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." Nothing particular appears to have come, so far as Johnson was concerned, of Colson's letter. He was out of the way at Rochester in a quiet seclusion, and Johnson was to fight for his life against severe odds in the rough training-school of London. The booksellers were his first resort. Applying to one of the craft, with the intimation that he expected to get his living as an author, the dealer in books, surveying his robust frame with a significant look, remarked, "You had better buy a porter's knot;" and the man who uttered this rude speech Johnson got to reckon among his best friends. Occasional literature offers the most available resource to a young writer in search of employment, and Johnson was naturally attracted to it in one of its better forms. Edward Cave, the son of a provincial shoemaker, with some education at Rugby school, had found his way into literature in London through his employment as a printer, and in the face of the usual auguries of failure, had successfully established the "Gentleman's Magazine," the most famous production of its class and still surviving, though changed with the wants of the times, approaching its hundred and fiftieth year-a longevity utterly beyond any of its short-lived race. When Johnson came to London it had been five or six years in existence, and its fame had reached him at Lichfield. He had written a letter to its founder

two or three years before, offering to contribute poems and criticisms, and he now addressed him again, proposing a new translation from the Italian of Father Paul Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent. It was not, however, till about a year later that he became a contributor to the Magazine, his first appearance being as the author of a complimentary Horatian ode in Latin, addressed to Sylvanus Urban, as the editor designated himself on the titlepage of his work. After this he was engaged as a regular contributor, and for several years derived his chief support from this source. There were no parliamentary reporters in those days, the publication of debates being interdicted; and to meet the public curiosity without violating the law, it was the custom of Cave to publish a disguised account of the proceedings under the name of "Reports of the Debates of the Senate of Lilliput," in which the leading speakers figured under absurd disguised names, in a clumsy slang language invented for the occasion. The mask was awkwardly worn, and not intended to conceal the features. In this contrivance Johnson was employed in the "Gentleman's Magazine" to write out the debates, often from the scantiest of material, being left to his own resources to supply thought and words. This he did with much effect, bestowing his best eloquence it is said on the side of the tories, of whom from his childhood he was among the most resolute if not the most bigoted.

Services like these might have se cured a scanty compensation barely sufficient to keep soul and body toge

Pope himself approved the work. Being told that the author was an obscure man named Johnson, for his name did not appear on the title page, he remarked that he would soon be brought to light. So favorable generally was the reception of the poem that a second edition of it was called for in a week.

Gower, a patron of the school, thought it worth while to solicit through a friend the intervention of Dean Swift to secure the coveted honor from the University of Dublin. The English nobleman plead hard for "the poor man" whom he wished to serve, describing him in his letter "starved to death in translating for booksellers, which has been his only subsistence for some time past." But fortunately nothing came of it; else Johnson might have been lost to London and the world, and served only as a notable head-master or a curiosity among ped

Comparing this work with the simultaneous production of Pope, the satire of the man of twenty-nine with that of the man of fifty, the preference must be given to youth over experience. It is quite fair to test Pope by the quotations from his writings-for no Eng-agogues in the local annals of a county lish writer has been quoted to such an extent--but there are more remembered familiar lines in Johnson's "London," than in Pope's "1738," as the satire was called on its first appear ance. While the poem thus gained its author reputation, its success did little to mend his fortunes. It produced him only ten guineas, half the sum or less, that was given at the time for a hack political pamphlet; and Johnson was left a living illustration of one of the finest lines in the poem itself:

'Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed." That poverty was so pressing that Johnson in his despair would again have assumed the office of a teacher, the mastership of a school in Leicestershire being offered to him and willing. ly accepted, if he could have complied with the condition. To hold the situation, it was necessary that he should have the degree of Master of Arts. Oxford was thought of and set aside, the request being considered too bold a one for that high quarter; but Earl

history. The law seems then to have been thought of, and Johnson had many requisites in subtilty and force of mind for the profession; but here again a degree was wanted, and the project, if seriously entertained, was abandoned. So he was left to the booksellers. Reviving the plan of a translation of Father Paul Sarpi, a prospectus was issued, some subscriptions obtained and several sheets of the work printed, when it was found, a strange coincidence, that it had been already undertaken by another Samuel Johnson in London; and in the discussion which ensued between the two, the execution of it was given up by both. At the conclusion of one of his letters to Cave, relating to the translation, Johnson signs himself Impransus. He had not dined that day, a statement which might mean something or nothing; but in Johnson's case it has been generally taken to mean something-for Johnson, in common with his needy literary brethren of the day, may very likely have been in want of a dinner-and the absence

of a dinner to Johnson was no slight privation. So the years wore on while Johnson who was now living with his wife in lodgings in London or its vicinity, eked out a scanty subsistence by minor literary labors, chiefly essays, biographies and translations for the "Gentleman's Magazine." In 1744, on the death of the poet Savage, he pub. lished anonymously a life of that extraordinary adventurer, whom he had known intimately in his parti-colored career in the metropolis, whose as sumptions and gleams of dashing prosperity he wondered at, whose poverty he had shared and whose fate he pitied. The book in which Johnson narrated his adventures is unique in biography. We know not where to find anything so natural, candid and spontaneous, so feeling and at the same time amusing a sketch of a vagabond existence. It is essentially the history of a bastard with an instinct for high life in his composition triumphant over all the mortifications and disasters of debt and poverty; a sketch wonderfully real and as ideal as any fancifully embellished portrait drawn by the pencil of Lamb. Indeed, it somehow recalls to us in its spirit Elia's account of the "triumphant progress" of that splendid borrower, Ralph Bigod, Esq., in his exquisite Essay on "The Two Races of Men." The shifts and expedients of a poor devil author, the grandeur of his mind supplying any deficiencies of his pocket, have never been more graphically related than in this charming biography by Johnson. It is pervaded throughout by the finest sense of humor, and is the highest proof which can be afforded of John

son's superiority to the casual, improv ident career of the careless company into which he was often thrown in the early period of his life in London. On every page there is the revelation of some absurd folly or pretension, or of darker profligacy, yet the picture upon the whole is a genial one; for Johnson, though he knew its minutest peculi arities, was so far above the scene in moral elevation as to look calmly upon it with the eye of a philosopher, as a curious study of human nature. It is a delightful mingling of details and generalities; the actual losing its grossness in the ideal. In other hands, Savage would most likely have appeared as an indifferent poet and profligate spendthrift, cruelly treated by his ti tled, disreputable mother, if his story was credited; but, in himself, an impracticable vagabond whom no kindness could serve or generosity, however large, relieve, and who, for those times, met an appropriate fate in an early departure from life within the walls of a debtor's prison. But the pen of Johnson could never be employed in unfeeling censure of the unfortunate, nor even of the criminal. The scamp is never disguised in his narrative, though he sometimes appears to be playing with the subject; while the moral that ends the story, "that nothing will supply the want of prudence, and that negligence and irregularity long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible," loses none of its force by the fairness, indulgent sympa thy and good humor of the narrative on which it is built.

The rapidity with which the book