of the straits to which young Johnson was reduced about this time. Belonging to Christ-Church College there was a tutor whose lectures Samuel prized very highly. These he used to get at second-hand from a friend of his who attended that college. But his shoes became so worn that his feet began to show through them; and when he saw that this was perceived, and no doubt commented upon, by the Christ-Church men, his visits to his friend at once ceased. He was too proud to accept of money; and when some fellow-student, with a delicacy which did his heart honour, placed a pair of new shoes at Johnson's roomdoor, he indignantly threw them away. This act of our hero's has been blamed by some, praised by others; some have set it down as springing from surly ingratitude, others as arising from a quite proper pride. For our own part, we prefer not to give it a name at all; but choose rather to quote the following lines from one of Robert Burns's famous poems as most fitly characterising both man and motive : "Is there for honest poverty That hangs his head and a' that? And if, with Samuel Johnson, this pride of "honest poverty" meant a resolute determination to stand, not only on his own feet, but also in his own boots, we can easily understand, and may readily forgive, his angry impulse to pitch the well-intended gift downstairs. Had he found the giver at the door, and sent him headlong after his own present, cavillers might have had. some reason to complain. In the year 1731, his father became bankrupt; and the remittances from home, which had all along been scanty, now entirely ceased. He was compelled, therefore, to return to Lichfield without a degree, having attended the University for somewhat over three years. In the December of this same year his father died, at the age of seventy-six. The following note in one of Samuel's diaries, dated 15th July, 1732, will give some idea of the state of poverty in which his parent left the world :-"I laid by 14 ON THE WORLD. eleven guineas on this day, when I received twenty pounds, being all that I have reason to hope for out of my father's effects, previous to the death of my mother; an event which I pray God may be very remote. I now, therefore, see that I must make my own fortune. Meanwhile, let me take care that the powers of my mind be not debilitated by poverty, and that indigence do not force me into any criminal act." Take courage, brave, manly, honest heart; failure there can be none for such as you. A place is preparing for you in the Great City, and you have been preparing for it by this long stern discipline of sufferings nobly borne and sorrows told only to yourself -and One Other. At that moment, however, having little or no choice, he had taken a situation as usher in the school of Market-Bosworth; whither he set out on foot next day, as appears from the following notice in his diary: "Julii 16, 1732, Bosvortiam pedes petii." He did not like the work. He once wrote to a friend, "that the poet had described the dull sameness of his existence in these words, Vitam continet una dies' (one day contains the whole of my life); that it was unvaried as the note of the cuckoo; and that he did not know whether it was more disagreeable for him to teach, or the boys to learn, the grammar rules." The work was not for him, and he was not for the work. The situation was rendered still more unbearable by the harsh treatment he experienced at the hands of the patron of the school, in whose house he seems to have officiated as a kind of domestic chaplain; at least, he said the grace at table, though with feelings burning underneath which were very far from gracious. He threw up the school after a few months' trial; but its name was ever afterwards associated in his memory with feelings of intense bitterness, and even of horror. The next two years of Johnson's life were spent in Birmingham-the first six months at the house of an intimate friend and old schoolfellow, the rest of the time in hired lodgings. With no settled plan for the present, and no clear prospect in the future, he thought himself as well situated here as he could have been ON THE WORLD. 15 anywhere else. What he wrote at this period, or whether it brought him any money-supplies, has not been well ascertained. One piece of literary labour he certainly performed; and it is worth mentioning, if only because it was his first work in prose. It was a translation from the French into the English of a book called "A Voyage to Abyssinia, by Lobo, a Portuguese Jesuit." He was not in very good health at the time, and his constitutional indolence was in full flower. But he was prevailed upon to translate as helay in bed, while a friend wrote to his dictation. This little bit of work brought him in five guineas. Perhaps, also, another little bit of work may have been done as he lay on that bed with the Abyssinian quarto before his eyes; a tiny seed of the future "Rasselas" may have fallen into his soul in some quiet moment of which memory would take no note. Visions of London, which were always visions of hope in those days and to such men, had often flitted in Johnson's imagination; but at Birmingham he fell in with a man who could give some degree of fixity to his otherwise wild and bewildering expectations. This was an Irish painter, who had been several years in the Metropolis, and had found it necessary all the time to practise that strict economy which life had made no stranger to our young literary enthusiast. Many a talk the two must have had together about the ways and means of "roughing it" in the mighty city; talk sometimes grave, often gay, generally cheerful. The painter would impart, and Johnson would gladly hear, such useful information as this: "Thirty pounds a year are enough to enable a man to live in London without being contemptible. I allow ten pounds for clothes and linen. You may live in a garret at eighteen-pence a week; few people will inquire where you lodge; and if they do, it is easy to say, 'Sir, I am to be found at such a place.' By spending threepence in a coffee-house you may be for some hours every day in very good company; you may dine for sixpence, breakfast on bread and cheese for a penny, and do without supper. On clean-shirt day you go abroad and pay visits." Thus the two friends sit discoursing and discussing the "Art of Living in London ;" while Johnson's Destiny, unseen the while, is making ready that which will change doubt into determination, vague hopes into 16 ON THE WORLD. a stern resolve to test their value, the London of dreams into the London of fact-in which his fame is to be won, his work to be done, and his strong and tender and manly heart at last stilled to rest. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will." MARRIED. 17 CHAPTER III. MARRIED-OFF TO LONDON-EARLY STRUGGLES. (1734-1740.) THE ninth of July, 1734, was a memorable day in the history of the young scholar; for on that day he was married. The woman of his choice was Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, a widow, with whom he had become acquainted about three years before the above date. Her age was nearly double that of her husband, and, if Garrick is to be believed, her personal attractions must have been somewhat limited. The wag used to describe the lady as "very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behaviour." This portrait must doubtless be taken as more than slightly caricatured ; but, in any case, the bridegroom himself seems to have thought his spouse handsome, if we may judge from a little circumstance which will be set down in its proper place. Besides, we must not forget that Johnson knew nothing, and thought nothing, of that Ideal Beauty which puts us nineteenth-century lovers in such ecstasies; he was all his life long the sternest of Realists, and no doubt found in his wife what he had chiefly desired: "A creature not too bright or good What the poor student required was a wife who should acquit herself well on the working-days, and not one, as Beatrice says, "too costly to wear every day." Moreover, Johnson's own ap C |