A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

All the statesmen of the day were not of the school of Grafton. There were numerous exceptions to the rule of Rigby. The Graftons and the Rigbys gain an unnatural prominence from the fact that then and later it was to such tools the King turned, and that he always found such tools ready to his hands. There were many men who, without any show of austerity or any burden of morality, were at least of a very different order from the creatures whom the King did not indeed delight to honor, but whom he condescended to employ. The Earl of Granville, with the weight of seventy years upon his shoulders, carried into active political life under his fourth sovereign the same qualities both for good and evil that adorned or injured the name of Carteret. He accepted Lord Bute's authority, and he did not live long enough to witness Bute's fall. He accorded to the peace brought about by Bute "the approbation of a dying statesman," as the most honorable peace the country had ever seen. He died in the January of 1763, leaving behind him the memory of a long life which had always been lived to his own advantage but by no means to the disadvantage of his country. He left behind him a memory of rare public eloquence and graceful private conversation, of an elegant scholarship that prompted him to the patronage of scholars, of a profound belief in his own judgment, and a no less profound contempt for the opinions of others. His public life was honest in an epoch when public dishonesty was habitual, and the best thing to be said of him was the best thing he said of himself, that when he governed Ireland he governed so as to please Dean Swift.

[Sidenote: 1763—Dr. Samuel Johnson]

At a time when the King was surrounded by such advisers as we have seen, the King's chief servant and most loyal subject was a man no longer young, who had nothing to do with the courts or councils, and who yet was of {39} greater service to the throne and its occupier than all the House of Lords and half the House of Commons. Long years before George the Third was born, a struggling, unsuccessful schoolmaster gave up a school that was well-nigh given up by its scholars and came to London to push his fortune as a man of letters. When George the Third came to the throne the schoolmaster had not found fortune—that he never found—but he had found fame, and the name of Samuel Johnson was known and loved wherever an English word was spoken or an English book read. The conditions of political life in England in the eighteenth century made it impossible for such a man as Samuel Johnson ever to be the chosen counsellor, the minister of an English king. The field of active politics was reserved for men of family, of wealth, or of the few whom powerful patronage served in lieu of birth and aided to the necessary opulence. Johnson was one of the most influential writers of his day, one of the strongest intellectual forces then at work, one of the greatest personalities then alive. But it would no more have occurred to him to dream of administrative honors and a place in a Ministry than it would have occurred to George the Third to send one of his equerries to the dingy lodgings of an author with the request that Dr. Johnson would step round to St. James's Palace and favor his Majesty with his opinion on this subject or on that. It is not certain that the King would have gained very much if he had done anything so unusual. Dr. Johnson's views were very much the King's views, and we know that he would have been as obstinate as the King in many if not most of the cases in which the King's obstinacy was very fatal to himself.

When Queen Anne was still upon the throne of England, when James the Second still lived with a son who dreamed of being James the Third, and when George the First was only Elector of Hanover, people still attributed to the sovereign certain gifts denied to subjects. They believed, for instance, that the touch of the royal fingers could cure the malady of scrofula, then widely known in consequence of that belief as the King's Evil. In obedience to that {40} belief, in the spring of 1712 some poor folk of Lichfield travelled to London with their infant son, in the hope that Queen Anne would lay her hand upon the child and make him whole. There were days appointed for the ceremony of the touch, and on one of those days the Johnsons of Lichfield carried their little Samuel into the royal presence, and Queen Anne stroked the child with her hand. For more than seventy years a dim memory remained with Johnson of a stately lady in black; for more than seventy years the malady that her touch was thought to heal haunted him. When the man who had been the sick child died, the third prince of a foreign house was seated on the throne of England, and the third of the line owed, unconscious of the debt, no little of his security on his throne and no little of his popularity with the mass of his people to the struggling author who had received the benediction of the last Stuart sovereign of England.

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on September 8, 1709. His father was a bookseller, perhaps too fond of books to be a good dealer in them. But his crowded shelves were a paradise to his son when at the age of sixteen he came home from the last of many schoolings, each of which had taught him much. For two years he read his way recklessly, riotously, and joyously through his father's migratory library. He took the advice of the varlet in "The Taming of the Shrew," and studied what he most affected. His memory was as vast as his head was huge and his body bulky. He read what he liked, and he stored his mind with as miscellaneous a mass of knowledge as ever was heaped up within the pent-house of one human skull. That youthful zeal and fiery heat of study remained youthful with him to the end of his many days; the passion for learning never burned low in that mighty brain. The man who in his old age studied Dutch to test the acquiring powers of his intellect, and still found them freshly tempered, acted in his ebullient boyhood as if, like Bacon, he had taken all knowledge to be his province. The man who in his old age found an exquisite entertainment in reading a Spanish romance of chivalry, in his eager {41} boyhood found the Latin poems of Petrarch sweeter than apples. The great Italian who counted the sonnets to which he owes his immortality but as the clouds of a dream, and who built his hopes of fame upon that "Africa" which the world has been willing to forget, found the reader he would have welcomed and the student he would have cherished in the ungainly youth who pored over him in a garret. The boy Johnson, bent over the great folio, forgot that he was poor, forgot that he was ill-clad, under the spell of the stately lines that their poet believed to be not less than Virgilian. He had set out on an errand even more trivial than that of Saul the son of Kish, and he had found the illimitable kingdom of dreams.

[Sidenote: 1728—The college days of Dr. Johnson]

Chance sent the student of Petrarch to Pembroke College, Oxford, where he passed two years eating the bitter bread of poverty in the bitter pride of youth. He was hungry, he was ragged, he was conscious of his great knowledge and his great gifts, and he saw all around him men in high places whose attainments he despised, and men seeking the same goal as himself whose happy ease of circumstances he affected to disdain and was compelled to envy. His wild soul rose in rebellion at the inequalities of life. He passed for a mutineer.

His college days were bitter and rebellious; days of hunger and thirst and ruined raiment. Some well-meaning person, moved to pity by the sight of Johnson's shabby shoes, patched and mended till they were past all wholesome cobbling, placed a new sound pair at Johnson's door in nameless benevolence. Johnson cast them from him with fury, too proud to be shod by another man's bounty. He drifted through his few and gloomy college days deriding and despising those in authority; seemingly wasting his time and yet not wasting it; translating Pope's "Messiah" into such noble Latin that Pope, moved by honest admiration, declared that future times would be unable to tell which was the original and which was the translation. Johnson could be nowhere without learning, and he learned something at Oxford; but in any case his stay was short, and he drifted back to Lichfield, leaving on the {42} banks of the Isis an amazing memory of a sullen savage creature, brimmed with the strangest miscellaneous learning. In Lichfield his father's death, following hard upon his return from Oxford, left him lonelier and poorer than ever, troubled by the grim necessity to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, and by the uncertainty how to set about it. He did set about it, earnestly, strenuously, if not very fruitfully.

[Sidenote: 1737—Johnson and his work]

He was ready to do anything, to turn to anything, to write, to translate, to teach. He fell in love with an amazing woman more than twenty years his senior, monstrously fat, monstrously painted, monstrously affected and absurd; he fell in love with her, and he married her. She had a little money, and Johnson set up an academy for the instruction of youth. But youth would not come to be instructed. One youth came, one of the very few, a soldier's son and a grandson of a Huguenot refugee, named David Garrick. The master and the pupil became friends, and the friendship lasted with life. Master and pupil resolved to make the adventure of the town together. The eyes of aspiring provincials turned always to the great city, every ambitious provincial heart beat with desire for the conquest of London. The priest of letters and the player of parts, the real man and the shadow of all men, packed up bag and baggage and came to London to very different fame and very different fortune. The great city had one kind of welcome to give to the man who desired to speak truth and another to the man who proposed to give pleasure. The chances for men of letters and for players were very unlike just then. The two strands of life ran across the web of London, the strand of Johnson iron-gray, the strand of Garrick gleaming gold. Through long years Johnson hid in dingy courts and alleys, ill-clothed, ill-fed, an uncouth Apollo in the service of Admetus Cave and his kind, while the marvellous actor was climbing daily higher and higher on the ladder of an actor's fame, the friend of the wealthy, the favored of the great, the admired, the applauded, the well-beloved. Garrick deserved his fame and his fortune, his splendid successes and {43} his shining rewards; but the grand, rough writer of books did not deserve his buffets and mishaps, his ferocious hungers, his acquaintanceship with sponging-houses, and all the catalogue of his London agonies. His struggle for life was a Titan's struggle, and it was never either selfish or ignoble. He wanted to live and be heard because he knew that he had something to say that was worth hearing. He needed to live for the sake of his ardent squalid affections, for the sake of the people who were always dependent upon his meagre bounty, for the sake of the wife he loved so deeply, mourned so truly when she died, and remembered with such tender loyalty so long as life was left to him. Miserably poor himself, he always had about him people more miserable and more poor, who looked to him for the very bread and water of their affliction, dependents whom he tended not merely generously, but, what was better still, cheerfully. Under conditions of existence that would have seemed crushing to men of letters with a tithe of Johnson's greatness of soul, Johnson fought his way inch by inch in the terrible career of the man who lived by his pen, and by his pen alone. He wrote anything and everything so long as it was honorable to write and promised to make the world better. But it was not what Johnson wrote so much as what Johnson did that commanded his age and commands posterity. In the truest sense of the word, he lived beautifully. "Rasselas" and "The Idler," "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes," "The Rambler" and the "Sessions of Lilliput," and the "Lives of the Poets," and even the famous "Dictionary," only claim remembrance because they were done by a man who would be as interesting a study and as ennobling an example if he had never written a line of the works that bear his signature in every sentence of their solemn, even their portentous majesty. Johnson had the kindest heart wrapped in a rugged hide. One of the noblest of the many noble stories about him relates how he and a friend, whose name of Burke was not then famous, found a poor woman of the streets houseless, hungry, and exhausted in the streets. Burke had a room which he could {44} offer the poor creature for a night's shelter; but Burke could not get the woman there. Johnson had no room—his dependents swarmed over every available space at his command—but he had the strength of a giant, and he used it as a giant should, in carrying the poor wretch in his arms to the roof that Burke could offer her. Long years later, another man of letters, hungry, homeless, and friendless, sick almost unto death, found a kind friend and gentle nurse in a woman of the streets. In succoring De Quincey we may well think that Anne was repaying something of the debt owed by one of her unhappy class to two of the glories of literature and of humanity.