Lives of the English Poets

The papers of which this volume is composed originally appeared in the London Magazine, between the years 1821 and 1824. It was the author's intention to continue the series of Lives to a later period, but a change in the proprietorship of the Magazine prevented the completion of his plan. They are now for the first time published in a separate form, and under their author's name.

In seeing the work through the press, the Editor has had occasion only to alter one or two particulars in the Life of Goldsmith, which the labours of that Poet's more recent biographer, Mr. Prior, have subsequently elucidated.

HENRY CARY.

WORCESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD. Dec. 1, 1845.

CONTENTS.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

JOHN ARMSTRONG

RICHARD JAGO

RICHARD OWEN CAMBRIDGE

TOBIAS SMOLLETT

THOMAS WARTON

JOSEPH WARTON

CHRISTOPHER ANSTEY

WILLIAM MASON

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

ERASMUS DARWIN

WILLIAM JULIUS MICKLE

JAMES BEATTIE

WILLIAM HAYLEY

SIR WILLIAM JONES

THOMAS CHATTERTON

HENRY KIRKE WHITE

LIVES OF ENGLISH POETS.

* * * * *

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

There is, perhaps, no one among our English writers, who for so great a part of his life has been an object of curiosity to his contemporaries as Johnson. Almost every thing he said or did was thought worthy of being recorded by some one or other of his associates; and the public were for a time willing to listen to all they had to say of him. A mass of information has thus been accumulated, from which it will be my task to select such a portion as shall seem sufficient to give a faithful representation of his fortunes and character, without wearying the attention of the reader. That any important addition should be made to what has been already told of him, will scarcely be expected.

Samuel Johnson, the elder of two sons of Michael Johnson, who was of an obscure family, and kept a bookseller's shop at Lichfield, was born in that city on the 18th of September, 1709. His mother, Sarah Ford, was sprung of a respectable race of yeomanry in Worcestershire; and, being a woman of great piety, early instilled into the mind of her son those principles of devotion for which he was afterwards so eminently distinguished. At the end of ten months from his birth, he was taken from his nurse, according to his own account of himself, a poor diseased infant, almost blind; and, when two years and a half old, was carried to London to be touched by Queen Anne for the evil. Being asked many years after if he had any remembrance of the Queen, he said that he had a confused but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds and a long black hood. So predominant was this superstition relating to the king's evil, that there was a form of service for the occasion inserted in the Book of Common Prayer, and Bishop Bull,[1] in one of his Sermons, calls it a relique and remainder of the primitive gift of healing. The morbidness of constitution natural to him, and the defect in his eye-sight, hindered him from partaking in the sports of other children, and probably induced him to seek for distinction in intellectual superiority. Dame Oliver, who kept a school for little children, in Lichfield, first taught him to read; and, as he delighted to tell, when he was going to the University, brought him a present of gingerbread, in token of his being the best scholar her academy had ever produced. His next instructor in his own language was a man whom he used to call Tom Browne; and who, he said, published a Spelling Book, and dedicated it to the universe. He was then placed with Mr. Hunter the head master of the grammar school in his native city, but, for two years before he came under his immediate tuition, was taught Latin by Mr. Hawkins, the usher. It is just that one, who, in writing the lives of men less eminent than himself, was always careful to record the names of their instructors, should obtain a tribute of similar respect for his own. By Mr. Price, who was afterwards head master of the same school, and whose name I cannot mention without reverence and affection, I have been told that Johnson, when late in life he visited the place of his education, shewed him a nook in the school-room, where it was usual for the boys to secrete the translations of the books they were reading; and, at the same time, speaking of his old master, Hunter, said to him, "He was not severe, Sir. A master ought to be severe. Sir, he was cruel." Johnson, however, was always ready to acknowledge how much he was indebted to Hunter for his classical proficiency. At the age of fifteen, by the advice of his mother's nephew, Cornelius Ford, a clergyman of considerable abilities, but disgraced by the licentiousness of his life, and who is spoken of in the Life of Fenton, he was removed to the grammar-school of Stourbridge, of which Mr. Wentworth was master. Here he did not remain much more than a twelvemonth, and, as he told Dr. Percy, learned much in the school, but little from the master; whereas, with Hunter, he had learned much from the master, and little in the school. The progress he made was, perhaps, gained in teaching the other boys, for Wentworth is said to have employed him as an assistant. His compositions in English verse indicate that command of language which he afterwards attained. The two following years he accuses himself of wasting in idleness at home; but we must doubt whether he had much occasion for self-reproach, when we learn that Hesiod, Anacreon, the Latin works of Petrarch, and "a great many other books not commonly known in the Universities," were among his studies.