Lives of the English Poets | Page 3

adeo mihi fortuna fingenda est. Interea ne paupertate vires animi languescant nec in flagitium egestas abigat, cavendum.--1732, July 15. I laid down eleven guineas. On which day, I received the whole of what it is allowed me to expect from my father's property, before the decease of my mother (which I pray may be yet far distant) namely, twenty pounds. My fortune therefore must be of my own making. Meanwhile, let me beware lest the powers of my mind grow languid through poverty, or want drive me to evil." On the following day we find him setting out on foot for Market Bosworth, in Leicestershire, where he had engaged himself as an usher to the school of which Mr. Crompton was master. Here he described to his old school-fellow, Hector, the dull sameness of his life, in the words of the poet: Vitam continct una dies: that it was as unvaried as the note of the cuckoo, and that he did not know whether it were more disagreeable for him to teach, or for the boys to learn the grammar rules. To add to his misery, he had to endure the petty despotism of Sir Wolstan Dixie, one of the patrons of the school. The trial of a few months disgusted him so much with his employment, that he relinquished it, and, removing to Birmingham, became the guest of his friend Mr. Hector, who was a chirurgeon in that town, and lodged in the house of a bookseller; having remained with him about six months, he hired lodgings for himself. By Mr. Hector he was stimulated, not without some difficulty, to make a translation from the French, of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia, for which he received no more than five guineas from the bookseller, who, by an artifice not uncommon, printed it at Birmingham, with the date of London in the title-page. To Mr. Hector, therefore, is due the impulse which first made Johnson an author. The motion being once given did not cease; for, having returned to Lichfield in 1735, he sent forth in August proposals for printing by subscription Politian's Latin Poems, with a Life of the Author, Notes, and a History of Latin Poetry, from the age of Petrarch to that of Politian. His reason for fixing on this era it is not easy to determine. Mussato preceded Petrarch, the interval between Petrarch and Politian is not particularly illustrated by excellence in Latin poetry; and Politian was much surpassed in correctness and elegance, if not in genius, by those who came after him--by Flaminio, Navagero, and Fracastorio. Yet in the hands of Johnson, such a subject would not have been wanting in instruction or entertainment. Such as were willing to subscribe, were referred to his brother, Nathaniel Johnson, who had succeeded to his father's business in Lichfield; but the design was dropped, for want of a sufficient number of names to encourage it, a deficiency not much to be wondered at, unless the inhabitants of provincial towns were more learned in those days than at present.
In this year, he made another effort to obtain the means of subsistence by an offer of his pen to Cave, the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine; but the immediate result of the application is not known; nor in what manner he supported himself till July 1736, when he married Elizabeth Porter, the widow of a mercer at Birmingham, and daughter of William Jervis, Esq. of Great Peatling, in Leicestershire. This woman, who was twenty years older than himself, and to whose daughter he had been an unsuccessful suitor, brought him eight hundred pounds; but, according to Garrick's report of her, was neither amiable nor handsome, though that she was both in Johnson's estimation appears from the epithets "formosae, cultae, ingeniosae," which he inscribed on her tombstone. Their nuptials were celebrated at Derby, and to that town they went together on horseback from Birmingham; but the bride assuming some airs of caprice on the road, like another Petruchio he gave her such effectual proofs of resolution, as reduced her to the abjectness of shedding tears. His first project after his marriage was to set up a school; and, with this intention, he hired a very commodious house, at the distance of about two miles from Lichfield, called Edial Hall, which has lately been taken down, and of which a representation is to be seen 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