SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709-1784) BY GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL AMUEL JOHNSON, the son of a bookseller, was born at Lichfield, Staffordshire, England, September 18th, 1709. He was educated mainly in the grammar school of that city; though perhaps the best part of his education he gave himself, in the free run which he had of the books in his father's shop. Lichfield was the literary centre of a large district. Old Michael Johnson supplied scholars with their folios, as well as less severe readers with romances, poems, essays, and pamphlets. It was in climbing up to search for some apples which young Samuel imagined his brother had hidden behind a large folio, that he came across the works of Petrarch, and fell to studying them. He was a mere child when, reading 'Hamlet' in his father's kitchen, he was so greatly scared by the ghost that he suddenly hurried up-stairs to the street door, that he might see people about him. With the memory of this terror fresh in his mind, he wrote many years afterwards: "He that peruses Shakespeare looks round him alarmed, and starts to find himself alone." He read with wonderful rapidity, ravenously as if he devoured the book, and what he read his powerful memory retained. "He knew more books," said Adam Smith, "than any man alive.» At the age of nineteen he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, "the best qualified for the university that his tutor had ever known come there.» Thence he was driven by poverty after a residence of only fourteen months. During the next few years he lived partly by teaching. At the age of twenty-six he married. Two years later he went up to London with a half-finished tragedy in his pocket, and David Garrick as his companion. There for five-and-twenty years he lived the hard life of a poor scholar. His wife died after a long illness. "The melancholy of the day of her death hung long upon me," he recorded in his diary. His own body, though large and powerful, was not sound, and his mind was often overcast by melancholy. "My health," he said in his old age, "has been from my twentieth year such as has seldom afforded me a single day of ease." In this period of his life he did most of his work. He wrote the Debates of Parliament, which were wholly in form and mainly in substance his own invention; his great Dictionary; his two poems 'London' and 'The Vanity of Human Wishes'; the Rambler, the Idler, and Rasselas,' and numerous minor pieces. He published moreover 'Observations on Macbeth,' and he made a beginning of his edition of Shakespeare. In 1762, when he was in his fifty-third year, a pension of £300 from the King freed him from the pressure of poverty. The rest of his life he passed in modest comfort. A friendship which he formed a little later added greatly to his happiness. A wealthy London brewer of the name of Thrale, a man of such strong sense that he sought a comrade in this rough genius, gave him a second home. Both in his town house and in his beautiful country villa a room was set apart for Johnson. Mrs. Thrale, "a lady of lively talents improved by education," flattered by the friendship of so great a man and by the society which he drew round her table, tended him like a daughter. "Her kindness soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched." To the Thrales he generally gave half the week, passing the rest of his time in his own house. There he found constant shelter for two humble friends; sometimes indeed for as many as five. His pen had long intervals of rest. He finished his Shakespeare, wrote four political tracts which added nothing to his reputation, and his Journey to the Western Islands.' Happily he was roused from his indolence by the request of the booksellers that he should undertake that one of all his works by which he is best known,-the 'Lives of the English Poets.' "I wrote it," he says, "in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily; unwilling to work, and working with vigor and haste." The indolence into which he seemed to have sunk was more apparent than real. That powerful mind was seldom long at rest. "He was a kind of public oracle, whom everybody thought they had a right to visit and consult." David Hume might complain that "men of letters have in London no rendezvous, and are indeed sunk and forgotten in the general torrent of the world." Those who knew Johnson felt no such want. "His house became an academy." So did the taverns which he frequented, whose chairs he looked upon as so many thrones of human felicity. "There I have," he said, "free conversation, and an interchange of discourse with those whom I most love; I dogmatize and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinions and opinions I find delight." In Thrale's house too "the society of the learned, the witty, and the eminent in every way, called forth his wonderful powers." Among his friends he numbered Reynolds, Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, and Boswell. They were all members of that famous club of which he was the light and centre. In the world of letters his opinion was eagerly awaited. "What does Johnson say of such a book?' was the question of every day." This, the happiest period of his life, was brought to an end by the death of Mr. Thrale in 1781. "I looked," he recorded in his diary, "for the last time upon the face that for fifteen years had never been turned upon me but with respect or benignity." The widow, who had scarcely buried her husband before she fell in love with an Italian singer, began to feel the old man's friendship a burden and reproach, and deserted him as she deserted her daughter. While he was thus losing his second home, "death visited his mournful habitation." Blind Miss Williams and that strange old surgeon Robert Levett, whom he had sheltered so many years and who repaid his kindness by companionship whenever he needed it, quickly followed Thrale to the grave. His own health began to break, and he was attacked by a succession of painful disorders. Though the ranks of his friends were thinning and his strength was failing, he did not lose heart. He tried to keep his friendships in constant repair," and he struggled hard for life. "I will be conquered," he said; "I will not capitulate." Death had always been terrible to him. Had Mr. Thrale outlived him he would have faced it in the house of friends, who by their attentions and their wealth would have screened some of its terrors from his view. He now faced it month after month in the gloom of solitude. He died on December 13th, 1784. "His death," wrote one of his contemporaries, "kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example." "It made a kind of era in literature," said Hannah More. Harriet Martineau was told, by an old lady who well remembered the time, that "the world of literature was perplexed and distressed as a swarm of bees that have lost their queen." The sovereign man of letters was indeed dead. "Sir," Goldsmith had one day said to him, "you are for making a monarchy of what should be a republic." The republic was at length founded; the last monarch of the English world of literature was gathered to his fathers. The sceptre which Dryden had handed down to Pope, and Pope to Johnson, fell to the ground, never to be raised again. The Declaration of Independence was read in the funeral service over the newly opened grave in Westminster Abbey. High as Johnson still stands as a writer, his great reputation rests mainly on his talk and on his character as a man, full as it was of strange variety, rugged strength, great tenderness, dogged honesty and truthfulness, a willingness to believe what was incredible combined with "an obstinate rationality" which ever prevented him, and Toryism with the spirit of a rebel glowing beneath. He had in the highest degree "that element of manhood" (to quote Lowell's words) "which we call character. It is something distinct from genius |