Life of Johnson

J >> James Boswell >> Life of Johnson


He, however, went to Oxford, and was entered a Commoner of Pembroke
College on the 31st of October, 1728, being then in his nineteenth year.

The Reverend Dr. Adams, who afterwards presided over Pembroke College
with universal esteem, told me he was present, and gave me some account
of what passed on the night of Johnson's arrival at Oxford. On that
evening, his father, who had anxiously accompanied him, found means to
have him introduced to Mr. Jorden, who was to be his tutor.

His father seemed very full of the merits of his son, and told the
company he was a good scholar, and a poet, and wrote Latin verses. His
figure and manner appeared strange to them; but he behaved modestly,
and sat silent, till upon something which occurred in the course of
conversation, he suddenly struck in and quoted Macrobius; and thus he
gave the first impression of that more extensive reading in which he had
indulged himself.

His tutor, Mr. Jorden, fellow of Pembroke, was not, it seems, a man of
such abilities as we should conceive requisite for the instructor of
Samuel Johnson, who gave me the following account of him. 'He was a
very worthy man, but a heavy man, and I did not profit much by his
instructions. Indeed, I did not attend him much. The first day after
I came to college I waited upon him, and then staid away four. On the
sixth, Mr. Jorden asked me why I had not attended. I answered I had
been sliding in Christ-Church meadow. And this I said with as much
nonchalance as I am now talking to you. I had no notion that I was wrong
or irreverent to my tutor. BOSWELL: 'That, Sir, was great fortitude of
mind.' JOHNSON: 'No, Sir; stark insensibility.'

He had a love and respect for Jorden, not for his literature, but for
his worth. 'Whenever (said he) a young man becomes Jorden's pupil, he
becomes his son.'

Having given a specimen of his poetical powers, he was asked by Mr.
Jorden, to translate Pope's Messiah into Latin verse, as a Christmas
exercise. He performed it with uncommon rapidity, and in so masterly a
manner, that he obtained great applause from it, which ever after kept
him high in the estimation of his College, and, indeed, of all the
University.

It is said, that Mr. Pope expressed himself concerning it in terms of
strong approbation. Dr. Taylor told me, that it was first printed for
old Mr. Johnson, without the knowledge of his son, who was very angry
when he heard of it.

The 'morbid melancholy,' which was lurking in his constitution, and to
which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular
life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such
strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful manner.
While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he
felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual
irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom,
and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he
never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and
all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful
influence. He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and
inefficient, that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town-clock.

Johnson, upon the first violent attack of this disorder, strove to
overcome it by forcible exertions. He frequently walked to Birmingham
and back again, and tried many other expedients, but all in vain. His
expression concerning it to me was 'I did not then know how to manage
it.' His distress became so intolerable, that he applied to Dr. Swinfen,
physician in Lichfield, his god-father, and put into his hands a state
of his case, written in Latin. Dr. Swinfen was so much struck with the
extraordinary acuteness, research, and eloquence of this paper, that in
his zeal for his godson he shewed it to several people. His daughter,
Mrs. Desmoulins, who was many years humanely supported in Dr. Johnson's
house in London, told me, that upon his discovering that Dr. Swinfen
had communicated his case, he was so much offended, that he was never
afterwards fully reconciled to him. He indeed had good reason to be
offended; for though Dr. Swinfen's motive was good, he inconsiderately
betrayed a matter deeply interesting and of great delicacy, which had
been entrusted to him in confidence; and exposed a complaint of his
young friend and patient, which, in the superficial opinion of the
generality of mankind, is attended with contempt and disgrace.

To Johnson, whose supreme enjoyment was the exercise of his reason,
the disturbance or obscuration of that faculty was the evil most to
be dreaded. Insanity, therefore, was the object of his most dismal
apprehension; and he fancied himself seized by it, or approaching to
it, at the very time when he was giving proofs of a more than ordinary
soundness and vigour of judgement. That his own diseased imagination
should have so far deceived him, is strange; but it is stranger still
that some of his friends should have given credit to his groundless
opinion, when they had such undoubted proofs that it was totally
fallacious; though it is by no means surprising that those who wish
to depreciate him, should, since his death, have laid hold of this
circumstance, and insisted upon it with very unfair aggravation.

The history of his mind as to religion is an important article. I have
mentioned the early impressions made upon his tender imagination by
his mother, who continued her pious care with assiduity, but, in his
opinion, not with judgement. 'Sunday (said he) was a heavy day to me
when I was a boy. My mother confined me on that day, and made me read
"The Whole Duty of Man," from a great part of which I could derive no
instruction. When, for instance, I had read the chapter on theft, which
from my infancy I had been taught was wrong, I was no more convinced
that theft was wrong than before; so there was no accession of
knowledge. A boy should be introduced to such books, by having
his attention directed to the arrangement, to the style, and other
excellencies of composition; that the mind being thus engaged by an
amusing variety of objects, may not grow weary.'

He communicated to me the following particulars upon the subject of
his religious progress. 'I fell into an inattention to religion, or an
indifference about it, in my ninth year. The church at Lichfield, in
which we had a seat, wanted reparation, so I was to go and find a seat
in other churches; and having bad eyes, and being awkward about this, I
used to go and read in the fields on Sunday. This habit continued till
my fourteenth year; and still I find a great reluctance to go to church.
I then became a sort of lax TALKER against religion, for I did not much
THINK against it; and this lasted till I went to Oxford, where it would
not be SUFFERED. When at Oxford, I took up Law's Serious Call to a Holy
Life, expecting to find it a dull book (as such books generally are),
and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me;
and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest of religion,
after I became capable of rational inquiry.' From this time forward
religion was the predominant object of his thoughts; though, with the
just sentiments of a conscientious Christian, he lamented that his
practice of its duties fell far short of what it ought to be.

The particular course of his reading while at Oxford, and during the
time of vacation which he passed at home, cannot be traced. Enough
has been said of his irregular mode of study. He told me that from his
earliest years he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to
an end; that he read Shakspeare at a period so early, that the speech of
the ghost in Hamlet terrified him when he was alone; that Horace's Odes
were the compositions in which he took most delight, and it was long
before he liked his Epistles and Satires. He told me what he read
SOLIDLY at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and
Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram; that the study of which
he was the most fond was Metaphysicks, but he had not read much, even in
that way. I always thought that he did himself injustice in his account
of what he had read, and that he must have been speaking with reference
to the vast portion of study which is possible, and to which a few
scholars in the whole history of literature have attained; for when
I once asked him whether a person, whose name I have now forgotten,
studied hard, he answered 'No, Sir; I do not believe he studied hard. I
never knew a man who studied hard. I conclude, indeed, from the effects,
that some men have studied hard, as Bentley and Clarke.' Trying him by
that criterion upon which he formed his judgement of others, we may be
absolutely certain, both from his writings and his conversation, that
his reading was very extensive. Dr. Adam Smith, than whom few were
better judges on this subject, once observed to me that 'Johnson knew
more books than any man alive.' He had a peculiar facility in seizing at
once what was valuable in any book, without submitting to the labour of
perusing it from beginning to end. He had, from the irritability of his
constitution, at all times, an impatience and hurry when he either read
or wrote. A certain apprehension, arising from novelty, made him write
his first exercise at College twice over; but he never took that trouble
with any other composition; and we shall see that his most excellent
works were struck off at a heat, with rapid exertion.

No man had a more ardent love of literature, or a higher respect for it
than Johnson. His apartment in Pembroke College was that upon the
second floor, over the gateway. The enthusiasts of learning will ever
contemplate it with veneration. One day, while he was sitting in it
quite alone, Dr. Panting, then master of the College, whom he called
'a fine Jacobite fellow,' overheard him uttering this soliloquy in his
strong, emphatick voice: 'Well, I have a mind to see what is done in
other places of learning. I'll go and visit the Universities abroad.
I'll go to France and Italy. I'll go to Padua.--And I'll mind my
business. For an Athenian blockhead is the worst of all blockheads.'

Dr. Adams told me that Johnson, while he was at Pembroke College, 'was
caressed and loved by all about him, was a gay and frolicksome fellow,
and passed there the happiest part of his life.' But this is a striking
proof of the fallacy of appearances, and how little any of us know of
the real internal state even of those whom we see most frequently; for
the truth is, that he was then depressed by poverty, and irritated by
disease. When I mentioned to him this account as given me by Dr. Adams,
he said; 'Ah, Sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they
mistook for frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my
way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all
authority.'

The Bishop of Dromore observes in a letter to me,

'The pleasure he took in vexing the tutors and fellows has been often
mentioned. But I have heard him say, what ought to be recorded to the
honour of the present venerable master of that College, the Reverend
William Adams, D.D., who was then very young, and one of the junior
fellows; that the mild but judicious expostulations of this worthy man,
whose virtue awed him, and whose learning he revered, made him really
ashamed of himself, "though I fear (said he) I was too proud to own it."

'I have heard from some of his cotemporaries that he was generally seen
lounging at the College gate, with a circle of young students round him,
whom he was entertaining with wit, and keeping from their studies, if
not spiriting them up to rebellion against the College discipline, which
in his maturer years he so much extolled.'

I do not find that he formed any close intimacies with his
fellow-collegians. But Dr. Adams told me that he contracted a love and
regard for Pembroke College, which he retained to the last. A short time
before his death he sent to that College a present of all his works, to
be deposited in their library; and he had thoughts of leaving to it his
house at Lichfield; but his friends who were about him very properly
dissuaded him from it, and he bequeathed it to some poor relations.
He took a pleasure in boasting of the many eminent men who had been
educated at Pembroke. In this list are found the names of Mr. Hawkins
the Poetry Professor, Mr. Shenstone, Sir William Blackstone, and others;
not forgetting the celebrated popular preacher, Mr. George Whitefield,
of whom, though Dr. Johnson did not think very highly, it must be
acknowledged that his eloquence was powerful, his views pious and
charitable, his assiduity almost incredible; and, that since his death,
the integrity of his character has been fully vindicated. Being himself
a poet, Johnson was peculiarly happy in mentioning how many of the sons
of Pembroke were poets; adding, with a smile of sportive triumph, 'Sir,
we are a nest of singing birds.'

He was not, however, blind to what he thought the defects of his own
College; and I have, from the information of Dr. Taylor, a very strong
instance of that rigid honesty which he ever inflexibly preserved.
Taylor had obtained his father's consent to be entered of Pembroke, that
he might be with his schoolfellow Johnson, with whom, though some years
older than himself, he was very intimate. This would have been a great
comfort to Johnson. But he fairly told Taylor that he could not, in
conscience, suffer him to enter where he knew he could not have an able
tutor. He then made inquiry all round the University, and having found
that Mr. Bateman, of Christ Church, was the tutor of highest reputation,
Taylor was entered of that College. Mr. Bateman's lectures were so
excellent, that Johnson used to come and get them at second-hand from
Taylor, till his poverty being so extreme that his shoes were worn
out, and his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating
circumstance was perceived by the Christ Church men, and he came no
more. He was too proud to accept of money, and somebody having set a
pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away with indignation. How
must we feel when we read such an anecdote of Samuel Johnson!

The res angusta domi prevented him from having the advantage of a
complete academical education. The friend to whom he had trusted for
support had deceived him. His debts in College, though not great, were
increasing; and his scanty remittances from Lichfield, which had all
along been made with great difficulty, could be supplied no longer, his
father having fallen into a state of insolvency. Compelled, therefore,
by irresistible necessity, he left the College in autumn, 1731, without
a degree, having been a member of it little more than three years.

And now (I had almost said POOR) Samuel Johnson returned to his native
city, destitute, and not knowing how he should gain even a decent
livelihood. His father's misfortunes in trade rendered him unable to
support his son; and for some time there appeared no means by which he
could maintain himself. In the December of this year his father died.

Johnson was so far fortunate, that the respectable character of his
parents, and his own merit, had, from his earliest years, secured him
a kind reception in the best families at Lichfield. Among these I
can mention Mr. Howard, Dr. Swinfen, Mr. Simpson, Mr. Levett, Captain
Garrick, father of the great ornament of the British stage; but
above all, Mr. Gilbert Walmsley, Register of the Prerogative Court of
Lichfield, whose character, long after his decease, Dr. Johnson has,
in his Life of Edmund Smith, thus drawn in the glowing colours of
gratitude:

'Of Gilbert Walmsley, thus presented to my mind, let me indulge myself
in the remembrance. I knew him very early; he was one of the first
friends that literature procured me, and I hope that, at least, my
gratitude made me worthy of his notice.

'He was of an advanced age, and I was only not a boy, yet he never
received my notions with contempt. He was a whig, with all the virulence
and malevolence of his party; yet difference of opinion did not keep us
apart. I honoured him and he endured me.

'At this man's table I enjoyed many cheerful and instructive hours, with
companions, such as are not often found--with one who has lengthened,
and one who has gladdened life; with Dr. James, whose skill in physick
will be long remembered; and with David Garrick, whom I hoped to have
gratified with this character of our common friend. But what are the
hopes of man! I am disappointed by that stroke of death, which has
eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the publick stock of
harmless pleasure.'

In these families he passed much time in his early years. In most of
them, he was in the company of ladies, particularly at Mr. Walmsley's,
whose wife and sisters-in-law, of the name of Aston, and daughters of a
Baronet, were remarkable for good breeding; so that the notion which has
been industriously circulated and believed, that he never was in good
company till late in life, and, consequently had been confirmed
in coarse and ferocious manners by long habits, is wholly without
foundation. Some of the ladies have assured me, they recollected him
well when a young man, as distinguished for his complaisance.

In the forlorn state of his circumstances, he accepted of an offer to be
employed as usher in the school of Market-Bosworth, in Leicestershire,
to which it appears, from one of his little fragments of a diary, that
he went on foot, on the 16th of July.

This employment was very irksome to him in every respect, and he
complained grievously of it in his letters to his friend Mr. Hector, who
was now settled as a surgeon at Birmingham. The letters are lost; but
Mr. Hector recollects his writing 'that the poet had described the dull
sameness of his existence in these words, "Vitam continet una dies" (one
day contains the whole of my life); that it was unvaried as the note of
the cuckow; and that he did not know whether it was more disagreeable
for him to teach, or the boys to learn, the grammar rules.' His general
aversion to this painful drudgery was greatly enhanced by a disagreement
between him and Sir Wolstan Dixey, the patron of the school, in whose
house, I have been told, he officiated as a kind of domestick chaplain,
so far, at least, as to say grace at table, but was treated with what
he represented as intolerable harshness; and, after suffering for a few
months such complicated misery, he relinquished a situation which all
his life afterwards he recollected with the strongest aversion, and even
a degree of horrour. But it is probable that at this period, whatever
uneasiness he may have endured, he laid the foundation of much future
eminence by application to his studies.

Being now again totally unoccupied, he was invited by Mr. Hector to
pass some time with him at Birmingham, as his guest, at the house of
Mr. Warren, with whom Mr. Hector lodged and boarded. Mr. Warren was the
first established bookseller in Birmingham, and was very attentive to
Johnson, who he soon found could be of much service to him in his trade,
by his knowledge of literature; and he even obtained the assistance of
his pen in furnishing some numbers of a periodical Essay printed in the
newspaper, of which Warren was proprietor. After very diligent inquiry,
I have not been able to recover those early specimens of that particular
mode of writing by which Johnson afterwards so greatly distinguished
himself.

He continued to live as Mr. Hector's guest for about six months, and
then hired lodgings in another part of the town, finding himself as well
situated at Birmingham as he supposed he could be any where, while he
had no settled plan of life, and very scanty means of subsistence. He
made some valuable acquaintances there, amongst whom were Mr. Porter,
a mercer, whose widow he afterwards married, and Mr. Taylor, who by his
ingenuity in mechanical inventions, and his success in trade, acquired
an immense fortune. But the comfort of being near Mr. Hector, his old
school-fellow and intimate friend, was Johnson's chief inducement to
continue here.

His juvenile attachments to the fair sex were very transient; and it is
certain that he formed no criminal connection whatsoever. Mr. Hector,
who lived with him in his younger days in the utmost intimacy and social
freedom, has assured me, that even at that ardent season his conduct
was strictly virtuous in that respect; and that though he loved to
exhilarate himself with wine, he never knew him intoxicated but once.

In a man whom religious education has secured from licentious
indulgences, the passion of love, when once it has seized him, is
exceedingly strong; being unimpaired by dissipation, and totally
concentrated in one object. This was experienced by Johnson, when he
became the fervent admirer of Mrs. Porter, after her first husband's
death. Miss Porter told me, that when he was first introduced to her
mother, his appearance was very forbidding: he was then lean and lank,
so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the
eye, and the scars of the scrophula were deeply visible. He also wore
his hair, which was straight and stiff, and separated behind: and he
often had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which
tended to excite at once surprize and ridicule. Mrs. Porter was so
much engaged by his conversation that she overlooked all these external
disadvantages, and said to her daughter, 'this is the most sensible man
that I ever saw in my life.'

Though Mrs. Porter was double the age of Johnson, and her person and
manner, as described to me by the late Mr. Garrick, were by no means
pleasing to others, she must have had a superiority of understanding
and talents, as she certainly inspired him with a more than ordinary
passion; and she having signified her willingness to accept of his hand,
he went to Lichfield to ask his mother's consent to the marriage, which
he could not but be conscious was a very imprudent scheme, both on
account of their disparity of years, and her want of fortune. But Mrs.
Johnson knew too well the ardour of her son's temper, and was too tender
a parent to oppose his inclinations.

I know not for what reason the marriage ceremony was not performed at
Birmingham; but a resolution was taken that it should be at Derby, for
which place the bride and bridegroom set out on horseback, I suppose in
very good humour. But though Mr. Topham Beauclerk used archly to mention
Johnson's having told him, with much gravity, 'Sir, it was a love
marriage on both sides,' I have had from my illustrious friend the
following curious account of their journey to church upon the nuptial
morn:

9th JULY:--'Sir, she had read the old romances, and had got into her
head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover
like a dog. So, Sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast, and she
could not keep up with me; and, when I rode a little slower, she passed
me, and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the slave
of caprice; and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. I therefore
pushed on briskly, till I was fairly out of her sight. The road lay
between two hedges, so I was sure she could not miss it; and I contrived
that she should soon come up with me. When she did, I observed her to be
in tears.'

This, it must be allowed, was a singular beginning of connubial
felicity; but there is no doubt that Johnson, though he thus shewed a
manly firmness, proved a most affectionate and indulgent husband to the
last moment of Mrs. Johnson's life: and in his Prayers and Meditations,
we find very remarkable evidence that his regard and fondness for her
never ceased, even after her death.

He now set up a private academy, for which purpose he hired a large
house, well situated near his native city. In the Gentleman's Magazine
for 1736, there is the following advertisement:

'At Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are boarded
and taught the Latin and Greek languages, by SAMUEL JOHNSON.'

But the only pupils that were put under his care were the celebrated
David Garrick and his brother George, and a Mr. Offely, a young
gentleman of good fortune who died early. The truth is, that he was not
so well qualified for being a teacher of elements, and a conductor in
learning by regular gradations, as men of inferiour powers of mind. His
own acquisitions had been made by fits and starts, by violent irruptions
into the regions of knowledge; and it could not be expected that his
impatience would be subdued, and his impetuosity restrained, so as to
fit him for a quiet guide to novices.

Johnson was not more satisfied with his situation as the master of an
academy, than with that of the usher of a school; we need not wonder,
therefore, that he did not keep his academy above a year and a half.
From Mr. Garrick's account he did not appear to have been profoundly
reverenced by his pupils. His oddities of manner, and uncouth
gesticulations, could not but be the subject of merriment to them;
and, in particular, the young rogues used to listen at the door of his
bed-chamber, and peep through the key-hole, that they might turn into
ridicule his tumultuous and awkward fondness for Mrs. Johnson, whom he
used to name by the familiar appellation of Tetty or Tetsey, which, like
Betty or Betsey, is provincially used as a contraction for Elisabeth,
her christian name, but which to us seems ludicrous, when applied to a
woman of her age and appearance. Mr. Garrick described her to me as
very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled
cheeks of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by
the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastick in her dress, and
affected both in her speech and her general behaviour. I have seen
Garrick exhibit her, by his exquisite talent of mimickry, so as to
excite the heartiest bursts of laughter; but he, probably, as is the
case in all such representations, considerably aggravated the picture.