He escaped, at length, from some degree of the humiliation which attaches to poverty. He projected his great work—the English Dictionary; several of the wealthiest booksellers entered into the scheme, and Johnson now left lodging in the courts and alleys about the Strand, and took a house in Gough Square, Fleet Street. This did not occur till he was eight-and-thirty; so great a portion of life had he passed in almost perpetual contest with pecuniary difficulties; nor was he entirely freed from them for some years to come. During the years spent in the exhausting labour of his Dictionary, the fifteen hundred guineas he received for the copyright were consumed on amanuenses, and the provision necessary for himself and his wife. The “Rambler” was written during these years in which his Dictionary was in course of publication, and the circumstances of its composition are most note-worthy among the “Triumphs of Perseverance.” With the exception of five numbers, every essay was written by Johnson himself; and it was regularly issued every Tuesday and Friday, for two years. The perseverance which enabled him so punctually to execute a stated task, even while continuously labouring in the greater work in which he was engaged, is remarkable: but the young reader’s thought ought to be more deeply fixed on the consideration that a life of unremitting devotion to study—unconquered by difficulty, and straitness of circumstances—had rendered him able easily to pour forth the treasures of a full mind. Although apparently the product of great care, and stored with the richest moral reflections, these essays were usually written in haste, frequently while the printer’s boy was waiting, and not even read over before given to him. This was not recklessness in Johnson, though it would have been folly in one whose mind was not most opulently stored with matured thought, and who had not attained such a habit of modulating sentences, as to render it almost mechanical. Such attainments can only be reached by the most determined disciple of perseverance. “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it,” was Johnson’s own saying; but he could not have verified it, unless his mind, by assiduous application, had been filled with the materials of writing. He was, likewise, held in high celebrity as the best converser of his age; but he acknowledged that he had attained his extraordinary accuracy and flow of language by having early laid it down as a fixed rule to arrange his thoughts before expressing them, and never to suffer a careless or unmeaning expression to escape from him.
The profits of a second periodical, “The Idler,” and the subscriptions for his edition of Shakspeare, were the means by which he supported himself for the four or five years immediately preceding the age of fifty. His wife had already died, and his aged mother being near her dissolution, in order to reach Lichfield, and pay her the last offices of filial piety, he devoted one fortnight to the composition of his beautiful and immortal tale of “Rasselas,” for which he received one hundred pounds. He did not arrive in time to close her eyes, but saw her decently interred, and then hastened back to London, to go, once more, into lodgings and retrench expenses. The next three years of his life appear to have been passed in even more than his early poverty; but the end of his difficulties was approaching.
The last twenty-two years of his existence—from the age of fifty-three to seventy-five—were spent in the receipt of a royal pension of three hundred pounds per annum; in the society of persons of fortune, who considered themselves honoured by the company of the once poverty-stricken and unknown scholar; in the companionship of Edmund Burke, and Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Joseph Warton, and others whose names are durably written on the roll of genius, and in the receipt of the highest honours of learning—for the Universities, both of Dublin and Oxford, conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws, and the Oxford University had previously sent him the degree of Master of Arts. Regarded as the great umpire of literary taste, receiving deference and respect wherever he went, and no longer driven to his pen by necessity, this honoured exemplar of perseverance did not pass through his remaining course in unproductive indolence. In addition to less important works, his “Lives of the Poets” was produced in this closing period of his life, and is well known as the most valuable and useful of his labours, with the exception of his great Dictionary.
WILLIAM GIFFORD,
In the early circumstances of his life, is a still more striking exemplar of the virtue of perseverance. He was left an orphan at thirteen years of age, was sent to sea for a twelvemonth, and was then taken home by his godfather, who had seized upon whatever his mother had left, as a means of repaying himself for money lent to her, and was now constrained to pay some attention to the boy, by the keen remonstrances of his neighbours. He was sent to school, and made such rapid progress in arithmetic that, in a few months, he was at the head of the school, and frequently assisted his master. The receipt of a trifle for these services raised in him the thought of one day becoming a schoolmaster, in the room of a teacher in the town of Ashburton, who was growing old and infirm. He mentioned his scheme to his godfather, who treated it with contempt, and forthwith apprenticed him to a shoemaker. His new master subjected him to the greatest degradation, made him the common drudge of his household, and took from him the means of pursuing his favourite study of arithmetic.
“I could not guess the motives for this at first,” he says—for his narrative is too remarkable at this period of his struggles, to be told in any other than his own language—“but at length discovered that my master destined his youngest son for the situation to which I aspired. I possessed, at this time, but one book in the world, it was a treatise on algebra, given to me by a young woman, who had found it in a lodging-house. I considered it as a treasure, but it was a treasure locked up, for it supposed the reader to be well acquainted with simple equations, and I knew nothing of the matter. My master’s son had purchased ‘Fenning’s Introduction;’ this was precisely what I wanted; but he carefully concealed it from me, and I was indebted to chance alone for stumbling upon his hiding-place. I sat up for the greatest part of several nights, successively; and, before he suspected that his treatise was discovered, had completely mastered it. I could now enter upon my own, and that carried me pretty far into the science. This was not done without difficulty. I had not a farthing on earth, nor a friend to give me one; pen, ink, and paper, therefore, were, for the most part, as completely out of my reach as a crown and sceptre. There was, indeed, a resource, but the utmost caution and secrecy were necessary in applying to it. I beat out pieces of leather as smooth as possible, and wrought my problems on them with a blunted awl; for the rest, my memory was tenacious, and I could multiply and divide by it to a great extent.”
He essayed the composition of rhyme, and the rehearsal of his verses secured him a few pence from his acquaintances. He now furnished himself with pens, ink, and paper, and even bought some books of geometry and of the higher branches of algebra; but was obliged to conceal them, and to pursue his studies by continued caution. Some of his verses, however, were shown to his master, and were understood to contain satirical reflections upon his oppressor. His books and papers were seized upon, by way of punishment; and he was reduced to the deepest despair. “I look back,” he says, in his own admirable narrative, “on that part of my life which immediately followed this event with little satisfaction: it was a period of gloom, and savage unsociability: by degrees I sunk into a kind of corporeal torpor; or, if roused into activity by the spirit of youth, wasted the exertion in splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated the few acquaintances compassion had left me.”
The heart revolts at the brutal injustice which drove Gifford’s young nature thus to harden itself into gloomy endurance of his lot, by “savage unsociability;” but a mind like his could not take that stamp for life. His disposition grew again buoyant, and his aspirations began to rekindle, as the term of his bondage grew shorter. Had he found no deliverance till it had legally expired, it may be safely affirmed that he would then have forced his way into eminence by self-assisted efforts; but an accidental circumstance emancipated him a year before the legal expiry of his apprenticeship. Mr. Cookesley, a philanthropic surgeon, having learnt from Gifford himself the facts of his hard history, through mere curiosity awakened by hearing some of his rhymes repeated, started ‘A subscription for purchasing the remainder of the time of William Gifford, and for enabling him to improve himself in writing and English grammar.’ Enough was collected to satisfy his master’s demand, he was placed at school with a clergyman, made his way into the classics, displayed such diligence that more money was raised to continue him in his promising course; and in two years and two months from the day of his liberation, he was considered by his instructor to be fit for the University, and was sent to Exeter College, Oxford.