SPENSER,
Was not less an exemplar of diligence than of skill in the architecture of verse. The mere task-work of constructing three thousand eight hundred and fifty-four stanzas, comprising forty-four thousand six hundred and sixty-eight lines, would have wearied out the industry of any mind whose powers were not indefatigable. He died, too, before his magnificent design was complete, or the elaborate monument of his fame might have been still more colossal. Superiority to mental indolence, so manifest in the lives of Shakspeare and Spenser, is equally noticeable in the cases of Chaucer and Milton, of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, of Dryden and Pope, of Byron and Wordsworth, our other great poets; and, indeed, in the histories of the great poets of all nations. When the quantity of their composition is considered, and it is remembered how much thought must have been expended in the bringing together of choice materials, how much care in the polishing and adorning of each part, and of the whole, of their seemly fabrics, the degree of perseverance exercised in the erection of so many immortal superstructures of the mind is presented to reflection with commanding self-evidence. But let us track, more circumstantially, the life-path, so proverbial for vicissitude, of some of the children of genius, that we may see how the energy of true men is neither quelled by difficulty nor enervated by success.
JOHNSON,
Afterwards so famous as the great arbiter of literary criticism, is found leaving college without a degree, and, from sheer poverty, at the age of twenty-two. The sale of his deceased father’s effects, a few months after, affords him but twenty pounds, and he is constrained to become an usher in a grammar school in Leicestershire. In the next year he performs a translation of “Lobo’s Voyage to Abyssinia” for a Birmingham bookseller, returns to Lichfield, his birth-place, and publishes proposals for printing, by subscription, the Latin poems of Politian, the life of that author, and a history of Latin poetry from the era of Petrarch to the time of Politian. His project failed to attract patrons, and he next offered his services to Cave, the original projector of the “Gentleman’s Magazine.” Cave accepted his offer, but on conditions which compelled Johnson to make application elsewhere for earning the means of living. He again offered to become assistant to the master of a grammar school; but, in spite of the great learning he had even then acquired, he was rejected, from the fear that his peculiar nervous and involuntary gestures would render him an object of ridicule with his pupils. Such was one of the disabilities of constitution under which this humbly-born and strong-minded man laboured through life.
Won, not by his ungainly person, but by the high qualities of his mind, a widow, with a little fortune of eight hundred pounds, yielded him her hand, in this season of his poverty; and he immediately opened a classical school in his native town. The celebrated Garrick, then about eighteen years old, became his pupil. His scheme, however, did not succeed; his newly acquired property was exhausted; and he and Garrick, then eight years his junior, set out together for London, with the resolve to seek their fortunes in the larger world. Garrick in a short time was acknowledged as the first genius on the stage, and made his way to wealth almost without difficulty. A longer and more toilful period of trial fell to the lot of the scholar and author. He first offered to the booksellers a manuscript tragedy, supposed to be his “Irene,” but could find no one willing to accept it. Cave gave him an engagement to translate the “History of the Council of Trent.” He received forty-nine pounds for part of the translation, but it was never completed for lack of sale. His pecuniary condition was so low, soon after this, that he and Savage, having walked, conversing, round Grosvenor Square, till four in the morning, and beginning to feel the want of refreshment, could not muster between them more than fourpence-halfpenny! He received ten guineas for his celebrated poem of “London;” but though Pope said, “The author, whoever he was, could not be long concealed,” no further advantage was derived by Johnson from its publication. Hearing of a vacancy in the mastership of another grammar school in Leicestershire, he, once more, proceeds thither as a candidate. The consequences of the poverty which had prevented him from remaining at the university till he could take a degree were now grievously felt. The statutes of the place required that the person chosen should be a Master of Arts. Some interest was made to obtain him that degree from the Dublin University; but it failed, and he was again thrown back on London.
In spite of his melancholic constitution, these repeated disappointments, so far from filling him with despair, seem only to have quickened his invention, and strengthened his resolution to continue the struggle for fame. He formed numerous projects on his return to the metropolis; but none succeeded except his contributions to the “Gentleman’s Magazine;” these were, chiefly, the “Parliamentary Debates,” which the world read with the belief that they were thus becoming acquainted with the eloquence of Chatham, Walpole, and their compeers, and little dreaming that those speeches were “written in a garret in Exeter Street,” by a poverty-stricken author. The talent displayed in this anonymous labour did not serve, as yet, to free him from difficulties. He next undertook to collect and arrange the tracts forming the miscellany, entitled “Harleian.” Osborne, the bookseller, was his employer in this work; and, having purchased Lord Oxford’s library, the bookseller also employed Johnson to form a catalogue. To relieve his drudgery, Johnson occasionally paused to peruse the book that came to hand; Osborne complained of this; a dispute arose; and the bookseller, with great roughness, gave the author the lie. The incident so characteristic of Johnson, and so often related, now took place—Johnson seized a folio, and knocked the bookseller down. The act was far from justifiable; but his indignation under the offence must have been great, as his rigid adherence to speaking the truth was so observable, that one of his most intimate friends declared “he always talked as if he were speaking on oath.”