Читать книгу Lives of the English Poets - Henry Francis Cary - Страница 4

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.

Samuel Johnson, the elder of two sons of Michael Johnson, who was of an obscure family, and kept a bookseller's shop at Lichfield, was born in that city on the 18th of September, 1709. His mother, Sarah Ford, was sprung of a respectable race of yeomanry in Worcestershire; and, being a woman of great piety, early instilled into the mind of her son those principles of devotion for which he was afterwards so eminently distinguished. At the end of ten months from his birth, he was taken from his nurse, according to his own account of himself, a poor diseased infant, almost blind; and, when two years and a half old, was carried to London to be touched by Queen Anne for the evil. Being asked many years after if he had any remembrance of the Queen, he said that he had a confused but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood. So predominant was this superstition relating to the king's evil, that there was a form of service for the occasion inserted in the Book of Common Prayer, and Bishop Bull,[1] in one of his Sermons, calls it a relique and remainder of the primitive gift of healing. The morbidness of constitution natural to him, and the defect in his eye-sight, hindered him from partaking in the sports of other children, and probably induced him to seek for distinction in intellectual superiority. Dame Oliver, who kept a school for little children, in Lichfield, first taught him to read; and, as he delighted to tell, when he was going to the University, brought him a present of gingerbread, in token of his being the best scholar her academy had ever produced. His next instructor in his own language was a man whom he used to call Tom Browne; and who, he said, published a Spelling Book, and dedicated it to the universe. He was then placed with Mr. Hunter the head master of the grammar school in his native city, but, for two years before he came under his immediate tuition, was taught Latin by Mr. Hawkins, the usher. It is just that one, who, in writing the lives of men less eminent than himself, was always careful to record the names of their instructors, should obtain a tribute of similar respect for his own. By Mr. Price, who was afterwards head master of the same school, and whose name I cannot mention without reverence and affection, I have been told that Johnson, when late in life he visited the place of his education, shewed him a nook in the school-room, where it was usual for the boys to secrete the translations of the books they were reading; and, at the same time, speaking of his old master, Hunter, said to him, "He was not severe, Sir. A master ought to be severe. Sir, he was cruel." Johnson, however, was always ready to acknowledge how much he was indebted to Hunter for his classical proficiency. At the age of fifteen, by the advice of his mother's nephew, Cornelius Ford, a clergyman of considerable abilities, but disgraced by the licentiousness of his life, and who is spoken of in the Life of Fenton, he was removed to the grammar-school of Stourbridge, of which Mr. Wentworth was master. Here he did not remain much more than a twelvemonth, and, as he told Dr. Percy, learned much in the school, but little from the master; whereas, with Hunter, he had learned much from the master, and little in the school. The progress he made was, perhaps, gained in teaching the other boys, for Wentworth is said to have employed him as an assistant. His compositions in English verse indicate that command of language which he afterwards attained. The two following years he accuses himself of wasting in idleness at home; but we must doubt whether he had much occasion for self-reproach, when we learn that Hesiod, Anacreon, the Latin works of Petrarch, and "a great many other books not commonly known in the Universities," were among his studies.

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.

Soon after his return to Lichfield, his father died; and the following memorandum, extracted from the little register which he kept in Latin, of the more remarkable occurrences that befel him, proves at once the small pittance that was left him, and the integrity of his mind: "1732, Julii 15. Undecim aureos deposui: quo die quicquid ante matris funus (quod serum sit precor) de paternis bonis sperare licet, viginti scilicet libras accepi. Usque adeo mihi fortuna fingenda est. Interea ne paupertate vires animi languescant nec in flagitium egestas abigat, cavendum.—1732, July 15. I laid down eleven guineas. On which day, I received the whole of what it is allowed me to expect from my father's property, before the decease of my mother (which I pray may be yet far distant) namely, twenty pounds. My fortune therefore must be of my own making. Meanwhile, let me beware lest the powers of my mind grow languid through poverty, or want drive me to evil." On the following day we find him setting out on foot for Market Bosworth, in Leicestershire, where he had engaged himself as an usher to the school of which Mr. Crompton was master. Here he described to his old school-fellow, Hector, the dull sameness of his life, in the words of the poet: Vitam continct una dies: that it was as unvaried as the note of the cuckoo, and that he did not know whether it were more disagreeable for him to teach, or for the boys to learn the grammar rules. To add to his misery, he had to endure the petty despotism of Sir Wolstan Dixie, one of the patrons of the school. The trial of a few months disgusted him so much with his employment, that he relinquished it, and, removing to Birmingham, became the guest of his friend Mr. Hector, who was a chirurgeon in that town, and lodged in the house of a bookseller; having remained with him about six months, he hired lodgings for himself. By Mr. Hector he was stimulated, not without some difficulty, to make a translation from the French, of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, for which he received no more than five guineas from the bookseller, who, by an artifice not uncommon, printed it at Birmingham, with the date of London in the title-page. To Mr. Hector, therefore, is due the impulse which first made Johnson an author. The motion being once given did not cease; for, having returned to Lichfield in 1735, he sent forth in August proposals for printing by subscription Politian's Latin Poems, with a Life of the Author, Notes, and a History of Latin Poetry, from the age of Petrarch to that of Politian. His reason for fixing on this era it is not easy to determine. Mussato preceded Petrarch, the interval between Petrarch and Politian is not particularly illustrated by excellence in Latin poetry; and Politian was much surpassed in correctness and elegance, if not in genius, by those who came after him—by Flaminio, Navagero, and Fracastorio. Yet in the hands of Johnson, such a subject would not have been wanting in instruction or entertainment. Such as were willing to subscribe, were referred to his brother, Nathaniel Johnson, who had succeeded to his father's business in Lichfield; but the design was dropped, for want of a sufficient number of names to encourage it, a deficiency not much to be wondered at, unless the inhabitants of provincial towns were more learned in those days than at present.

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.

Among the many respectable families in Lichfield, into whose society Johnson had been admitted, none afforded so great encouragement to his literary talents as that of Mr. Walmsley, who lived in the Bishop's palace, and was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, and whom he has so eloquently commemorated in his Lives of the Poets. By this gentleman he was introduced in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Colson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and the master of an academy, "as a very good scholar, and one who he had great hopes would turn out a fine dramatic writer, who intended to try his fate with a tragedy, and to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French." The tragedy on which Mr. Walmsley founded his expectations of Johnson's future eminence as a dramatic poet, was the Irene. A shrewd sally of humour, to which the reading of this piece gave rise, evinces the terms of familiarity on which he was with his patron; for, on Walmsley's observing, when some part of it had been read, that the poet had already involved his heroine in such distress, that he did not see what further he could do to excite the commiseration of the audience, Johnson replied, "that he could put her into the Ecclesiastical Court." Garrick, who was to be placed at Colson's academy, accompanied his former instructor on this expedition to London, at the beginning of March, 1737. It does not appear that Mr. Walmsley's recommendation of him to Colson, whom he has described under the character of Gelidus[2], in the twenty-fourth paper of the Rambler, was of much use. He first took lodgings in Exeter-street in the Strand, but soon retired to Greenwich, for the sake of completing his tragedy, which he used to compose, walking in the Park.

From Greenwich, he addressed another letter to Cave, with proposals for translating Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent, with the notes of Le Courayer. Before the summer was expired, he returned for Mrs. Johnson, whom he had left at Lichfield, and remaining there three months, at length finished Irene. On his second visit to London, his lodgings were first in Woodstock-street, near Hanover Square, and then in Castle-street, near Cavendish Square. His tragedy, which was brought on the stage twelve years after by Garrick, having been at this time rejected by the manager of the playhouse, he was forced to relinquish his hopes of becoming a dramatic writer, and engaged himself to write for the Gentleman's Magazine. The debates in Parliament were not then allowed to be given to the public with the same unrestricted and generous freedom with which it is now permitted to report them. To elude this prohibition, and gratify the just curiosity of the country, the several members were designated by fictitious names, under which they were easily discoverable; and their speeches in both Houses of Parliament, which was entitled the Senate of Lilliput, were in this manner imparted to the nation in the periodical work above-mentioned. At first, Johnson only revised these reports; but he became so dexterous in the execution of his task, that he required only to be told the names of the speakers, and the side of the question to be espoused, in order to frame the speeches himself; an artifice not wholly excusable, which afterwards occasioned him some self-reproach, and even at the time pleased him so little, that he did not consent to continue it. The whole extent of his assistance to Cave is not known. The Lives of Paul Sarpi, Boerhaave, Admirals Drake and Blake, Barretier, Burman, Sydenham, and Roscommon, with the Essay on Epitaphs, and an Essay on the Account of the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough, were certainly contributed to his Miscellany by Johnson. Two tracts, the one a Vindication of the Licenser of the Stage from the Aspersions of Brooke, Author of Gustavus Vasa; the other, Marmor Norfolciense, a pamphlet levelled against Sir Robert Walpole and the Hanoverian succession, were published by him, separately, in 1739.

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 [3] 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.

In May, 1738, appeared his "London," imitated from the Third Satire of Juvenal, for which he got ten guineas from Dodsley. The excellence of this poem was so immediately perceived, that it reached a second edition in the course of a week. Pope having made some ineffectual inquiries concerning the author, from Mr. Richardson, the son of the painter, observed that he would soon be deterre. In the August of 1739, we find him so far known to Pope, that at his intercession, Earl Gower applied to a friend of Swift to assist in procuring from the University the degree of Master of Arts, that he might be enabled to become a candidate for the mastership of a school then vacant; the application was without success.

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.

December, 1, 1743.

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 (I think twelve pounds) 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,