house in which he was born is there upon a corner of the great broadened street, opposite St. Mary's Church. We get a pleasant glimpse of the house on a page of Our Old Home, by Hawthorne; and another glimpse of the colossal figure of Dr. Johnson, seated in his marble chair, upon that Lichfield market-place. His father was a bookseller; held, too, some small magistracy; was eminently respectable; loved books as well as sold them, and had a corresponding inaptitude for business. The son added to indifferent schooling, here and there, a habit of large browsing along his father's shelves; was a great, ungainly lout of a boy, but marvellously quick-witted. With some help from his father, and some from friends, and with a reputation for making verses, and tastes ranging above bookstalls, he entered at Oxford when nineteen; but that life. We miss in it, indeed, some of the "Croker " notes, which made such inviting quarry for the sharp huntsmanship of Macaulay. But the editing is done with a love and a tirelessness which are as winning as they are rare. See, also, Leslie Stephen's sketch-which is the best short the stings of poverty smote him there early; and after three years of irregular attendance, he leftonly to find his father lapsing into bankruptcy and a fatal illness. On the settlement of the old bookseller's estate, £20 only was the portion of the son. Then follow some dreary years; he is hypochondriac and fears madness; he is underteacher in a school; he offers to do job-work for the book-makers; he translates the narrative of a Portuguese missionary about Abyssinia; he ponders over a tragedy of Irene. Not much good comes of all this, when - on a sudden, our hero, who is now twenty-six, marries a widow-who admired his talents-who is twenty years his senior and has £800. Johnson was not a person to regard closely such little discrepancies as that difference in age- nor she, I suppose. - The bride is represented as not over-comely, and as one of good judgment in most matterswho resorted to some vulgar appliances for making the most of her "good looks." Lord Macaulay uses a very rampant rhetoric in his encyclopædic Ency. Britannica; Art. Johnson. mention of the paint she put upon her cheeks. With the aid of her £800, Johnson determined to set up a boarding-school for young gentlemen; a gaunt country-house three miles out of Lichfield was rented and equipped and advertised; but the young gentlemen did not come. How could they be won that way? The mistress frowsy, simpering, ancient, painted, and becurled; and Mr. Johnson, gaunt, clumsy, squinting - one side of his face badly scarred with some early surgical cut; one eye involved and drooping, and a twitchy St. Vitus's dance making all uglier. What boy would not dread a possible whipping from such a master, and what mamma would not tremble for her boy? Yet I do not believe he ever whipped hard, when he had occasion; he was kind-hearted; but his scolds at a false syntax must have been terrific and have made the floors shiver. Among the boys who did venture to that Edial school was one David Garrick, whose father had been a friend of the elder Johnson; and when the school broke up—as it did presently-Johnson and David Garrick set out together for London, to seek their fortune-carrying letters to some booksellers there; and Johnson carrying that halfwritten tragedy of Irene in his pocket. Garrick's rise began early, and was brilliant, but of this we cannot speak now. Johnson knocked about those London streets-translating a little, jobbing at books a little, starving and scrimping a great deal. He fell in early with a certain Richard Savage,* a wild, clever, disorderly poet, as hard pinched as Johnson. According to his story, he was the son of the Countess Macclesfield, but disowned by her-he only coming to knowledge of his parentage through accident, when he was grown to manhood. Johnson tells the pathetic tale of how Savage paced up and down, at night, in sight of his mother's palatial windows, gazing grief-smitten at them, and yearning for the maternal recognition, which the heartless, dishonored woman refused. So, this castaway runs to drink and all deviltries; Johnson staying him much as B. 1698; d. 1743. Poet and dramatist. Collected edit. of his writings published in 1775. His largest claim to distinction is due to the Life of Richard Savage, by Samuel Johnson; first published 1744. he can-walking with him up and down through London streets till midnight-talking poetry, philosophy, religion; hungry both of them, and many a time with only ten pence between them. Well, at last, Savage kills his man in a tavern broil; would have been hung- the mother countess (as the story runs) hoping it would be so; but he escapes, largely through the influence of that Queen Caroline, to whom Jeanie Deans makes her eloquent plea in Scott's ever-famous novel of The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Savage escapes, but 'tis only to go to other bad ways, and at last he died in a Bristol jail. All this offered material for a pathetic story, and Johnson made the most of it in his Life of Savage― afterward incorporated in his Lives of the Poets, but first published in 1744, about seven years after his coming to London. The book appeared anonymously; but its qualities gave it great vogue; and its essential averments formed the basis of all biographic and encyclopædic* notices for nearly a century thereafter. * Vide old edition of Ency. Britannica, also Strahan's Biographical Dictionary of 1784; Biographie Universelle, et al. |