Lives of the English Poets | Page 4

in the History of Lichfield, by Mr. Harwood. One of my friends, who
inhabited it for the same purpose, has told me that an old countryman
who lived near it, and remembered Johnson and his pupil Garrick, said
to him, "that Johnson was not much of a scholar to look at, but that
master Garrick was a strange one for leaping over a stile." It is amusing
to observe the impressions which such men make on common minds.
Unfortunately the prejudice occasioned by Johnson's unsightly exterior
was not confined to the vulgar, insomuch that it has been thought to be
the reason why so few parents committed their children to his care, for
he had only three pupils. This unscholarlike appearance it must have
been that made the bookseller in the Strand, to whom he applied for
literary employment, eye him archly, and recommend it to him rather to
purchase a porter's knot. But, as an old philosopher has said, every
thing has two handles. It was, perhaps, the contrast between the body
and the mind, between the incultum corpus, and the ingenium, which
afterwards was one cause of his being received so willingly in those
circles of what is called high life, where any thing that is exceedingly
strange and unusual is apt to carry its own recommendation with it.
Failing in his attempt at Edial, he was disposed once more to engage in

the drudgery of an usher, and offered himself in that capacity to the
Rev. William Budworth, master of the grammar-school at Brewood, in
Staffordshire, celebrated for having been the place in which Bishop
Hurd received his education, under that master. But here again nature
stood in his way; for Budworth was fearful lest a strange motion with
the head, the effect probably of disease, to which Johnson was
habitually subject, might excite the derision of his scholars, and for that
reason declined employing him. He now resolved on trying his fortune
in the capital.
Among the many respectable families in Lichfield, into whose society
Johnson had been admitted, none afforded so great encouragement to
his literary talents as that of Mr. Walmsley, who lived in the Bishop's
palace, and was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, and whom he has
so eloquently commemorated in his Lives of the Poets. By this
gentleman he was introduced in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Colson,
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge,
and the master of an academy, "as a very good scholar, and one who he
had great hopes would turn out a fine dramatic writer, who intended to
try his fate with a tragedy, and to get himself employed in some
translation, either from the Latin or the French." The tragedy on which
Mr. Walmsley founded his expectations of Johnson's future eminence
as a dramatic poet, was the Irene. A shrewd sally of humour, to which
the reading of this piece gave rise, evinces the terms of familiarity on
which he was with his patron; for, on Walmsley's observing, when
some part of it had been read, that the poet had already involved his
heroine in such distress, that he did not see what further he could do to
excite the commiseration of the audience, Johnson replied, "that he
could put her into the
Ecclesiastical Court." Garrick, who was to be
placed at Colson's academy, accompanied his former instructor on this
expedition to London, at the beginning of March, 1737. It does not
appear that Mr. Walmsley's recommendation of him to Colson, whom
he has described under the character of Gelidus[2], in the twenty-fourth
paper of the Rambler, was of much use. He first took lodgings in
Exeter-street in the Strand, but soon retired to Greenwich, for the sake
of completing his tragedy, which he used to compose, walking in the
Park.

From Greenwich, he addressed another letter to Cave, with proposals
for translating Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent, with the
notes of Le Courayer. Before the summer was expired, he returned for
Mrs. Johnson, whom he had left at Lichfield, and remaining there three
months, at length finished Irene. On his second visit to London, his
lodgings were first in Woodstock-street, near Hanover Square, and then
in Castle-street, near Cavendish Square. His tragedy, which was
brought on the stage twelve years after by Garrick, having been at this
time rejected by the manager of the playhouse, he was forced to
relinquish his hopes of becoming a dramatic writer, and engaged
himself to write for the Gentleman's Magazine. The debates in
Parliament were not then allowed to be given to the public with the
same unrestricted and generous freedom with which it is now permitted
to report them. To elude this prohibition, and gratify the just curiosity
of the country, the several members were