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checked these wishes, and left him to feek the means of a future fubfiftence. If nature could be faid to have pointed out a profeffion for him, that of the bar seems to have been it: in that faculty, his acutenefs and penetration, and above all, his nervous and manly elocution, could fcarcely have failed to diftinguish him, and to have raised him to the highest honours of that lucrative profeffion; but, whatever nature might have intended for him, fortune seems to have been the arbiter of his destiny, and by shutting up the avenues to wealth and civil honours, to have left him to display his talents in the feveral characters of a moralift, a philofopher, and a poet.

The time of his continuance at Oxford is divifible into two periods, the former whereof commenced on the 31st day of October, 1728, and determined in

He was firft no better than a poor beggar boy, if not a parish ⚫ foundling, without known parents or relations. He had found a way to live by obfequioufnefs, (in Clement's-Inn, as I re'member,) and courting the attornies clerks for scraps. The ' extraordinary obfervance and diligence of the boy, made the fociety willing to do him good. He appeared very ambitious to learn to write; and one of the attornies got a board knocked ' up at a window on the top of a staircase, and that was his desk, ⚫ where he fat and wrote after copies of court and other hands ⚫ the clerks gave him. He made himself so expert a writer, that ⚫he took in bufinefs, and earned fome pence by hackney-writing. And thus, by degrees, he pushed his faculties, and fell to forms; and, by books that were lent him, became an ex'quifite entering-clerk: and, by the fame courfe of improve

ment of himself, an able counfel, firft in fpecial pleading, ⚫ then at large. And, after he was called to the bar, had practice in the King's-Bench court equal with any there.'

He fucceeded Pemberton in the office of chief juftice of the king's bench, and died of an apoplexy and palfy a fhort time. before the revolution. A curious delineation of his person and character may be feen in the volume above cited.

December,

December, 1729, when, as appears by a note in his diary in these words, 1729 Dec. S. J. Oxonio rediit,' he left that place, the reafon whereof, was a failure of pecuniary fupplies from his father; but meeting with another fource, the bounty, as it is fuppofed, of fome one or more of the members of the cathedral, he returned, and made up the whole of his refidence in the university, about three years, during all which time his academical ftudies, though not orderly, were to an aftonishing degree intenfe. Whoever has perused Mr. Spence's life of Antonio Magliabechi, may difcern a near refemblance in their manner of reading, between that perfon and Johnfon: the former, fays his author, feems never to have applied himself to any particular ftudy. A paffion for reading was his ruling paffion, and a prodigious memory his great talent: he read every book almost indifferently, as they happened to come into his hands: he read them with a surprifing quickness, and yet retained, not only the fense of what he read, but, often, all the words and the very manner of spelling them, if there was any thing peculiar of that kind in any author.'

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A like propensity to reading, and an equal celerity in the practice thereof, were obfervable in Johnson: it was wonderful to fee, when he took up a book, with what eagerness he perufed, and with what hafte his eye, for it has been related, that he had the use of only one, travelled over it: he has been known to read a volume, and that not a fmall one, at a fitting; nor was he inferior in the power of memory to him with whom he is compared: whatever he read, became his own for ever, with all the advantages that a penetrating judgment and deep reflection could add to it. I

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have

have heard him repeat, with scarce a miftake of a word, paffages from favourite authors, of three or four octavo pages in length. One inftance of the greatness of his retentive faculty himself has thought fit to give, in his life of the Earl of Rochefter, where may be seen a Latin poem upon Nothing, written by Pafferat; for the infertion whereof he had, as it is faid, no other aid than his own recollection. How far he approved that method of reading, which he is above faid to have purfued, and what value he fet on the powers of memory, may be inferred from his character of the former of those perfons in his lives of the poets, of whom he thus speaks :

He was remarkable for the power of reading with great rapidity, and of retaining with great fidelity what he fo easily collected. He, therefore, ' always knew what the prefent queftion required; ' and when his friends expreffed their wonder at his acquifitions, made in a ftate of apparent negligence ' and drunkenness, he never difcovered his hours of reading or method of ftudy, but involved himself ' in affected filence, and fed his own vanity with ‹ their admiration and conjectures.'

It is little less than certain, that his own indigence, and the inability of his father to help him, called Johnfon from the univerfity fooner than he meant to quit it his father, either during his continuance there, or poffibly before, had been by misfortunes rendered infolvent, if not, as Johnfon told me, an actual bankrupt. The non-attainment of a degree, which after a certain ftanding is conferred almost of course, he regretted not: it is true, he foon felt the want of one; but ample amends were afterwards

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made him, by the voluntary grant of the highest academical honours that two of the most learned feminaries in Europe could bestow.

The advantages he derived from an university education, finall as they may hitherto feem, went a great way towards fixing, as well his moral as his literary character: the order and difcipline of a college life, the reading the beft authors, the attendance on public exercises, the early calls to prayer, the frequent inftructions from the pulpit, with all the other means of religious and moral improvement, had their proper effect; and though they left his natural temper much as they found it, they begat in his mind those fentiments of piety which were the rule of his conduct throughout his future life, and made fo confpicuous a part of his character.

He could not, at this early period of his life, divest himself of an opinion, that poverty was difgraceful; and was very severe in his cenfures of that œconomy in both our univerfities, which exacted at meals the attendance of poor scholars, under the several denominations of fervitors in the one, and fizers in the other: he thought that the fcholar's, like the chriftian life, levelled all distinctions of rank and worldly pre-eminence; but in this he was mistaken: civil policy had, long before his coming into the world, reduced the feveral claffes of men to a regular fubordination, and given fervitude its fanction. The feudal fyftem of government throughout Europe had fo arranged the feveral orders of fubjects, that the lower were uniformly dependent on the higher; and in the hiftory of the peerage of our own country, we find the retinues of the higher nobility made up of the fons and daugh

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ters of thofe of the lower: Wolfey had in his train, earls, barons, and knights; and the founder of the prefent Cavendish family was his gentleman-ufher, at a falary of ten pounds a year: and, to juftify the practice of perfonal fervitude at meals, we have an example of a child waiting on his parents while at dinner, in the Pietas Puerilis, among the colloquies of Erafmus *.

Upon his leaving the univerfity, he went home to the house of his father, which he found fo nearly filled with relations, that is to fay, the maiden fifters of his mother and coufin Cornelius Ford, whom his father, on the decease of their brother in the fummer of 1731, had taken in to board, that it would fcarce receive him.

He brought with him a deep fenfe of religion, a due reverence for the national church, and a refpect for its minifters; and the fe he retained, though he had been a witness to the profligacy of his coufin Ford, which was nearly enough to have effaced all fuch impreffions from a young mind. Having not then feen, as we now do, ecclefiaftical benefices advertised for fale, and confidered by the purchafers as lay-fees; nor beheld many of the beneficed clergy abandoning the duties of the clerical function to the lowest of their order, themfelves becoming gentlemen at large, mixing in all public recreations and amufements †,

Adornatâ parentibus mensâ, recito confecrationem: deinde prandentibus miniftro, donec jubeor et ipfe prandium fumere.

+ While this is the cafe, there can be very little hope of mending the fituation of the inferior clergy. An increase of income would raise them to a condition of employing fubflitutes whom mere neceffity would compel to the performance of their duty, and thefe would have the fame reafon to complain as those who at prefent are the objects of our compaffion. In a word, were the gradations of the clergy to be multiplied, the moft effential offices of their function would continue, as they now are, to be the employment of the lowest of them.