to be the best scholar she ever had. After a few years at the free grammar-school of Lichfield, and one year at Stourbridge, he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, at the age of nineteen. Here he did not confine himself to the studies of the place, but indulged in a wide range of miscellaneous reading. He was too poor to take a degree, and accordingly left Oxford without graduating. After acting for some time as a bookseller’s hack, he married a Mrs Porter of Birmingham—a widow with £800. With this money he opened a boarding-school, or “academy” as he called it; but he had never more than three scholars—the most famous of whom was the celebrated player, David Garrick. In 1737 he went up to London, and for the next quarter of a century struggled for a living by the aid of his pen. During the first ten years of his London life he wrote chiefly for the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine.’ In 1738 his London—a poem in heroic metre—appeared. In 1747 he began his famous Dictionary; it was completed in 1755; and the University of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of M.A. In 1749 he wrote another poem—also in heroic metre—the ‘Vanity of Human Wishes.’ In 1750 he had begun the periodical that raised his fame to its full height—a periodical to which he gave the name of The Rambler. It appeared twice a-week; and Dr Johnson wrote every article in it for two years. In 1759 he published the short novel called Rasselas: it was written to defray the expenses of his mother’s funeral; and he wrote it “in the evenings of a week.” The year 1762 saw him with a pension from the Government of £300 a-year; and henceforth he was free from heavy hack-work and literary drudgery, and could give himself up to the largest enjoyment of that for which he cared most—social conversation. He was the best talker of his time; and he knew everybody worth knowing—Burke, Goldsmith, Gibbon, the great painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, and many other able men. In 1764 he founded the “Literary Club,” which still exists and meets in London. Oddly enough, although a prolific writer, it is to another person—to Mr James Boswell, who first met him in 1763—that he owes his greatest and most lasting fame. A much larger number of persons read Boswell’s Life of Johnson—one of the most entertaining books in all literature—than Johnson’s own works. Between the years 1779 and 1781 appeared his last and ablest work, The Lives of the Poets, which were written as prefaces to a collective edition of the English Poets, published by several London booksellers. He died in 1784.
[3.] Johnson’s earlier style was full of Latin words; his later style is more purely English than most of the journalistic writing of the present day. His Rambler is full of “long-tailed words in osity and
ation;” but his ‘Lives of the Poets’ is written in manly, vigorous, and idiomatic English. In verse, he occupies a place between Pope and Goldsmith, and is one of the masters in the “didactic school” of English poetry. His rhythm and periods are swelling and sonorous; and here and there he equals Pope in the terseness and condensation of his language. The following is a fair specimen:—
“Of all the griefs that harass the distressed,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest;
Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart,
Than when a blockhead’s insult points the dart.”
[4.] Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), poet, essayist, historian, and dramatist, was born at Pallas, in the county of Longford, Ireland, in the year 1728. His father was an Irish clergyman, careless, good-hearted, and the original of the famous Dr Primrose, in The Vicar of Wakefield. He was also the original of the “village preacher” in The Deserted Village.
“A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a-year.”