that society,1 they were amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners than by the quantity of extensive and curious information which he had picked up during many months of desultory but not unprofitable study. On the first day of his residence, he surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; 2 and one of the most learned among them declared that he had never known a freshman of equal attainments.

At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years. He was poor, even to raggedness; and his appearance excited a mirth and a pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit. He was driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church by the sneering looks which the members of that aristocratical society cast at the holes in his shoes. Some charitable person placed a new pair at his door, but he spurned them away in a fury. Distress made him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable. No opulent gentleman commoner, panting for one and twenty, could have treated the academical authorities with more gross disrespect. The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate of Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and

3

4

1 An English college is an endowed and incorporated association of students. Its rulers are the Master (or Warden, etc.) and the fellows.

2 Died 415 A. D., author of a miscellaneous collection of antiquarian and critical pieces entitled Saturnalia, but best known for his commentary on the famous Scipio's Dream of Cicero.

8 One paying all charges and not dependent on the college funds for support.

* Pembroke (founded 1624) has had many other distinguished -e. g. Shenstone, Blackstone, and Whitefield.

sons

dirty linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendency. In every mutiny against the discipline of the college, he was the ringleader. Much was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly distinguished by abilities and acquirements. He had early made himself known by turning Pope's "Messiah "1 into Latin verse. The style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly Virgilian; but the translation found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by Pope himself.

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course of things, have become a bachelor of arts; but he was at the end of his resources. Those promises of support on which he had relied had not been kept. His family could do nothing for him. His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay. In the autumn of 1731 he was under the necessity of quitting the university without a degree. In the following winter his father died. The old man left but a pittance, and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the support of his widow. The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds.

His life during the thirty years which followed was one hard struggle with poverty. The misery of that struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound mind. Before the young man left the uni

1 This poem, first published in The Spectator for May 14, 1712, was in imitation of Virgil's Pollio (Eclogue IV.), and is one of the best of Pope's early works. The concluding lines have furnished us with one of the most familiar of modern hymns:

"Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise!"

versity, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a singularly cruel form. He had become an incurable hypochondriac. He said long after that he had been mad all his life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons and for setting. aside wills. His grimaces, his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who did not know him. At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe. He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer. He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the hateful place. He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked. If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the omission. Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid and his imagination morbidly active. At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour. At another he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name. But this was not the worst. A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human destiny. Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves. But he was under no temptation to commit suicide. He was sick of life, but he was afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour. In religion he found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of

dejection, for his religion partook of his own character. The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendor. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium: they reached him refracted, dulled, and discolored by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul; and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him.

With such infirmities of body and of mind, this celebrated man was left, at two and twenty, to fight his way through the world. He remained during about five years in the midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired others. He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey,1 a gay officer of noble family, who happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley,2 registrar of the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts, learning, and knowledge of the world, - did himself honor by patronizing the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the neighborhood to laughter or to disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school 3 in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a country gentleman; but a life of

1 Born in 1700; brother of Lord John Hervey.

2 (1680-1751). At the end of his Life of the poet Edmund Smith, Johnson paid a noble tribute to this early friend.

That is, assistant master in a school in which Latin and Greek were the chief studies. The school was that of Market Bosworth. He became usher in July, 1732.

4 Sir Wolstan Dixie, patron of the school.

dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a translation, little noticed at the time and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia.1 He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian,2 with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse; but subscriptions did not come in, and the volume never appeared.

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in love. The object of his passion was Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colors, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels.3 To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the same room with a woman of real fashion, his Tetty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for she was as poor as himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honor, the addresses of a

This was not a Latin book, but a French translation of a work by Lobo (1593–1678), a Portuguese Jesuit.

2 Politian (Angelo Ambrogini, 1454-1494) was one of the most brilliant scholars and teachers of the Renaissance. He not

only succeeded in Latin verse, but was also an able Italian poet.

3 Mary Lepel (1700-1768), who married Lord John Hervey, author of the Memoirs of the Court of George II., and Catherine Hyde (died 1777), afterwards Duchess of Queensberry, were noted beauties of the period, and friends of Pope and Gay.