together. Davy Garrick is to be with you early the next week, and Mr Johnson to try his fate with a tragedy, and to see to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French. Johnson is a very good scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a fine tragedy-writer. If it should any way lie in your way, I doubt not but you would be ready to recommend and assist your countryman.

The tragedy referred to was "Irene," only three acts of which, however, were at the moment complete. This was to be his passport to fame. Meanwhile, to meet his immediate needs, he had twopence halfpenny in his pocket.

I'

II

T is important to understand the condition of things in the literary world of London

at the time when Johnson entered it, because this provides the background of so much of his own life.

In the early years of the eighteenth century men of letters had prospered greatly through their close connexion with ministers and wealthy patrons; most of them had been willing to sell their pens to one or other, and sometimes even to both, of the rival political parties; they had successfully cultivated the arts of flattery and intrigue; and gifts of money, comfortable pensions, well-paid offices and snug sinecures had been their reward. But these fat days came to an end with the advent

of Sir Robert Walpole, who, like his royal masters, George I and George II, despised literature and its practitioners, though he was ready enough to pay cash down to journalists for support of his administration. With his accession to power the Government patronage of literature ceased, and before long patronage in general began to go out of fashion. The result was that anyone who wrote for a living now became entirely dependent upon the booksellers (as publishers were then called), whose position enabled them to exploit his needs. Hence the profession of authorship fell into disrepute, while the lot of the hack-writer was one of constant struggle and poverty, the hardships of which were commonly intensified-for the moral effect of such conditions was only too painfully apparent-by his own shiftlessness and dissipation.1 A passage from Johnson's life of his Bohemian friend Richard Savage, who died in a debtor's prison in Bristol, may fittingly be cited in illustration:

He lodged as much by accident as he dined, and passed the night sometimes in mean houses which are set open at night to any casual wanderers, sometimes in cellars, among the riot and filth of the meanest and most profligate of the rabble; and sometimes, when he had not money enough to support even the expenses of such receptacles, walked about the streets till he was weary, and lay down in summer upon the bulk, or in the winter, with his associates in poverty, among the ashes of a glass-house.

1 Cp. Goldsmith's "Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning," especially chap. viii.

Another of Johnson's associates, a poetaster named Boyse, was once found by Johnson confined to his bed because his only clothes were in pawn, and though Johnson, who was then almost as impecunious as himself, contrived to collect enough money, by separate sixpences, to get them out, in two days they were pawned again and their owner once more a prisoner in his garret. The annals of Grub Street are full of similar details, and though, as in these particular instances, the man was himself the main cause of his misfortunes, this was, as our own subject shows, by no means always or necessarily the case. Johnson at least never sank into the mire of iniquity; yet he tasted all the bitterness of the most extreme poverty; he knew well what it was to wear shabby clothes and to go without a meal; he and Savage sometimes tramped the streets all night for want of a few pence to pay for a bed; once, as he told Sir Joshua Reynolds, they had thus spent a night together walking round St James's Square, though on this special occasion they had kept themselves in good spirits by inveighing against the Government.

Johnson's first lodging in London was in Exeter Street, Strand; his first eating-house the "Pine-Apple," in New Street, near by, where he dined very well" and in very good company " for eightpence-sixpence for a cut of meat, a penny for bread, and a penny to the waiter. In the summer of that year he spent some time in Lichfield, where he finished his

tragedy, and on his return to London in the autumn brought his wife with him. The rejection of " Irene " by the patentee of Drury Lane Theatre was a bad blow to his hopes. But he was now fortunate enough to obtain regular employment on Edward Cave's "Gentleman's Magazine," which, though illpaid, provided him, Boswell surmises, with "a tolerable livelihood." To this, in particular, he contributed, from 1740 to 1743, the monthly reports of the proceedings of Parliament. It must be remembered that Parliamentary reporting, in our sense of the term, was not then permitted, and these so-called reports appeared

as

"Discussions in the Senate of Lilliput "; the Lords figuring as Hurgoes, the Commons as Clinabs, and the various speakers being thinly disguised under anagrams or other fanciful and easily deciphered pseudonyms. Johnson himself was never in either House; he merely worked upon the scanty notes brought to him by persons sent thither to collect material, who gained admission through Cave's interest with the door-keepers; and as he had thus a free hand to write up the debates, not as they had actually taken place, but in accordance with his own preconceived ideas, he was always careful, as he afterward confessed, "that the Whig dogs should not have the best of it." 1

1 According to Murphy ("Essay on the Life and Genius of Dr Johnson "), the authorship of these debates, which was at the time a secret, was first acknowledged by Johnson himself at a dinner given some years later by Foote the actor. The company had been praising a speech by Pitt as equal to anything in Demosthenes. "That speech," said Johnson, to the amazement of all present, "I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street"; and he pro

It must be added, however, that the popular success of his work caused him to discontinue it, for as soon as he found that the speeches were thought genuine he determined that he would write no more of them, "while (" such was the tenderness of his conscience that a short time before his death he expressed his regret for having been the author of fictions which had passed for realities."

Amid such labours undertaken for gain, not glory," and "solely to obtain an honest support," he had meanwhile published, in May 1738, his first substantial work, "London: a Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal." This he sold to Dodsley, who gave him ten guineas for the copyright. At that time of dominating classic taste the young poet, ambitious of fame, turned as naturally to satire of the Latin type as in the age of Elizabeth he would have turned to romantic drama, and the success of Pope's "Imitations of Horace " quite as naturally prompted him to further experiments on the same general lines. Pope, taking the kindly philosopher of the Sabine Farm as his model, had applied his "reflections to the use of his own country.” Johnson does the same with the "reflections" of the other great Roman satirist, whose moral earnestness and sæva indignatio made his temper in many ways congenial to his own. Thus he does not translate the Third Satire, ceeded to explain how it was done. It was the "lavish encomiums "bestowed upon him for his impartiality which called forth the highly characteristic remark quoted above.