200 



JOHNSON. 



Johnson, nagcmcnt of the Magazine, and specified the articles 

 Samuel. w hich he was ready to supply. Cave answered his 

 ' '.' ' lottoro ^ but it tloca not nppear that any agreement was 

 formed between them at this time. At this period, in 

 his 25th year, when his finances must have been very 

 low, and his prospects very precarious, he adopted that 

 happy mode of extricating himself from his difficulties, 

 to which men of genius often resort, that of taking to 

 himself a wife. His choice was a Mrs. Porter, the wi- 

 dow of a mercer in Birmingham, who was in her 48th 

 year. In spite of this disparity of their ages, Johnson 

 gravely told his friend, Mr. Topham Beauclerk, who 

 archly repeated it, " that it was a love marriage on 

 both sides." His bride had a fortune of eight hundred 

 pounds ; and with part of this money he hired a house 

 at Edial, near Litchfield, where young gentlemen were 

 to be boarded, and taught the Greek and Latin lan- 

 guages. The scheme, however, did .not succeed. In 

 the space of a year and a half he Jiad only found three 

 pupils, one of whom was David Garrick. During his 

 residence at Edial, he wrote a considerable part of his 

 Irene, which his friend Gilbert Walmsley, registrar of 

 the ecclesiastical court of Litchfield, a man of letters 

 and generosity, advised him to prepare for the stage. 



Finding his academy so unlikely to succeed, he de- 

 termined to repair to London, and there to try his for- 

 tune. Garrick, his pupil, h;ul formed the same resolu- 

 tion, and, in March 1737, they arrived in the metropo- 

 lis together. One of his first employments in London 

 was to proceed with the composition of his tragedy. 

 He also renewed his application to Cave, by whom he 

 was employed in translating the history of the Council 

 of Trent, and for the part of the work which he execu- 

 ted, lie received 4Q ; but it was dropt upon the an- 

 nouncement of a rival translation. In the course of 

 the summer he went back to Litchfield, where he had 

 left Mrs. Johnson finished his tragedy, and returned 

 at the end of three months, with his wife to London, 

 where he endeavoured to prevail on Fleetwood, the 

 patentee of Drury Lane, to accept it. Being unsuc- 

 cessful in this attempt, he resumed his literary drudg- 

 ery, and became a principal contributor to Cave's Ma- 

 gazine. For that work he supplied, among many va- 

 rious articles, the debates in Parliament. These were 

 given under the fiction of debates in the senate of Lilli- 

 put, and the speakers -were disguised under feigned 

 names. Guthrie, a writer of history, for a time com- 

 posed these speeches from such heads as he could bring 

 away in his memory. Johnson first assisted in this de- 

 partment, and then entirely filled it. The public was 

 highly delighted with the extraordinary eloquence 

 which Johnson displayed in these compositions, which 

 were almost exclusively the product of his own inven- 

 tion. In process of time he came to consider this de- 

 ceit as an unjustifiable imposition on the world. It is 

 probable, however, that he generally adhered to the 

 tenor of argument really employed by the parliamenta- 

 ry speakers, otherwise his account of the debates could 

 scarcely have passed at the tims for genuine. He 

 - -owned that he was not quite impartial in dealing out 

 his reason and rhetoric ; but took care that the Whig 

 dogs should not have the best of it. Mr. Chalmers, in 

 his edition of the British poets, (Life of Johnson,) has 

 announced his having made the discovery, that Johnson 

 was at one time editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, 

 and had a regular salary of 100 ; but that must have 

 been at some distance of time from his first connexion 

 with the work. His apparent poverty, when he writes 

 to Cave with the signature of Imprunsus, seems to be 



with difficulty reconcileable to the supposition of his Johnson, 

 having had, at that early stage of his career, so consi- Samuel. 

 derable a settled income. V *~""Y~""'' 



In the year 1738, he rose at once to rjublic notice by 

 the publication of his London, in imitation of the third 

 satire of Juvenal. Dodsley gave him ten guineas for 

 the copyright of this poem, and such was the state of 

 literary property at the time, that he considered it a 

 liberal price. His London came out in the same morn- 

 ing with Pope's " Seventeen hundred and thirty-eight." 

 The former poem immediately brought its unknown 

 author a reputation, that made him be compared with 

 the reigning bard of the time ; and Pope himself was 

 among the first to acknowledge its merit, and to pre- 

 dict his future consequence. It is at this very period 

 when he could be said to have first begun to taste the 

 only consolation of an author's life reputation, that 

 we find him making serious efforts to settle himself in 

 some other profession for a livelihood. He would have 

 accepted of the mastership of the school of Appleby in 

 Leicestershire, the salary of which was about 60 a , 



year ; but the laws of the school required that the can- 

 didate should be a master of arts, and the University 

 of Oxford, when applied to for a degree, refused to 

 grant it. In this unsuccessful effort for a degree, Pope 

 interested himself in Johnson's behalf; although he 

 knew him only by name, as author of London. About 

 the same time he formed a design of studying the civil 

 law, with a view to practise in Doctor's Commons. 

 This scheme, also, was rendered abortive for want of a 

 degree, and he was obliged to resume his labours in the 

 Gentleman's Magazine. His productions from this 

 time became more numerous than it is possible to par- 

 ticularize in any condensed account of our author. He 

 published, in 1739, an " ironical" vindication of the 

 licencers of the stage, against the scandalous asper- 

 sions of the author of" Gustavus Vasa.'' In the same 

 year his attachment to the Tory, or rather the Jacobite 

 party, was shewn in an humorous pamphlet, entitled 

 Marmor Norfalciense, consisting of a supposed ancient 

 prophecy in monkish Latin rhymes, with an explana- 

 tion. For some years he composed biographical arti- 

 cles in the Gentleman's Magazine, full of that animated 

 and shrewd cast of language and thought, which he 

 brought into English biography. His life of Savage, 

 published separately in 1744, forms a sort of era in the 

 record of his prose writings. He had been intimate 

 with Savage for several years ; and if we may judge of 

 Johnson, by the circumstance of his living for a time 

 separated from his wife, as well as by the poverty and 

 midnight rambles in which Savage and he shared, it 

 would appear that the moral biographer himself had 

 been drawn, for a while, into the same follies, dissipa- 

 tions, and idleness, of his ill-starred brother genius. 

 But the effect of his companionship on Johnson's ha- 

 bits was not lasting, and, to his knowledge of Savage, 

 we are indebted for one of the most interesting and 1 in- 

 structive pictures of an individual mind that was ever 

 exhibited. No one who has read the life of Savage, can 

 have failed to acknowledge the eloquence with which 

 he describes the sufferings of unfortunate genius, and 

 the candour with which he traces his faults ; whilst he 

 throws a transparent veil of compassion and charity, 

 that softens, without hiding, those vices that would of- 

 fend us in closer view. 



In 174-5, he published miscellaneous observations on 

 the tragedy of Macbeth, with remarks on Sir Thomas 

 Hanmer's edition of Shakespeare, to which he prefixed 

 proposals for a new edition of the great poet, and was 



