, in His decisions rest,
Secure, whate'er He gives, He gives the best.
Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires,
And strong devotion to the skies aspires,11
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resign'd;
For love, which scarce collective man 12
can fill;
For patience, sov'reign o'er transmuted 12 ill;
For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,

Counts death kind nature's signal of retreat:

These goods for man the laws of heav'n ordain;
These goods He grants, who grants the pow'r to gain;
With these celestial wisdom calms the mind,

And makes the happiness she does not find.

(2.) RASSELAS is a kind of romance, with the moral everywhere obtruded. In that respect-in its painfully instructive and "lessongiving" character-it may be compared with Télémaque. The central idea seems to be that no form of life is without its compensations. It was written "in the evenings of a week," and is, perhaps, the best example of Johnson's peculiar style.

(3.) THE DICTIONARY is a splendid piece of work. It is not scientific in its method of distinguishing and arranging the meaning of words, and many of its derivations are incorrect, as the true method of philological inquiry was quite unknown in his time.

But it is a work to which very great labour and much acute thinking have been given; and the original edition, with numerous quotations from English authors of different epochs, is very interesting reading.

(4.) THE LIVES OF THE POETS was originally written as a series of prefaces to an edition of the English poets; but it is now always printed in a separate form. In addition to Milton and others, it contains the lives of a large number of verse-writers who are never now read, and will never be read again. The style of this work is not so elaborate or rotund as that of Rasselas or of the Rambler.

6. The three chief peculiarities of his style are (a) its Latinized diction; (b) the pompous and ponderous movement of its rhythm; and (c), its ceaseless antithesis.

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(a) One of the most characteristic examples of this is to be found in his criticism on a play mentioned by Boswell. Dr. Johnson said: “The Rehearsal has not wit enough to keep it sweet;" and then, pausing for a moment, he translated this simple English into “It has not sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction." Macaulay says: as soon as he took his pen in his hand to write for the public, his style became systematically vicious. All his books are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in which nobody ever thinks."

(b) The rhythm of his phrases, clauses, and sentences is, as all rhythm generally is, the expression in sound of the temperament and disposition of the writer. Johnson was clumsy, rough, and overbearing; and all his rhythms have a magisterial, authoritative, and ponderous movement. He makes a young lady of sixteen write thus (in the Rambler) about her aunt: "She had not very elevated sentiments, or extensive views, but her principles were good, and her intentions pure; and though some may practise more virtues, scarce any commit fewer faults." The following is another example of ponderosity: "In cities, and yet more in courts, the minute discriminations which distinguish one from another are for the most part effaced. The peculiarities of temper and opinion are gradually worn away by promiscuous converse, as angular bodies and uneven surfaces lose their points and asperities by frequent attrition against one another, and approach by degrees to uniform rotundity."