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Foams the wild beach below with maddening rage,
Where waves and rocks a dreadful combat wage.
The sickly heaven, fermenting with its freight,
Still vomits o'er the main the feverish weight:
And now, while winged with ruin from on high,
Through the rent cloud the ragged lightnings fly,
A flash quick glancing on the nerves of light,
Struck the pale helmsman with eternal night:
Rodmond, who heard a piteous groan behind,
Touched with compassion, gazed upon the blind;
And while around his sad companions crowd,
He guides the unhappy victim to the shroud:
'Hie thee aloft, my gallant friend,' he cries;
'Thy only succour on the mast relies.'
The helm, bereft of half its vital force,
Now scarce subdued the wild unbridled course;
Quick to the abandoned wheel Arion came,
The ship's tempestuous sallies to reclaim.
Amazed he saw her, o'er the sounding foam
Upborne, to right and left distracted roam.
So gazed young Phaeton, with pale dismay,
When, mounted on the flaming car of day,
With rash and impious hand the stripling tried
The immortal coursers of the sun to guide.
The vessel, while the dread event draws nigh,
Seems more impatient o'er the waves to fly :
Fate spurs her on. Thus, issuing from afar,
Advances to the sun some blazing star;
And, as it feels the attraction's kindling force,
Springs onward with accelerated force.

With mournful look the seamen eyed the strand,
Where death's inexorable jaws expand;
Swift from their minds elapsed all dangers past,
As, dumb with terror, they beheld the last.
Now on the trembling shrouds, before, behind,
In mute suspense they mount into the wind.
The genius of the deep, on rapid wing,
The black eventful moment seemed to bring.
The fatal sisters, on the surge before,
Yoked their infernal horses to the prore.

The steersmen now received their last command
To wheel the vessel sidelong to the strand.
Twelve sailors, on the foremast who depend,
High on the platform of the top ascend:
Fatal retreat for while the plunging prow
Immerges headlong in the wave below,
Down-pressed by watery weight the bowsprit bends,
And from above the stem deep crashing rends.
Beneath her beak the floating ruins lie;
The foremast totters, unsustained on high;
And now the ship, fore-lifted by the sea,
Hurls the tall fabric backward o'er her lee;
While, in the general wreck, the faithful stay
Drags the maintop-mast from its post away.
Flung from the mast, the seamen strive in vain
Through hostile floods their vessel to regain.
The waves they buffet, till, bereft of strength,
O'erpowered, they yield to cruel fate at length.
The hostile waters close around their head,
They sink for ever, numbered with the dead!

Those who remain their fearful doom await,
Nor longer mourn their lost companions' fate.
The heart that bleeds with sorrows all its own,
Forgets the pangs of friendship to bemoan.
Albert and Rodmond and Palemon here,
With young Arion on the mast appear;
Even they, amid the unspeakable distress,
In every look distracting thoughts confess;
In every vein the refluent blood congeals,
And every bosom fatal terror feels.
Enclosed with all the demons of the main,
They viewed the adjacent shore, but viewed in
vain.

And now, lashed on by destiny severe,

With horror fraught the dreadful scene drew near
The ship hangs hovering on the verge of death,
Hell yawns, rocks rise, and breakers roar beneath!

662

In vain, alas! the sacred shades of yore,
Would arm the mind with philosophic lore;
In vain they'd teach us, at the latest breath,
To smile serene amid the pangs of death.
Even Zeno's self, and Epictetus old,
This fell abyss had shuddered to behold.
Had Socrates, for godlike virtue famed,
And wisest of the sons of men proclaimed,
Beheld this scene of frenzy and distress,
His soul had trembled to its last recess !
O yet confirm my heart, ye powers above,
This last tremendous shock of fate to prove!
The tottering frame of reason yet sustain !
Nor let this total ruin whirl my brain!

In vain the cords and axes were prepared, For now the audacious seas insult the yard; High o'er the ship they throw a horrid shade, And o'er her burst, in terrible cascade. Uplifted on the surge, to heaven she flies, Her shattered top half buried in the skies, Then headlong plunging thunders on the ground, Earth groans, air trembles, and the deeps resound! Her giant bulk the dread concussion feels, And quivering with the wound, in torment reels; So reels, convulsed with agonising throes, The bleeding bull beneath the murderer's blows. Again she plunges ; hark! a second shock Tears her strong bottom on the marble rock! Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries, The fated victims shuddering roll their eyes In wild despair; while yet another stroke, With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak: Till, like the mine, in whose infernal cell The lurking demons of destruction dwell, At length asunder torn her frame divides, And crashing spreads in ruin o'er the tides. . . . As o'er the surf the bending mainmast hung, Still on the rigging thirty seamen clung; Some on a broken crag were struggling cast, And there by oozy tangles grappled fast; Awhile they bore the o'erwhelming billows' rage, Unequal combat with their fate to wage; Till all benumbed and feeble, they forego Their slippery hold, and sink to shades below; Some, from the main-yard-arm impetuous thrown On marble ridges, die without a groan; Three with Palemon on their skill depend, And from the wreck on oars and rafts descend; Now on the mountain-wave on high they ride, Then downward plunge beneath the involving

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Till one, who seems in agony to strive, shore alive: The whirling breakers heave on knew, The rest a speedier end of anguish ss crew, da And pressed the stony beach-a lifele do depa Next, O unhappy chief! the eternal more Of heaven decreed thee to the briny tomb What scenes of misery torment thy view What painful struggles of thy dying crew Thy perished hopes all buried in the floo O'erspread with corses, red with human d pard! So pierced with anguish hoary Priam gaz the p When Troy's imperial domes in ruin blaz illust While he, severest sorrow doomed to feel of the Expired beneath the victor's murdering sounde Thus with his helpless partners to the lasion of Sad refuge! Albert grasps the floating mit in a His soul could yet sustain this mortal blossrs Bl But droops, alas! beneath superior woe and la For now strong nature's sympathetic chai larke & Tugs at his yearning heart with powerful his e His faithful wife, for ever doomed to mo a For him, alas! who never shall return; Sintmen To black adversity's approach exposed, his voy With want, and hardships unforeseen, er et the His lovely daughter, left without a friend corru Her innocence to succour and defend,

By youth and indigence set forth a prey
To lawless guilt, that flatters to betray---
While these reflections rack his feeling mind,
Rodmond, who hung beside, his grasp resigned,
And, as the tumbling waters o'er him rolled,
His outstretched arms the master's legs infold:
Sad Albert feels their dissolution near,
And strives in vain his fettered limbs to clear,
For death bids every clenching joint adhere.
All faint, to heaven he throws his dying eyes,
And 'Oh, protect my wife and child!' he cries-
The gushing streams roll back the unfinished sound;
He gasps! and sinks amid the vast profound,

ROBERT LLOYD.

ROBERT LLOYD, the friend of Cowper and Churchill, was born in London in 1733. His father was under-master at Westminster School. He distinguished himself by his talents at Cambridge, but was irregular in his habits. After completing his education, he became an usher under his father. The wearisome routine of this life soon disgusted him, and he attempted to earn a subsistence by his literary talents. His poem called The Actor attracted some notice, and was the precursor of Churchill's Rosciad. The style is light and easy, and the observations generally correct and spirited. By contributing to periodical works as an essayist, a poet, and stage critic, Lloyd picked up a precarious subsistence, but his means were thoughtlessly squandered in company with Churchill and other wits upon town.' He brought out two indifferent theatrical pieces, published his poems by subscription, and edited the St James's Magazine, to which Colman, Bonnel Thornton, and others contributed.

The

magazine failed, and Lloyd was cast into prison for debt. Churchill generously allowed him a guinea a week, as well as a servant; and endeavoured to raise a subscription for the purpose of extricating him from his embarrassments. Churchill died in November 1764. Lloyd,' says Southey, 'had been apprised of his danger; but when the news of his death was somewhat abruptly announced to him, as he was sitting at dinner, he was seized with a sudden sickness, and saying: "I shall follow poor Charles," took to his bed, from which he never rose again; dying, if ever man died, of a broken heart. The tragedy did not end here: Churchill's favourite sister, who is said to have possessed much of her brother's sense, and spirit, and genius, and to have been betrothed to Lloyd, attended him during his illness; and, sinking under the double loss, soon followed her brother and her lover to the grave.' Lloyd, in conjunction with Colman, parodied the Odes of Gray and Mason, and the humour of their burlesques is not tinctured with malignity. Indeed, this unfortunate young poet seems to have been one of the gentlest of witty observers and lively satirists; he was ruined by the friendship of Churchill and the Nonsense Club, and not by the force of an evil nature. The vivacity of his style-which both Churchill and Cowper copied-may be seen from the followres du ing short extract:

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Though for a while with easy air
She smooths the rugged brow of care,
And laps the mind in flowery dreams,
With Fancy's transitory gleams;
Fond of the nothings she bestows,
We wake at last to real woes.
Through every age, in every place,
Consider well the poet's case;
By turns protected and caressed,
Defamed, dependent, and distressed.
The joke of wits, the bane of slaves,
The curse of fools, the butt of knaves;
Too proud to stoop for servile ends,
To lacquey rogues or flatter friends;
With prodigality to give,

Too careless of the means to live;
The bubble fame intent to gain,
And yet too lazy to maintain;
He quits the world he never prized,
Pitied by few, by more despised,
And, lost to friends, oppressed by foes,
Sinks to the nothing whence he rose.

O glorious trade! for wit's a trade, Where men are ruined more than made ! Let crazy Lee, neglected Gay, The shabby Otway, Dryden gray, Those tuneful servants of the NineNot that I blend their names with mine→→ Repeat their lives, their works, their fame, And teach the world some useful shame.

But bad as the life of a hackney poet and critic seems to have been in Lloyd's estimation, the situation of a school-usher was as little to be desired, and so thought Goldsmith :

Wretchedness of a School-usher.

Were I at once empowered to shew
My utmost vengeance on my foe,
To punish with extremest rigour,
I could inflict no penance bigger,
Than, using him as learning's tool,
To make him usher of a school.
For, not to dwell upon the toil
Of working on a barren soil,
And labouring with incessant pains,
To cultivate a blockhead's brains,
The duties there but ill befit
The love of letters, arts, or wit.

For one, it hurts me to the soul,
To brook confinement or control;
Still to be pinioned down to teach
The syntax and the parts of speech;
Or, what perhaps is drudgery worse,
The links, and points, and rules of verse;
To deal out authors by retail,
Like penny pots of Oxford ale;
Oh, 'tis a service irksome more
Than tugging at the slavish oar!
Yet such his task, a dismal truth,
Who watches o'er the bent of youth,
And while a paltry stipend earning,
He sows the richest seeds of learning,
And tills their minds with proper care,
And sees them their due produce bear;
No joys, alas! his toil beguile,
His own lies fallow all the while.
"Yet still he's on the road,' you say,
'Of learning.' Why, perhaps he may,
But turns like horses in a mill,

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CHARLES CHURCHILL.

A second Dryden was supposed to have arisen in Churchill, when he published his satirical poem, the Rosciad, in 1761. The impression was continued by his reply to the critical reviewers, shortly afterwards; and his Epistle to Hogarth, the Prophecy of Famine, Night, and passages in his other poems-all thrown off in haste to serve the purpose of the day-evinced great vigour and facility of versification, and a breadth and boldness of personal invective that drew instant attention to their author. Though Cowper, from early predilections, had a high opinion of Churchill, and thought he was 'indeed a poet,' we cannot now consider the author of the Rosciad as more than a special pleader or pamphleteer in verse. He seldom reaches the heart-except in some few lines of penitential fervour-and he never ascended to the higher regions of imagination, then trod by Collins, Gray, and Akenside. With the beauties of external nature he had not the slightest sympathy. He died before he had well attained the prime of life; yet there is no youthful enthusiasm about his works, nor any indications that he sighed for a higher fame than that of being the terror of actors and artists, noted for his libertine eccentricities, and distinguished for his devotion to Wilkes. That he misapplied strong original talents in following out these pitiful or unworthy objects of his ambition is undeniable. The 'fatal facility' of his verse, and his unscrupulous satire of living individuals and passing events, had the effect of making all London ring from side to side' with his applause, at a time when the real poetry of the age could hardly obtain either publishers or readers. Excepting Marlowe, the dramatic poet, scarcely any English author of reputation has been more unhappy in his life and end than Charles Churchill. He was the son of a clergyman in Westminster, where he was born in 1731. After attending Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge--which he quitted abruptly-he made a clandestine marriage with a young lady in Westminster, and was assisted by his father, till he was ordained and settled in the curacy of Rainham, in Essex. His father died in 1758, and the poet was appointed his successor in the curacy and lectureship of St John's at Westminster. This transition, which promised an accession of comfort and respectability, proved the bane of poor Churchill. He was in his twentyseventh year, and his conduct had been up to this period irreproachable. He now, however, renewed his intimacy with Lloyd and other school-companions, and launched into a career of dissipation and extravagance. His poetry drew him into notice; and he not only disregarded his lectureship, but he laid aside the clerical costume, and appeared in the extreme of fashion, with a blue coat, gold-laced hat, and ruffles. The dean of Westminster remonstrated with him against this breach of clerical propriety, and his animadversions were seconded by the poet's parishioners. Churchill affected to ridicule this prudery, and Lloyd made it the subject of an epigram:

To Churchill, the bard, cries the Westminster dean,
Leather breeches, white stockings! pray what do you

mean?

'Tis shameful, irreverent-you must keep to church rules.

This

If wise ones, I will; and if not, they're for fools. If reason don't bind me, I'll shake off all fetters; To be black and all black, I shall leave to my betters. The dean and the congregation were, however, too powerful, and Churchill found it necessary to resign the lectureship. His ready pen still threw off at will his popular satires, and he plunged into the grossest debaucheries. These excesses he attempted to justify in a poetical epistle to Lloyd, entitled Night, in which he revenges himself on prudence and the world by railing at them in good set terms. 'This vindication proceeded,' says his biographer, 'on the exploded doctrine, that the barefaced avowal of vice is less culpable than the practice of it under a hypocritical asindividual is, we conceive, tolerably equal; but the sumption of virtue. The measure of guilt in the sanction and dangerous example afforded in the former case, renders it, in a public point of view, an evil of tenfold magnitude. The poet's irregularities affected his powers of composition, and his poem of The Ghost, published at this time, was an incoherent and tiresome production. A greater evil, too, was his acquaintance with Wilkes, unfortunately equally conspicuous for public faction and private debauchery. Churchill assisted his new associate in the North Briton, and received the profit arising from its sale. circumstance rendered him of importance enough to be included with Wilkes in the list of those whom the messengers had verbal instructions to apprehend under the general warrant issued for that purpose, the execution of which gave rise to the most popular and only beneficial part of the warm contest that ensued with government. Churchill was with Wilkes at the time the latter was apprehended, and himself only escaped owing to the messenger's ignorance of his person, and to the presence of mind with which Wilkes addressed him by the name of Thomson.'* set about his satire, the Prophecy of Famine, The poet now which, like Wilkes's North Briton, was specially directed against the Scottish nation. The outlawry of Wilkes separated the friends, but they kept up a correspondence, and Churchill continued to be a keen political satirist. The excesses of his daily life remained equally conspicuous. Hogarth, who was opposed to Churchill for being a friend of Wilkes, characteristically exposed his habits by caricaturing the satirist in the form of a bear dressed canonically, with ruffles at his paws, and holding a pot of porter. Churchill took revenge in a fierce and sweeping 'epistle' to Hogarth, which is said to have caused him the most exquisite pain. After separating from his wife, and forming an unhappy connection with another female, the daughter of a Westminster tradesman, wretched Churchill's career drew to a sad and premature close. In October 1764 he went to France to pay a visit to his friend Wilkes, and was seized at Boulogne with a

Life of Churchill prefixed to works (London, 1804). When Churchill entered the room, Wilkes was in custody of the messenger. 'Good-morning, Mr Thomson, said Wilkes to him. How does Mrs Thomson do? Does she dine in the country?' Churchill took the hint as readily as it had been given. He replied that Mrs Thomson was waiting for him, and that he only came, for a his leave, hastened home, secured his papers, retired into the moment, to ask him how he did. Then almost directly he took country, and eluded all search.

fever, which proved fatal on the 4th of November. With his clerical profession Churchill had thrown off his belief in Christianity, and Southey mentions, that though he made his will only the day before his death, there is in it not the slightest expression of religious faith or hope. So highly popular and productive had his satires proved, that he was enabled to bequeath an annuity of sixty pounds to his widow, and fifty to the more unhappy woman whom he had latterly abused, and some surplus remained to his sons. The poet was buried at Dover, and some of his gay associates placed over his grave a stone, on which was engraved a line from one of his own poems:

Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.

The enjoyment may be doubted, and still more the taste of this inscription. It is certain that Churchill expressed his compunction for parts of his conduct, in verses that evidently came from the heart:

Remorse.

Look back! a thought which borders on despair,
Which human nature must, yet cannot bear.
'Tis not the babbling of a busy world,
Where praise or censure are at random hurled,
Which can the meanest of my thoughts control,
Or shake one settled purpose of my soul;
Free and at large might their wild curses roam,
If all, if all, alas! were well at home.
No; 'tis the tale which angry conscience tells,
When she with more than tragic horror swells
Each circumstance of guilt; when stern, but true,
She brings bad actions forth into review,
And, like the dread handwriting on the wall,
Bids late remorse awake at reason's call;
Armed at all points, bids scorpion vengeance pass,
And to the mind holds up reflection's glass-
The mind which starting heaves the heartfelt groan,
And hates that form she knows to be her own.
The Conference.

The most ludicrous, and, on the whole, the best of Churchill's satires, is his Prophecy of Famine, a Scots pastoral, inscribed to Wilkes. The Earl of Bute's administration had directed the enmity of all disappointed patriots and keen partisans against the Scottish nation. Even Johnson and Junius descended to this petty national prejudice, and Churchill revelled in it with such undisguised exaggeration and broad humour, that the most saturnine or sensitive of our countrymen must have laughed at its absurdity. This unique pastoral opens as follows:

A Scots Pastoral.

Two boys whose birth, beyond all question, springs
From great and glorious, though forgotten kings,
Shepherds of Scottish lineage, born and bred
On the same bleak and barren mountain's head,
By niggard nature doomed on the same rocks
To spin out life, and starve themselves and flocks,
Fresh as the morning, which, enrobed in mist,
The mountain's top with usual dullness kissed,
Jockey and Sawney to their labours rose;
Soon clad, I ween, where nature needs no clothes;
Where from their youth inured to winter skies,
Dress and her vain refinements they despise.

Jockey, whose manly high cheek-bones to crown, With freckles spotted flamed the golden down,

With meikle art could on the bagpipes play,
Even from the rising to the setting day;
Sawney as long without remorse could bawl
Home's madrigals, and ditties from Fingal:
Oft at his strains, all natural though rude,
The Highland lass forgot her want of food,
And, whilst she scratched her lover into rest,
Sunk pleased, though hungry, on her Sawney's breast.
Far as the eye could reach, no tree was seen,
Earth, clad in russet, scorned the lively green:
The plague of locusts they secure defy,
For in three hours a grasshopper must die:
No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there,
But the chameleon, who can feast on air.
No birds, except as birds of passage, flew;
No bee was known to hum, no dove to coo:
No streams, as amber smooth, as amber clear,
Were seen to glide, or heard to warble here:
Rebellion's spring, which through the country ran,
Furnished with bitter draughts the steady clan:
No flowers embalmed the air, but one white rose,
Which on the tenth of June,* by instinct blows;
By instinct blows at morn, and, when the shades
Of drizzly eve prevail, by instinct fades.

In the same poem, Churchill thus alludes to himself:

Me, whom no muse of heavenly birth inspires,
No judgment tempers, when rash genius fires;
Who boast no merit but mere knack of rhyme,
Short gleams of sense and satire out of time;
Who cannot follow where trim fancy leads
By prattling streams, o'er flower-impurpled meads;
Who often, but without success, have prayed
For apt alliteration's artful aid;

Who would, but cannot, with a master's skill,
Coin fine new epithets which mean no ill:
Me, thus uncouth, thus every way unfit
For pacing poesy, and ambling wit,
Taste with contempt beholds, nor deigns to place
Amongst the lowest of her favoured race.

The characters of Garrick, &c. in the Rosciad, have now ceased to interest; but some of these rough pen-and-ink sketches of Churchill are happily executed. Smollett, who, as Churchill believed, had attacked him in the Critical Review, he alludes to with mingled approbation and ridicule:

Whence could arise this mighty critic spleen,
The muse a trifler, and her theme so mean?
What had I done that angry heaven should send
The bitterest foe where most I wished a friend?
Oft hath my tongue been wanton at thy name,
And hailed the honours of thy matchless fame.
For me let hoary Fielding bite the ground
So nobler Pickle stand superbly bound;
From Livy's temples tear the historic crown,
Which with more justice blooms upon thine own.
Compared with thee, be all life-writers dumb,
But he who wrote the life of Tommy Thumb.
Whoever read the Regicide but swore
The author wrote as man ne'er wrote before?
Others for plots and under-plots may call,
Here's the right method-have no plot at all!
Of Hogarth :

In walks of humour, in that cast of style,
Which, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile;
In comedy, his natural road to fame,
Nor let me call it by a meaner name,

The birthday of the old Chevalier. It used to be a great object with the gardener of a Scottish Jacobite family of those days to have the Stuart emblem in blow by the tenth of June.

Where a beginning, middle, and an end
Are aptly joined; where parts on parts depend,
Each made for each, as bodies for their soul,
So as to form one true and perfect whole,
Where a plain story to the eye is told,
Which we conceive the moment we behold,
Hogarth unrivalled stands, and shall engage
Unrivalled praise to the most distant age.

In Night, Churchill thus gaily addressed his friend Lloyd on the proverbial poverty of poets:

What is 't to us if taxes rise or fall?
Thanks to our fortune, we pay none at all.
Let muckworms, who in dirty acres deal,
Lament those hardships which we cannot feel.
His Grace, who smarts, may bellow if he please,
But must I bellow too, who sit at ease?
By custom safe, the poet's numbers flow
Free as the light and air some years ago.
No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains
To tax our labours and excise our brains.
Burdens like these, vile earthly buildings bear;
No tribute 's laid on castles in the air!

The reputation of Churchill was also an aërial structure. No English poet,' says Southey,' had ever enjoyed so excessive and so short-lived a popularity; and indeed no one seems more thoroughly to have understood his own powers; there is no indication in any of his pieces that he could have done anything better than the thing he did. To Wilkes he said that nothing came out till he began to be pleased with it himself; but, to the public, he boasted of the haste and carelessness with which his verses were poured forth.

periods-his manly character and appearancehis great virtues and strong prejudices—his early and severe struggles, illustrating his own noble

verse

Slow rises worth by poverty depressed

his love of argument and society, into which he poured the treasures of a rich and full mind— his wit, repartee, and brow-beating his rough manners and kind heart-his curious household, in which were congregated the lame, blind, and despised-his very looks, gesticulation, and dress -have all been brought so vividly before us by his biographer, Boswell, that to readers of every class Johnson is as well known as any member of their own family. His heavy form seems still to haunt Fleet Street and the Strand, and he has stamped his memory on the remote islands of the Hebrides. In literature, his influence has been scarcely less extensive. No prose writer of that day escaped the contagion of his peculiar style. He banished for a long period the naked simplicity of Swift, and the idiomatic graces of Addison; he depressed the literature and poetry of imagination, while he elevated that of the understanding; he based criticism on strong sense and solid judgment, not on scholastic subtleties and refinement; and though some of the higher qualities and attributes of genius eluded his grasp and observation, the withering scorn and invective with which he assailed all affected sentimentalism, immorality, and licentiousness, introduced a pure and healthful and invigorating atmosphere into the crowded walks of literature. These are solid and substantial benefits which should weigh down errors of Had I the power, I could not have the time, While spirits flow, and life is in her prime, taste or the caprices of a temperament constituWithout a sin 'gainst pleasure, to design tionally prone to melancholy and disease, and A plan, to methodise each thought, each line, which was little sweetened by prosperity or Highly to finish, and make every grace applause at that period of life when the habits are In itself charming, take new charms from place. formed and the manners become permanent. Nothing of books, and little known of men, a man, Johnson was an admirable representative When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen ; of the Englishman-as an author, his course was Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down, singularly pure, high-minded, and independent. Rough as they run, discharge them on the town. He could boast with more truth than Burke, that ' he had no arts but manly arts.' At every step in Popularity which is easily gained, is lost as his progress, his passport was talent and virtue; easily; such reputations resembling the lives of and when the royal countenance and favour were insects, whose shortness of existence is compen- at length extended to him, it was but a ratificasated by its proportion of enjoyment. He perhaps tion by the sovereign of the wishes and opinions imagined that his genius would preserve his sub-entertained by the best and wisest of the nation. jects, as spices preserve a mummy, and that the individuals whom he had eulogised or stigmatised would go down to posterity in his verse, as an old admiral comes home from the West Indies in a puncheon of rum: he did not consider that the rum is rendered loathsome, and that the spices with which the Pharaohs and Potiphars were embalmed, wasted their sweetness in the catacombs. But, in this part of his conduct, there was no want of worldly prudence: he was enriching himself by hasty writings, for which the immediate sale was in proportion to the bitterness and personality of the satire.'

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Johnson was born at Lichfield, September 18, 1709. His father was a bookseller. In his nineteenth year, he was placed at Pembroke College, Oxford. Misfortunes in trade happened to the elder Johnson, and Samuel was compelled to leave the university without a degree. He had been only fourteen months at Oxford, but during that time had distinguished himself by translating Pope's Messiah into Latin verse. He was a short time usher in a school at Market Bosworth; but marrying a widow, Mrs Porter-who was in her forty-eighth year (Johnson himself was twentyseven) he set up a private academy at Edial, near his native city. He had only three pupils, one of whom was David Garrick. After an unsuccessful career of a year and a half, Johnson went to London, accompanied by Garrick. He had written part of his tragedy of Irene, hoping to get it brought on the stage, but it was refused. He now commenced author by profession, contributing essays, reviews, &c. to the Gentleman's Magazine.

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