Lives of the English Poets | Page 4

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 designated by fictitious names, under which they were easily discoverable; and their speeches in both Houses of Parliament, which was entitled the Senate of Lilliput, were in this manner imparted to the nation in the periodical work above-mentioned. At first, Johnson only revised these reports; but he became so dexterous in the execution of his task, that he required only to be told the names of the speakers,