tomed channel; the influence of the school of Addison and Pope still remained paramount; poetry and criticism were still fettered by artificial restrictions and conventionality. Here and there, it is true, a voice might be heard that seemed to prophesy the advent of a new literary era; but such voices were few and far between, and were little attended to or rudely condemned in an age that was not yet prepared for them. It was not till the time of the greatest event in modern history-the French Revolution-that the adherents of the so-called romantic school, appealing to feelings that then more or less influenced the minds of all classes, began to establish themselves as a new and great power in literature.

The most prominent figure in the literature of the period with which we are now dealing is that of Samuel Johnson, and round him its history centres. Several of his contemporaries were greater writers than he, but none was so looked up to; none possessed his strong and intensely marked character; and none was so exactly typical of his age alike in his good and in his bad qualities. Born in 1709, the son of a bookseller in Lichfield, he early imbibed from his father those Tory and High Church prejudices which clung to him throughout life. Very early, too, were noticeable his other distinguishing characteristics-a bodily frame massive and powerful but diseased; a strong propensity to indolence united with an extraordinary capacity for strenuous exertion when compelled to work; a memory capacious, retentive, and exact; a spirit proud yet humble, irascible but forgiving, and combining outward harshness with a deep and genuine tenderness of heart. When at school, though his shortness of sight deprived him of the power of distinguishing himself in field-sports, his strength of intellect and character made him occupy among his classfellows somewhat the same position as he afterwards held in London literary society. Certain of his companions used to attend him in the morning and carry him to school in a species of triumphal procession. "Sir," he once said to Boswell, speaking of his school-days, "they never thought to raise me by comparing me to any one; they never said 'Johnson is as good

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Samuel Johnson.

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In his sixteenth

He then loitered

a scholar as such a one,' but 'Such a one is as good a scholar as Johnson;' and this was said but of one, but of Lowe: and I do not think he was as good a scholar." year his school education came to an end. at home for two years, "in a state," says Boswell, "very unworthy of his uncommon abilities.' His time was not, however, altogether wasted. In his desultory way he read largely, not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir," he told Boswell, "all ancient writers, all manly;" and tried his hand at poetical translations and original verses, not without success. In his nineteenth year he was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford, where he was very proud, very poor, and very miserable. His father was not wealthy enough to bear the expenses of his education at the University, so he must have received assistance elsewhere-from whom is not quite certain. Conscious of great abilities but crushed by poverty, Johnson during his University career, which lasted about three years, was far from happy. He left Oxford in 1731, without taking a degree. Almost the only distinction won by him was the praise he received for a Latin version of Pope's "Messiah," of which Pope himself declared, "The writer of this poem will leave it doubtful in after-times which was the original, his verses or mine."

In the same year in which Johnson left the University his father died, leaving his affairs in a state approaching to insolvency. Johnson was now compelled to do something to earn a living. At first he tried teaching-that rough apprenticeship through which so many men of letters have had to pass, with pain, but not, perhaps, altogether without profit. The few months during which he was thus engaged he always afterwards looked back to with a kind of shuddering horror. Then he turned his thoughts towards literature, "that general refuge for the destitute," as Carlyle once called it. Settling in Birmingham in 1733, he contributed essays to a local newspaper, and translated from the Latin Lobo's "Voyage to Abyssinia." It lies before us as we write, a volume of about four hundred pages of some two hundred and eighty words each. For

this work, which was published in 1735, Johnson received the munificent sum of five guineas. It is remarkable that during his whole career, whether working as a Grub Street hack or whether writing in a blaze of popularity, the most distinguished author of his time, Johnson seems to have received less for his productions than almost any of his fellow literary craftsmen.

In 1736 Johnson married. The object of his choice was a widow named Porter, forty-eight years of age, and described as a coarse, vulgar. ugly woman, who painted herself, and who was fantastic both in dress and in manners. It is said (with what degree of truth is not known for certain) that she possessed a fortune of some £800. Johnson's shortness of sight concealed from him her bodily defects, and there is every reason to believe that he was speaking nothing but the truth when he declared, "Sir, it was a love match on both sides." His wife, whatever may have been her faults, appears to have had a genuine admiration of Johnson's intellectual powers; and we can easily imagine how sweet praise must then have been to the "uncourtly scholar," whose appearance was far from prepossessing, and who had at that time done nothing to show the vast powers that lay concealed beneath his rough and uncouth exterior. On her death, which happened in 1752, Johnson's grief was terrible; and to the end of his life he never ceased to cherish with fond regret the remembrance of his "dear Tetty."

As literature did not appear likely to be sufficiently remunerative to afford sustenance to himself and his wife, Johnson, in 1736, determined to again try schoolmastering. He opened a boarding-school at Edial, in Staffordshire, and announced his intention of instructing young gentlemen in the Greek and Latin languages. The enterprise was an unfortunate one. Johnson was ill-gifted to be a preceptor; and neither his manners nor his appearance were such as to conciliate parents. Few pupils came, and the school was abandoned. Along with David Garrick, Johnson, with little or no money, but with the manuscript of his tragedy "Irene" in his pocket, in 1737 set out for London.

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From this point the real commencement of his literary career may be dated. It was begun at a bad time. If, indeed, he had become what he afterwards described as one of the lowest of all human beings, a scribbler for a party, he might possibly have obtained remunerative occupation; but Johnson was too high-spirited to turn his pen to such vile uses. The age of patronage, when a well-written dedication was often munificently rewarded, was passing away; the reading public was small; and journalism, which now gives employment to thousands of writers, was then, comparatively speaking, in its infancy. Moreover, we must remember (what appears to have been forgotten by many writers about Johnson) that even in our own day, when the avenues to a literary career are so much better and more numerous than in Johnson's time, a writer who came to London circumstanced as he was would have a very hard battle to fight. The fact that he had translated a book from the Latin, or that he had contributed articles to a provincial newspaper, was not likely to tell much in his favour with publishers; he had left the University without obtaining any distinction; and he was destitute of money, which might have enabled him to subsist while he wrote some work which might attract the attention of the public. He was obliged to live "from hand to mouth," as the saying is, and work done under such circumstances is rarely of much value. Into the details of Johnson's literary hack-work we need not enter. He wrote extensively in the Gentleman's Magazine; he executed various translations; he assisted Osborne in compiling the catalogue of the Harleian Library; and, from November 1740 to February 1742, he wrote in the Gentleman's Magazine an account of the debates in parliament, under the title of "The Senate of Lilliput." Parliamentary reporting was then not allowed, but persons were employed to attend the two Houses and take such notes as they could. These notes Johnson put into shape, often writing entirely imaginary speeches, and always "taking care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.". He gave up the occupation when he found that many received the speeches as

actual reports, declaring that he "would not be accessory to the propagation of falsehood."

In May 1738 appeared anonymously Johnson's first work of importance, "London," an imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal. It was a considerable success, a second edition being called for within a week, and Pope, the reigning king of poetry, declaring that whoever the author was, he would soon be déterré. "London" was followed ten years later by a similar but more powerful poem, the "Vanity of Human Wishes," an imitation of the Tenth Satire of Juvenal, containing in dignified and impressive verse a declaration of Johnson's profound and lifelong conviction, that, upon the whole, the amount of misery in the world is greatly in excess of the amount of happiness. Johnson, as some of his shorter poems (for example, the noble and touching verses on Levett) show, possessed a real though a slender vein of poetical genius; but "London" and the "Vanity of Human Wishes" are mainly valuable, not on account of their intrinsically poetical qualities, but as expressing in verse which has the merits of dignity, honesty, and originality, the opinions on life which had been formed by a man of strong mind, who had read much and thought much. This remark applies especially to the "Vanity of Human Wishes." ""Tis a grand poem," wrote Byron in his Diary, "and so true." Sir Walter Scott found in Johnson's poetry something peculiarly attractive to his manly good sense. He once told Ballantyne, that he derived more pleasure from Johnson's poetry than from that of any writer he could mention.

Among the many questionable acquaintances whom Johnson fell in with during his sojourn in Bohemia, or, as it was then called, Grub Street, was Richard Savage, a dissipated profligate, of whom it was generally believed (falsely, it would appear) that he was the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield, who refused to acknowledge him. During his chequered career Savage had seen a good deal of literary society, and although his principal poem, "The Wanderer," which Scott pronounced "beautiful," is by most found quite unreadable, he was a man of considerable abilities: in particular,