and a more fatiguing application of mind. Rapidly as Johnson seemed to write, he yet testifies that composition is usually an effort of slow diligence, to which the author is dragged by necessity, and from which the attention is every moment starting to pleasanter pursuits. No occupation is so tiring, none requires such concentration of the powers and such a freedom from everything which can distract the thoughts; none, therefore, is so harassing under the least derangement of health or circumstances. 'A man,' says Johnson, 'doubtful of his dinner or trembling at a creditor is not much disposed to abstracted meditation or remote inquiries; nor can any pursuit be so trying when poverty compels the toil to be unremitting; when

'Day after day the labour must be done,

And sure as comes the postman and the sun
The indefatigable ink must run.'

Half the works which delight the world may almost be said to have been written with the blood of their authors. 'Ye,' exclaims Johnson, who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, attend to the history of Rasselas Prince of Abyssinia.' With much more reason might those who think of adopting literature as a profession, seduced by dazzling dreams of affluence and fame, attend to the history of Samuel Johnson. Whoever weighs the sufferings against the success will have little reason to envy his lot; and though he presents as grand a spectacle of a brave man struggling with distress as the world ever saw, the grandeur is felt by those who contemplate his career, and little besides the distress was felt by himself.

Shortly after Johnson settled in London, at the close of 1737, his chief employer was Edward Cave, the son of a shoemaker at Rugby. Cave had acquired some scholarship by his education at the grammar school of that place, and was now established as a printer and publisher at St. John's Gate. He had started the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' and never, Johnson said, 'looked out of the window but with a view to it.' Such was his minute anxiety respecting it that he would name a particular person who he heard had talked of leaving it off, and would exclaim, 'Let us have something good next month.' Johnson spoke of him in later years with great affection, and described him as a good man who always delighted to have his friends at table,' but added, 'that he was a penurious paymaster, who would contract for lines by the hundred, and expect the long hundred.' However sensible he may have been of the value of his new contributor, whose articles, compared to the flimsy stuff which filled

the

the journals of that day, were like jewels among sand, Cave does not seem to have relaxed his parsimony in his favour. The wages of Johnson were those of the ordinary literary drudges of his time, and the terms which conscious merit would have induced him to refuse, starving indigence compelled him to accept.

'

Most of his productions during the early part of his sojourn in London have not been traced. In 1740 his known contributions to the Gentleman's Magazine' become more important, and it was at the conclusion of this year that he began to compose the Parliamentary Debates,' which he had previously been employed to revise. Persons were sent to the Houses of Lords and Commons to learn the names of the speakers and the sides they took. Sometimes his informants brought away notes of what was said, and from these slender materials Johnson constructed the finished speeches which appeared in the Magazine. His last, and upon the whole his ablest, effort of the kind, was his report of the discussion on 'Spirituous Liquors' in February, 1743. He then desisted from the task on discovering what he had never before suspected, that these effusions of his pen were supposed to be the true debates, for he would not,' he said, 'be accessory to the propagation of falsehood.' Though there could be no guilt where no fraud was designed, and though not a single ill effect was alleged to have been produced by the misconception of the public, his detestation of everything deceptive was so extreme that a few days before his death he declared that the Debates were the only part of his writings which gave him compunction.' Their genuineness was long undoubted even by men who might have been thought to be in a position to hear the truth from the members of either House of Parliament. Three of the speeches were published by Dr. Maty in the works of Lord Chesterfield as specimens of his Lordship's eloquence;' and years after the scrupulous moralist had abandoned the practice Dr. Francis, the translator of Demosthenes and Horace, mentioned at a dinner, at which Johnson was present, that the reply of Mr. Pitt to the elder Horace Walpole in the 'Debate on Seamen' in 1741, was the finest he had ever read-finer than anything in the great Greek orator himself. The rest of the company were loud in their applause, and when panegyric was exhausted, Johnson exclaimed, That speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter-street.' This vigorous piece of fierce invective is the best burst of declamation he produced.

6

The excellence of the speeches may have done much to remove suspicion. It may have appeared more probable that they should be faithful reports than that they should be the composi

tion of a magazine writer; but as Flood remarked, they are none of them in the least like real debates, and they are all written in one style, and that the mannered style of Johnson. The substance is just as much in his usual strain of speculation and moralising. There is a vast amount of reflection, very few facts, and very little politics. His addiction to generalities is the cause why he displays in the conflict of opposite opinions less argumentative ingenuity than might be expected from his notable skill in maintaining either side of a question, and making the worse appear the better reason. When he was praised for his impartiality in holding the balance even between the contending parties, he answered That is not quite true. I saved appearances tolerably well, but I took care that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it.' It would be impossible, however, from the debates themselves to discover his bias. Both sides declaim with equal plausibility of assertion and power of language. The pride of the author prevailed over the prejudices of the politician, and as every speech was in fact his own, he could not resist the impulse to put the strongest arguments and most forcible expressions into the mouth of the speaker. None of his works were written with equal velocity. Three columns of the Magazine,' he said, 'in an hour was no uncommon effort, which was faster than most persons could have transcribed that quantity. Considered in this light, the composition is extraordinary. There is abundance of amplified commonplaces, but intermingled with admirable reflections which are conveyed throughout in a polished and stately style, and in diction remarkable for its copiousness and vigour. Some of the speeches on 'Spirituous Liquors' are finished dissertations on the evil effects, individual and national, of habits of intoxication, and would be supposed to be the result of unusual care.

There was once an idea of bringing Johnson himself into Parliament. Conceiving, as was conjectured by Lord Stowell, that, like the elephant in battle, so headstrong a champion might trample down friends as well as foes, Lord North declined to forward the scheme. Mr. Flood was reasonably of opinion that Johnson, at the age of sixty-two, had been too long used to the sententious brevity and short flights of conversation to have acquired the 'expanded kind of argument' necessary in Parliament; but nothing could be less reasonable than to refer to the imaginary debates in the Magazine in proof of this position. Whatever may be their fault, it assuredly is not want of expansion; and they are essays and not speeches, exactly because they were written to be read and not to be spoken. At any period while his mind retained its pliancy Johnson could have had no

difficulty

difficulty in varying the treatment of his subject to fit their altered purpose. Burke pronounced that if he had come early into the House of Commons he would have been beyond question the greatest speaker that ever appeared there. He several times attempted an harangue in the Society of Arts and Sciences,' and told Sir William Scott that he found he could not get on.' He must have meant he could not get on to the satisfaction of himself, for Dr. Kippis heard him speak there on a question of mechanics with a perspicuity and energy which excited general admiration.' Promptitude of mind was one of his most conspicuous qualities, and a little practice would have rendered oratorical contests as congenial to him as colloquial.

6

Like the dawning light which shows itself to the world before the luminary is visible from which it proceeds, Johnson's writings were admired long before he himself was brought into view. While he was penning speeches for eminent statesmen which eclipsed their own productions, he was not always able even to command a garret. About the time when he commenced the Parliamentary debates, he and Savage discussed politics one night as they walked round and round St. James's Square because they were destitute of a lodging. In high spirits and brimful of patriotism they continued their circuit for several hours, inveighing against Sir Robert Walpole and resolving that they would stand by their country.' By four in the morning fatigue got the better of patriotic fervour; they began to wish for refreshment, and found that they could only make up fourpence halfpenny between them. Savage died in 1743, and in the following year Johnson published a Life of him. This unhappy man was at once extravagantly proud and meanly importunate. He demanded alms with the air of a king who levies rightful taxes on his subjects, and thought to dignify beggary by insolence. Instead of being grateful for what was bestowed, he was enraged when anything was withheld, and to have been once his friend was to ensure his subsequent enmity. The sums which were given him out of charity he squandered in profligacy, and passed his days between the fierce extremes of ravenous debauchery and squalid want. His conversation was doubtless the circumstance which recommended him to his future biographer. Johnson had never come within reach of the heads of his profession. Savage had herded with many of them as well as with various persons of rank. He was a close and accurate observer of mankind, had a singularly tenacious memory, and possessed the art of communicating his reminiscences in easy, elegant, and vivacious language. It may readily be conceived with what eager interest Johnson would listen to his traits and anecdotes. What

Le

he saw in him was the companion of Pope and the describer of the many-coloured scenes of life, not the vindictive spendthrift and abandoned reveller. Their companionship was of short duration, for it is certain they were not acquainted when Johnson published his London' in May, 1738, and Savage left the metropolis in July, 1739, and never returned to it.

With so unpromising a hero, whose talents were not extraordinary* and the incidents of whose career were neither numerous nor creditable, Johnson produced a biography which, as Mr. Croker happily remarks, gives, like Raphael's Lazarus or Murillo's Beggar, pleasure as a work of art, while the original could only excite disgust.' The splendour of the author's mind reflected from the page redeems the inherent poverty of the subject. Yet the effect is not obtained by ascribing to Savage fictitious virtues or an imaginary importance. His ill-regulated disposition and ignoble career, if touched with tenderness, are described with as much fidelity as power. The interest springs honestly from the skill of the narrative and the reflections which are interwoven with it. The work was thrown off at a heat. 'I wrote,' Johnson said, 'forty-eight of the printed octavo pages at a sitting; but then I sat up all night.' It bears no marks of the haste with which it was composed; the style is not so harmonious and compact as that to which he had attained when he wrote the Lives of the Poets;' but it is always imposing and often terse, and runs on in a full and equable flow from the opening to the close.

The copyright of the 'Life of Savage' was purchased by Cave for fifteen guineas. No succession of masterpieces that it was in the power of man to produce could have enabled an author at this price to earn a subsistence; the money received for one performance would have been spent long before he could have collected the materials for a second. Thus Johnson was obliged to go back to his usual taskwork in which the returns were

*

Fielding relates that the writings of Savage had long lain uncalled for in the warehouse till he happened, very fortunately for his bookseller, to be convicted at the Old Bailey of having killed one Sinclair in a tavern-scuffle, by running him through with a sword. The bookseller immediately advertised The Works of Mr. Savage, now under Sentence of Death for Murder,' and the whole stock was sold. The man next offered the condemned poet a high price for a Dying Speech,' which Savage accordingly furnished. When, contrary to all expectation, he was pardoned, he wished to return the money. The bookseller preferred to stand by the bargain. He published the Speech' which Mr. Savage had intended to make at Tyburn; and Fielding says 'it is probable as many were sold as there were people in town who could read.' It is wonderful to reflect upon the circumstances which are a source of interest in the eyes of the multitude, when poems before neglected assumed a sudden value because their author was to be hanged for murder.