the Gentleman's Magazine;
but the immediate result of the application is not known; nor in what
manner he supported himself till July 1736, when he married Elizabeth
Porter, the widow of a mercer at Birmingham, and daughter of William
Jervis, Esq. of Great Peatling, in Leicestershire. This woman, who was
twenty years older than himself, and to whose daughter he had been an
unsuccessful suitor, brought him eight hundred pounds; but, according to
Garrick's report of her, was neither amiable nor handsome, though that
she was both in Johnson's estimation appears from the epithets
"formosae, cultae, ingeniosae," which he inscribed on her tombstone.
Their nuptials were celebrated at Derby, and to that town they went
together on horseback from Birmingham; but the bride assuming some airs
of caprice on the road, like another Petruchio he gave her such
effectual proofs of resolution, as reduced her to the abjectness of
shedding tears. His first project after his marriage was to set up a
school; and, with this intention, he hired a very commodious house, at
the distance of about two miles from Lichfield, called Edial Hall, which
has lately been taken down, and of which a representation is to be seen
in the History of Lichfield, by Mr. Harwood. One of my friends, who
inhabited it for the same purpose, has told me that an old countryman
who lived near it, and remembered Johnson and his pupil Garrick, said to
him, "that Johnson was not much of a scholar to look at, but that master
Garrick was a strange one for leaping over a stile." It is amusing to
observe the impressions which such men make on common minds.
Unfortunately the prejudice occasioned by Johnson's unsightly exterior
was not confined to the vulgar, insomuch that it has been thought to be
the reason why so few parents committed their children to his care, for
he had only three pupils. This unscholarlike appearance it must have
been that made the bookseller in the Strand, to whom he applied for
literary employment, eye him archly, and recommend it to him rather to
purchase a porter's knot. But, as an old philosopher has said, every
thing has two handles. It was, perhaps, the contrast between the body
and the mind, between the incultum corpus, and the ingenium, which
afterwards was one cause of his being received so willingly in those
circles of what is called high life, where any thing that is exceedingly
strange and unusual is apt to carry its own recommendation with it.
Failing in his attempt at Edial, he was disposed once more to engage in
the drudgery of an usher, and offered himself in that capacity to the
Rev. William Budworth, master of the grammar-school at Brewood, in
Staffordshire, celebrated for having been the place in which Bishop Hurd
received his education, under that master. But here again nature stood
in his way; for Budworth was fearful lest a strange motion with the
head, the effect probably of disease, to which Johnson was habitually
subject, might excite the derision of his scholars, and for that reason
declined employing him. He now resolved on trying his fortune in the
capital.

Among the many respectable families in Lichfield, into whose society
Johnson had been admitted, none afforded so great encouragement to his
literary talents as that of Mr. Walmsley, who lived in the Bishop's
palace, and was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, and whom he has
so eloquently commemorated in his Lives of the Poets. By this gentleman
he was introduced in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Colson, Lucasian Professor
of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and the master of an
academy, "as a very good scholar, and one who he had great hopes would
turn out a fine dramatic writer, who intended to try his fate with a
tragedy, and to get himself employed in some translation, either from
the Latin or the French." The tragedy on which Mr. Walmsley founded his
expectations of Johnson's future eminence as a dramatic poet, was the
Irene. A shrewd sally of humour, to which the reading of this piece gave
rise, evinces the terms of familiarity on which he was with his patron;
for, on Walmsley's observing, when some part of it had been read, that
the poet had already involved his heroine in such distress, that he did
not see what further he could do to excite the commiseration of the
audience, Johnson replied, "that he could put her into the
Ecclesiastical Court." Garrick, who was to be placed at Colson's
academy, accompanied his former instructor on this expedition to London,
at the beginning of March, 1737. It does not appear that Mr. Walmsley's
recommendation of him to Colson, whom he has described under the
character of Gelidus[2], in the twenty-fourth paper of the Rambler, was
of much use. He first took lodgings in Exeter-street in the Strand, but
soon retired to Greenwich, for the sake of completing his tragedy, which
he used to compose, walking in the Park.

From Greenwich, he addressed another letter to Cave, with proposals for
translating Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent, with the notes
of Le Courayer. Before the summer was expired, he returned for Mrs.
Johnson, whom he had left at Lichfield, and remaining there three
months, at length finished Irene. On his second visit to London, his
lodgings were first in Woodstock-street, near Hanover Square, and then
in Castle-street, near Cavendish Square. His tragedy, which was brought
on the stage twelve years after by Garrick, having been at this time
rejected by the manager of the playhouse, he was forced to relinquish
his hopes of becoming a dramatic writer, and engaged himself to write
for the Gentleman's Magazine. The debates in Parliament were not then
allowed to be given to the public with the same unrestricted and
generous freedom with which it is now permitted to report them. To elude
this prohibition, and gratify the just curiosity of the country, the
several members were designated by fictitious names, under which they
were easily discoverable; and their speeches in both Houses of
Parliament, which was entitled the Senate of Lilliput, were in this
manner imparted to the nation in the periodical work above-mentioned. At
first, Johnson only revised these reports; but he became so dexterous in
the execution of his task, that he required only to be told the names of
the speakers, and the side of the question to be espoused, in order to
frame the speeches himself; an artifice not wholly excusable, which
afterwards occasioned him some self-reproach, and even at the time
pleased him so little, that he did not consent to continue it. The whole
extent of his assistance to Cave is not known. The Lives of Paul Sarpi,
Boerhaave, Admirals Drake and Blake, Barretier, Burman, Sydenham, and
Roscommon, with the Essay on Epitaphs, and an Essay on the Account of
the Conduct of the Duchess of Marlborough, were certainly contributed to
his Miscellany by Johnson. Two tracts, the one a Vindication of the
Licenser of the Stage from the Aspersions of Brooke, Author of Gustavus
Vasa; the other, Marmor Norfolciense, a pamphlet levelled against Sir
Robert Walpole and the Hanoverian succession, were published by him,
separately, in 1739.

For his version of Sarpi's History, he had received from Cave, before
the 21st of April in this year, fifty pounds, and some sheets of it had
been committed to the press, when, unfortunately, the design was
stopped, in consequence of proposals appearing for a translation of the
same book, by another person of the same name as our author, who was
curate of St. Martin's in the Fields, and patronized by Dr. Pearce, the
editor of Longinus. Warburton [3] afterwards expressed a wish that
Johnson would give the original on one side, and his translation on the
other. His next engagement was to draw up an account of the printed
books in the Earl of Oxford's library, for Osborne, the bookseller, who
had purchased them for thirteen thousand pounds. Such was the petulant
impatience of Osborne, during the progress of this irksome task, that
Johnson was once irritated so far as to beat him.

In May, 1738, appeared his "London," imitated from the Third Satire of
Juvenal, for which he got ten guineas from Dodsley. The excellence of
this poem was so immediately perceived, that it reached a second edition
in the course of a week. Pope having made some ineffectual inquiries
concerning the author, from Mr. Richardson, the son of the painter,
observed that he would soon be _deterre_. In the August of 1739, we find
him so far known to Pope, that at his intercession, Earl Gower applied
to a friend of Swift to assist in procuring from the University the
degree of Master of Arts, that he might be enabled to become a candidate
for the mastership of a school then vacant; the application was without
success.

His own wants, however pressing, did not hinder him from assisting his
mother, who had lost her other son. A letter to Mr. Levett, of
Lichfield, on the subject of a debt, for which he makes himself
responsible on her account, affords so striking a proof of filial
tenderness, that I cannot refuse myself the pleasure of transcribing it.

  _December_, 1, 1743.

  Sir,--I am extremely sorry that we have encroached so much upon your
  forbearance with respect to the interest, which a great perplexity of
  affairs hindered me from thinking of with that attention that I ought,
  and which I am not immediately able to remit to you, but will pay it
  (I think twelve pounds) in two months. I look upon this, and on the
  future interest of that mortgage, as my own debt; and beg that you
  will be pleased to give me directions how to pay it, and not mention
  it to my dear mother. If it be necessary to pay this in less time, I
  believe I can do it; but I take two months for certainty, and beg an
  answer whether you can allow me so much time. I think myself very much
  obliged for your forbearance, and shall esteem it a great happiness to
  be able to serve you. I have great opportunities of dispersing any
  thing that you may think it proper to make public. I will give a note
  for the money payable at the time mentioned, to any one here that you
  shall appoint.

  I am, Sir, your most obedient,

  and most humble servant,

  SAM. JOHNSON.

  _At Mr. Osborne's, Bookseller, in Gray's Inn_.

In the following year (1744) he produced his Life of Savage, a work that
gives the charm of a romance to a narrative of real [**re in original]
events; and which, bearing the stamp of that eagerness [**ea  ness in
original] and rapidity with which it was thrown off the mind of the
writer, exhibits rather the fervour of an eloquent advocate, than the
laboriousness of a minute biographer. The forty-eight octavo pages, as
he told Mr. Nichols [4], were written in one day and night. At its first
appearance it was warmly praised, in the Champion, probably either by
Fielding, or by Ralph, who succeeded to him in a share of that paper;
and Sir Joshua Reynolds, when it came into his hand, found his attention
so powerfully arrested, that he read it through without changing his
posture, as he perceived by the torpidness of one of his arms that had
rested on a chimney-piece by which he was standing. For the Life of
Savage [5], he received fifteen guineas from Cave. About this time he
fell into the company of Collins, with whom, as he tells us in his life
of that poet, he delighted to converse.

His next publication (in 1745) was a pamphlet, called "Miscellaneous
Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, with Remarks on Sir T.H. (Sir
Thomas Hanmer's) Edition of Shakspeare," to which were subjoined,
proposals for a new edition of his plays. These observations were
favourably mentioned by Warburton, in the preface to his edition; and
Johnson's gratitude for praise bestowed at a time when praise was of
value to him, was fervent and lasting. Yet Warburton, with his usual
intolerance of any dissent from his opinions, afterwards complained in a
private letter [6] to Hurd, that Johnson's remarks on his commentaries
were