it should any way lie in your way, doubt not but you would be ready to recommend and assist your countryman, "G. WALMESLEY." How he employed himself upon his first coming to London is not particularly known. I never heard that he found any protection or encouragement by the means of Mr. Colson, to whose academy David Garrick went. Mrs. Lucy Porter told me, that Mr. Walmesley gave him a letter of introduction to Lintot' his bookseller, and that Johnson wrote some things for him; but I imagine this to be a mistake, for I have discovered no trace of it, and I am pretty sure he told me, that Mr. Cave was the first publisher by whom his pen was engaged in London.2 66 He had a little money when he came to town, and he knew how he could live in the cheapest manner. His first lodgings were at the house of Mr. Norris, a staymaker, in Exeter Street, adjoining Catherine Street, in the Strand. "I dined," said he, " very well for eight-pence, with very good company, at the Pine-Apple in New Street, just by. Several of them had travelled. They expected to meet every day; but did not know one another's names. It used to cost the rest a shilling, for they drank wine; but I had a cut of meat for sixpence, and bread for a penny, and gave the waiter a penny; so that I was quite well served, nay, better than the rest, for they gave the waiter nothing." 3 He at this time, I believe, abstained entirely from fermented liquors: a practice to which he rigidly conformed for many years together, at different periods of his life. + His Ofellus, in the Art of Living in London 5, I have heard him relate, was an Irish painter, whom he knew at Birmingham, and who had practised his own precepts of economy for several years in the British capital. He assured Johnson, who, I suppose, was then meditating to try his fortune in London, but was apprehensive of the expense, "that thirty 1 Mr. P. Cunningham observes, that this letter must have been to the son of the celebrated Bernard Lintot, the latter having died 3d Feb. 1736.- CROKER, 1846. 2 One curious anecdote was communicated by himself to Mr. John Nichols. Mr. Wilcox, the bookseller, on being informed by him that his intention was to get his livelihood as an author, eyed his robust frame attentively, and, with a significant look, said, "You had better buy a porter's knot" He, however, added, "Wilcox was one of my best friends." -BOSWELL. Perhaps he meant that Cave was the first to whom he was regularly and constantly engaged; but Wilcox and Lintot may have employed him occasionally; and Dodsley certainly printed his London before Cave had printed any thing of his but two or three trifles in the Gentleman's Magazine. - CROKER. 3 But if we may trust Mr. Cumberland's recollection, he was about this time, or very soon after, reduced still lower; "for, painful as it is to relate," (says that gentleman in his Memoirs, vol. i. p. 355.) "I have heard that illustrious scholar, Dr. Johnson, assert, and he never varied from the truth of fact, that he subsisted himself for a considerable space of time upon the scanty pittance of four-pence halfpenny per day." - CROKER. At this time his abstinence from wine may, perhaps, be attributed to poverty, but in his subsequent life he was restrained from that indulgence by, as it appears, moral, or rather medical considerations. He found by experience that wine, though it dissipated for a moment, yet eventually pounds a year was enough to enable a man to live there without being contemptible. He allowed ten pounds for clothes and linen. He said a man might live in a garret at eighteenpence a week; few people would inquire where he lodged; and if they did, it was easy to say, Sir, I am to be found at such a place. By spending three-pence in a coffee-house, he might be for some hours every day in very good company; he might dine for sixpence, breakfast on bread and milk for a penny, and do without supper. On clean-shirt-day he went abroad, and paid visits." 6 I have heard him more than once talk of his frugal friend, whom he recollected with esteem and kindness, and did not like to have one smile at the recital. “This man," said he, gravely, "was a very sensible man, who perfectly understood common affairs: a man of a great deal of knowledge of the world, fresh from life, not strained through books. He borrowed a horse and ten pounds at Birmingham. Finding himself master of so much money, he set off for West Chester, in order to get to Ireland. He returned the horse, and probably the ten pounds too, after he had got home." Considering Johnson's narrow circumstances in the early part of his life, and particularly at the interesting era of his launching into the ocean of London, it is not to be wondered at, that an actual instance, proved by experience, of the possibility of enjoying the intellectual luxury of social life upon a very small income, should deeply engage his attention, and be ever recollected by him as a circumstance of much importance. He amused himself, I remember, by computing how much more expense was absolutely necessary to live upon the same scale with that which his friend described, when the value of money was diminished by the progress of commerce. It may be estimated that double the money might now with difficulty be sufficient. Amidst this cold obscurity, there was one brilliant circumstance to cheer him; he was well acquainted with Mr. Henry Hervey7, one aggravated the hereditary disease under which he suffered; and perhaps it may have been owing to a long course of abstinence, that his mental health seems to have been better in the latter than in the earlier portion of his life. He says, in his Prayers and Meditations, (17 Aug. 1767,) “By abstinence from wine and suppers, I obtained sudden and great relief, and had freedom of mind restored to me; which I have wanted for all this year, without being able to find any means of obtaining it." See also post, Sept. 16. 1773. These remarks are important, because depression of spirits is too often treated on a contrary system, from ignorance of, or inattention to, what may be its real cause. — ČROKER. 5 Ofellus was a Roman rustic whom Horace introduces as giving precepts for frugal living. Boswell, therefore, calls this Irish professor of economy Johnson's Ofellus. — CROKER. 6 This species of economy was not confined to indigence. Swift, I think, talks of making visits on shaving-day and clean-shirt-day. CROKER. He 7 The Hon. Henry Hervey, third [fourth] son of the first Earl of Bristol, [born 1700,] quitted the army and took orders. married [in 1730, Catherine the eldest] sister of Sir Thomas Aston, by whom he got the Aston Estate, and assumed the name and arms of that family. BoSWELL. Mr. Hervey's acquaintance and kindness Johnson owed, no doubt, to his friend Mr. Walmesley; who, it will be recollected, married Mrs. Hervey's sister, Margaret Aston. But I doubt whether Mr. Boswell does not antedate this intimacy with Hervey and Johnson's love of that name by a couple of years,-for the first of the branches of the noble family of that name, who had been quartered at Lichfield as an officer of the army, and had at this time a house in London, where Johnson was frequently entertained, and had an opportunity of meeting genteel company. Not very long before his death, he mentioned this, among other particulars of his life, which he was kindly communicating to me; and he described this early friend "Harry Hervey," thus: "He was a vicious man', but very kind to me. If you call a dog HERVEY, I shall love him." He told me he had now written only three acts of his IRENE, and that he retired for some time to lodgings at Greenwich, where he proceeded in it somewhat further, and used to compose, walking in the Park; but did not stay long enough at that place to finish it. scribed with his own name, that he had not yet been introduced to Mr. Cave. We shall presently see what was done in consequence of the proposal which it contains. In the course of the summer he returned to Lichfield 2, where he had left Mrs. Johnson, and there he at last finished his tragedy, which was not executed with his rapidity of composition upon other occasions, but was slowly and painfully elaborated. A few days before his death, while burning a great mass of papers, he picked out from among them the original unformed sketch of this tragedy, in his own handwriting, and gave it to Mr. Langton, by whose favour a copy of it is now in my possession. It contains fragments of the intended plot, and speeches for the different persons of the drama, partly in the raw materials of prose, partly worked up into verse; as also a variety of hints for illustration, borrowed from the Greek, Roman, and modern writers. The handwriting is very difficult to be read, even by those who were best acquainted with Johnson's mode of penmanship, which at all times was very particular. The King having graciously accepted of this manuscript as a literary curiosity, Mr. SIR, Having observed in your papers very uncommon offers of encouragement to men of let-Langton made a fair and distinct copy of it, At this period we find the following letter from him to Mr. Edward Cave, which, as a link in the chain of his literary history, it is proper to insert: JOHNSON TO CAVE. "Greenwich, next door to the Golden Heart, Church Street, July 12. 1737. ters, I have chosen, being a stranger in London, to communicate to you the following design, which, I hope, if you join in it, will be of advantage to both of us. "The History of the Council of Trent having been lately translated into French, and published with large notes by Dr. Le Courayer, the reputation of that book is so much revived in England, that, it is presumed, a new translation of it from the Italian, together with Le Courayer's notes from the French, could not fail of a favourable reception. "If it be answered, that the History is already in English, it must be remembered that there was the same objection against Le Courayer's undertaking, with this disadvantage, that the French had a version by one of their best translators, whereas you cannot read three pages of the English history without discovering that the style is capable of great improvements; but whether those improvements are to be expected from this attempt, you must judge from the specimen, which, if you approve the proposal, I shall submit to your examination. Suppose the merit of the versions equal, we may hope that the addition of the notes will turn the balance in our favour, considering the repu tation of the annotator. which he ordered to be bound up with the original and the printed tragedy; and the volume is deposited in the King's library.3 His Majesty was pleased to permit Mr. Langton to take a copy of it for himself. The whole of it is rich in thought and imagery, and happy expressions; and of the disjecta membra scattered throughout, and as yet unarranged, a good dramatic poet might avail himself with considerable advantage. I shall give my readers some specimens of different kinds, distinguishing them by the italic cha racter. "Nor think to say, here will I stop, Here will I fix the limits of transgression, And quit their charge to horror and to ruin.” A small part only of this interesting admothink, not to advantage: nition is preserved in the play, and is varied, I "The soul once tainted with so foul a crime, No more shall glow with friendship's hallow'd Those holy beings whose superior care Resign their charge to baseness and to ruin." they recollected him well when a young man, as distinguished for his complaisance. And that his politeness was not merely occasional and temporary, or confined to the circles of Lichfield, is ascertained by the testimony of a lady', who, in a paper with which I have been favoured by a daughter of his intimate friend and physician, Dr. Lawrence, thus describes Dr. Johnson some years afterwards: "As the particulars of the former part of Dr. Johnson's life do not seem to be very accurately known, a lady hopes that the following information may not be unacceptable. She remembers Dr. Johnson on a visit to Dr. Taylor, at Ashbourn, some time between the end of the year 37, and the middle of the year 40; she rather thinks it to have been after he and his wife were removed to London. During his stay at Ashbourn, he made frequent visits to Mr. Meynell, at Bradley, where his company was much desired by the ladies of the family, who were, perhaps, in point of elegance and accomplishments, inferior to few of those with whom he was afterwards acquainted. Mr. Meynell's eldest daughter was afterwards married to Mr. Fitzherbert, father to Mr. Alleyne Fitzherbert, lately minister to the court of Russia [and since Lord St. Helens]. Of her, Dr. Johnson said in Dr. Lawrence's study, that she had the best understanding he ever met with in any human being. At Mr. Meynell's he also commenced that friendship with Mrs. Hill Boothby, sister to the present Sir Brook Boothby, which continued till her death. The young woman whom he used to call Molly Aston, was sister to Sir But "Sir, I have so long neglected to return you thanks for the favour and assistance received from you at Stourbridge, that I am afraid you have now done expecting it. I can, indeed, make no apology, but by assuring you, that this delay, whatever was the cause of it, proceeded neither from forgetfulness, disrespect, nor ingratitude. Time has not made the sense of obligation less warm, nor the thanks I return less sincere. while I am acknowledging one favour, I must beg another that you would excuse the composition of the verses you desired. Be pleased to consider, that versifying against one's inclination is the most disagreeable thing in the world; and that one's own disappointment is no inviting subject; and that though the gratifying of you might have prereflection, so barren, that to attempt to write upon vailed over my dislike of it, yet it proves, upon it, is to undertake to build without materials. I am yet unemployed, I hope you will, if any thing should offer, remember and recommend, "Sir, your humble servant, "SAM. JOHNSON."] As In the forlorn state of his circumstances, he Thomas Aston, and daughter to a baronet; she accepted of an offer to be employed as usher 6, was also sister to the wife of his friend, Mr. Gilbert in the school of Market-Bosworth, in LeiWalmesley. Besides his intimacy with the above-cestershire, to which it appears, from one of mentioned persons, who were surely people of rank and education, while he was yet at Lichfield he used to be frequently at the house of Dr. Swinfen, a gentleman of very ancient family in Staffordshire, from which, after the death of his elder brother, he inherited a good estate. He was, besides, a physician of very extensive practice; but for want of due attention to the management of his domestic con 1 The anonymous lady's information is of no great value, even if true, but there is strong reason to doubt its accuracy. It is full of chronological difficulties, and can be at best but the vague recollections of 50 years before, as the quotation from Hawkins ascertains it to have been given subsequent to 1787.-CROKER. 2 Miss Boothby was born in 1708, and died in 1756. For the last three years of her life this lady maintained a pious and somewhat mystical correspondence with Dr. Johnson, which was published in 1805, by Mr. Wright of Lichfield, in the same little volume, with the ante-biographical " Account of Dr. Johnson's Early Life, already mentioned." Miss Seward choosed to imagine that there was an early attachment between Miss Boothby and Johnson; but all that lady's stories are worse than apocryphal. The first letter, dated July 1753, proves that the acquaintance was then recent.— CROKER. 3 The words of Sir John Hawkins, p. 316. - BOSWELL. 4 Sir Thomas Aston, Bart., who died in January, 1724-5, left one son, named Thomas also, and eight daughters. Of the daughters, Catherine married Johnson's friend, the Hon. Henry Hervey; Margaret, Gilbert Walmsley. Another of these ladies [Jane] married the Rev. Mr. Gastrell [the man who cut down Shakspeare's mulberry-tree]; Mary, or Molly Aston, as she was usually called, became the wife of Captain Brodie of the navy. Another sister, who was unmarried, was living at Lichfield in 1776. — MALONE. the latter, whose name was Elizabeth, Miss Seward has put an injurious character into the mouth of Dr. Johnson Of his little fragments of a diary, that he went on (in a dialogue which she (falsely I have no doubt) reports herself to have had with him). She died in 1785, in the 78th year of her age. The youngest sister married a Mr. Prujean (post, 2d Jan. 1779).- CROKER. 5 Mr. Boswell should not have admitted this uncharitable insinuation of an anonymous informant against poor Mrs. Desmoulins who was, probably, not popular with "the ladies of Lichfield." She is supposed to have forfeited the protection of her own family by, what they thought, a derogatory marriage with a writing-master. She and her son were in close and grateful attendance on Johnson in his last days, and she was watching him at the moment of death. — CROKER. 6 Mr. Nichols, on the authority of this letter to Mr. Hickman, who was master of the Grammar School at Stourbridge, thought that Johnson had at this time made a fruitless attempt to obtain the situation of usher there. (Literary Anecdotes, vol. viii. p. 416.) But I do not think that the letter itself is quite conclusive on this point. His failure in such an object would be a strange theme for a poetical compliment. See post, p. 32. n. 4. — CROKER. 7 There is here (as Mr. James Boswell observes to me) a slight inaccuracy. Bishop Hurd, in the Epistle Dedicatory prefixed to his Commentary on Horace's Art of Poetry, &e., does not praise Blackwall, but the Rev. Mr. Budworth, headmaster of the Grammar School at Brewood, in Staffordshire, who had himself been bred under Blackwall. MALONE. We shall see presently (p.24. n.1), on the authority of Mr. Nichols, that Johnson proposed himself to Mr. Budworth, as an assistant. CROKER. died on the 8th of April, 1730, more than a year before Johnson left the University.' 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 cuckoo; 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 Dixie, the patron of the school, in whose house, I have been told, he officiated as a kind of domestic 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 horror. 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 him self. 1 See Gent. Mag., Dec. 1784, p. 957.- BOSWELL. But see date, p. 19. n. 3, the disproof of this assertion.- CROker. * This portion of Johnson's life is involved in great obscurity. Mr. Malone states, that he had read a letter of Johnson's to a friend, dated July 27. 1732, saying, that he bad then recently left Sir Wolstan Dixie's house, and had some hopes of succeeding, either as master or usher, in the school of Ashbourn. Now if Mr. Boswell be right in applying the entry in Johnson's diary of July 16. 1732, to his first visit to Bosworth, his sojourn there must have been less than ten days; a time too short to be characterised as "a period of complicated misery," and to be remembered during a long Ite with the strongest aversion and horror." The probable solution of these difficulties is, that the walk to Bosworth, the 16th July, 1732, was not his first appearance there, but that having been called thence to Lichfield to receive ba share of his father's property (which we have just seen that he did on the 15th July), he returned to Bosworth on the 19h, perhaps for the purpose of making his final arrangementa for leaving it, which he did within ten days. The Memoirs already quoted say that "he went to Bosworth Immediately after he had left Oxford, and remained there much longer than was expected by any one who knew him, andrously employed in the pursuit of intellectual acquisiton," but we have seen that he was “unemployed" at Lich He continued to live as Mr. Hector's guest for about six months, and then hired lodgings in another part of the town 3, 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 immerse fortune. But the comfort of being near Mr. Hector, his old schoolfellow and intimate friend, was Johnson's chief inducement to continue here. In what manner he employed his pen at this period, or whether he derived from it any pecuniary advantage, I have not been able to ascertain. He probably got a little money from Mr. Warren; and we are certain, that he executed here one piece of literary labour, of which Mr. Hector has favoured me with a minute account. Having mentioned that he had read at Pembroke College a Voyage to Abyssinia, by Lobo, a Portuguese Jesuit, and that he thought an abridgment and translation of it from the French into English might be an useful and profitable publication, Mr. Warren and Mr. Hector joined in urging him to undertake it. He accordingly agreed; and the book not being to be found in Birmingham, he borrowed it of Pembroke College. A part of the work being very soon done, one Osborn, who was Mr. Warren's printer, was set to work with what was ready, and Johnson engaged to supply the press with copy as it should be wanted; but his constitutional indolence soon prevailed, and the work was at a stand. Mr. Hector, who knew that a motive of humanity would be the most prevailing argument with his friend, went to Johnson, and represented to him that the printer could have no other employment till this undertaking was finished, and that the poor man and his family were suffering. Johnson, upon this, exerted the powers of his mind, though his body was. relaxed. He lay in bed with the book, which was a quarto, before him, field in October, 1731. I conclude from all this that he might have been usher to Blackwall in the spring of 1730, and that his connexion with Sir Wolstan Dixie commenced towards the close of 1731, or, as Hawkins says, in the ensuing spring, and ended in July, 1732. It seems very extraordinary that the laborious diligence and lively curiosity of Hawkins. Murphy, Malone, and above all Boswell, were able to discover so little of the history of Johnson's life from December, 1729, to his marriage in July, 1736, and that what they have told should be liable to so much doubt. It may be inferred, that it was a period to which Johnson looked back with little satisfaction, and of which he did not love to talk. There seems reason to suspect that Sir Wolstan Dixie's temper was, to say the least of it, irregular and violent, and Johnson's own nind had been recently in a state o morbid disturbance. - CROKER. 3 Sir John Hawkins states, from one of Johnson's diaries, that, in June, 1753, he lodged in Birmingham, at the house of a person named Jervis, probably a relation of Mrs. Porter, whom he afterwards married, and whose maiden name was Jervis. MALONE. 4 Father Jerome Lobo, a Jesuit missionary, was born at Lisbon, in 1593, where he died, in 1678. His Voyage to Abyssinia was translated from the Portuguese into French, by the Abbé Le Grand, in 1728. — WRIGHT. and dictated while Hector wrote. Mr. Hector carried the sheets to the press, and corrected almost all the proof sheets, very few of which were even seen by Johnson. In this manner, with the aid of Mr. Hector's active friendship, the book was completed, and was published in 1735, with London upon the title-page, though it was in reality printed at Birmingham, a device too common with provincial publishers. For this work he had from Mr. Warren only the sum of five guineas. This being the first prose work of Johnson, it is a curious object of enquiry how much may be traced in it of that style which marks his subsequent writings with such peculiar excellence; with so happy an union of force, vivacity, and perspicuity. I have perused the book with this view, and have found that here, as I believe in every other translation, there is in the work itself no vestige of the translator's own style; for the language of translation being adapted to the thoughts of another person, insensibly follows their cast, and, as it were, runs into a mould that is ready prepared. Thus, for instance, taking the first sentence that occurs at the opening of the book, p. 4. : "I lived here above a year, and completed my studies in divinity; in which time some letters were received from the fathers of Ethiopia, with an account that Sultan Segned, Emperor of Abyssinia, was converted to the church of Rome; that many of his subjects had followed his example, and that there was a great want of missionaries to improve these prosperous beginnings. Every body was very desirous of seconding the zeal of our fathers, and of sending them the assistance they requested; to which we were the more encouraged, because the Emperor's letter informed our Provincial, that we might easily enter his dominions by the way of Dancala; but, unhappily, the secretary wrote Geila for Dancala, which cost two of our fathers their lives." Every one acquainted with Johnson's manner will be sensible that there is nothing of it here; but that this sentence might have been composed by any other man. But, in the Preface the Johnsonian style begins to appear; and though use had not yet taught his wing a permanent and equable flight, there are parts of it which exhibit his best manner in full vigour. I had once the pleasure of examining it with Mr. Edmund Burke, who confirmed me in this opinion, by his superior critical sagacity, and was, I remember, much delighted with the following specimen1: — "The Portuguese traveller, contrary to the general vein of his countrymen, has amused his reader with no romantic absurdity, or incredible 1 This very extract was published in the Memoirs as an early specimen of Johnson's peculiar style, long before Mr. Boswell's notice of it. - CROKER, 1846. 2. See Rambler, No. 103. ["Curiosity is the thirst of the soul," &c.] - BOSWELL. 3 May we not trace a fanciful similarity between Politian and Johnson? Huetius, speaking of Paulus Pelissonius Fontanerius, says, "-in quo natura, ut olim in Angelo Politiano, fictions; whatever he relates, whether true or not, is at least probable; and he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of probability, has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him. "He appears, by his modest and unaffected narration, to have described things as he saw them, to have copied nature from the life, and to have consulted his senses, not his imagination. He meets with no basilisks that destroy with their eyes, his crocodiles devour their prey without tears, and his cataracts fall from the rocks without deafening the neighbouring inhabitants. "The reader will here find no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blest with spontaneous fecundity; no perpetual gloom, or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in Here are no Hotall private or social virtues. tentots without religious policy or articulate language; no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled in all sciences; he will discover, what will always be discovered by a diligent and impartial inquirer, that wherever human nature is to be found, there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason; and that the Creator doth not appear partial in his distributions, but has balanced, in most countries, their particular inconveniences by particular favours." Here we have an early example of that brilliant and energetic expression, which, upon innumerable occasions in his subsequent life, justly impressed the world with the highest admiration. Nor can any one, conversant with the writings of Johnson, fail to discern his hand in this passage of the Dedication to John Warren, Esq., of Pembrokeshire, though it is ascribed to Warren the bookseller: "A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity; nor is that curiosity ever more agreeably or usefully employed, than in examining the laws and customs of foreign nations. I hope, therefore, the present I now presume to make will not be thought improper; which, however, it is not my business as a dedicator to commend, nor as a bookseller to depreciate.' It is reasonable to suppose, that his having been thus accidentally led to a particular study of the history and manners of Abyssinia, was the remote occasion of his writing, many years afterwards, his admirable philosophical tale, the principal scene of which is laid in that country. Johnson returned to Lichfield early in 1734, and in August that year he made an attempt to procure some little subsistence by his pen; for he published proposals for printing by subscription the Latin Poems of Politian3: “ An deformitatem oris excellentis ingenii præstantià compensa- In this learned masquerade of "Paulus Pelissonius Fonta qu'il |