In these families he passed much time in his early years. In most of them, he was in the company of ladies, particularly at Mr. Walmesley's, whose wife and sisters-in-law, of the name of Aston, and daughters of a baronet, were remarkable for good breeding; so that the notion which has been industriously circulated and believed, that he never was in good company till late in life, and, consequently, had been confirmed in coarse and ferocious manners by long habits, is wholly without foundation. Some of the ladies have assured me, 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 (1), 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

(1) Dr. Taylor must have been at this time a very young man. His residence at Ashbourn was patrimonial, and not ecclesiastical; and the house and grounds which Dr. Johnson's visits have rendered remarkable, are now the property of Mr. Webster, Dr. Taylor's legatee. . CROKER.

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. 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 (2), 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 Thomas Aston (4), and daughter to a baronet; she was also sister to the wife of his friend, Mr. Gilbert Walmesley. Besides his intimacy with the above-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

(1) [Afterwards Lord St. Helens.]

(2) [Miss Boothby was born in 1708, and died in 1756. For the last three years of her life this lady corresponded with Dr. Johnson, and some of her letters are inserted in the APPENDIX to Vol. II.]

(3) The words of Sir John Hawkins, p. 316.

(4) Sir Thomas Aston, Bart., who died in January, 1724-5, left one son, named Thomas also, and eight daughters. Of the daughters, Catharine married Johnson's friend, the Hon. Henry Hervey; Margaret, Gilbert Walmesley. 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. [She died in 1785.]

due attention to the management of his domestic concerns, left a very large family in indigence. One of his daughters, Mrs. Desmoulins, afterwards found an asylum in the house of her old friend, whose doors were always open to the unfortunate, and who well observed the precept of the Gospel, for he was kind to the unthankful and to the evil."" (1)

In the forlorn state of his circumstances, he accepted of an offer to be employed as usher(2) in the

(1) Here Mr. Boswell has admitted the insinuation of an anonymous informant against poor Mrs. Desmoulins, as bitter, surely, as any thing which can be charged against any of his rival biographers; and, strange to say, this scandal is conveyed in a quotation from the book of Charity. Mrs. Desmoulins 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. Her husband, it is said, was a writing-master. CROKER.

(2) [It has appeared, since Boswell wrote, that Johnson had been endeavouring, the year before this, to obtain the situation of usher at the Grammar School of Stourbridge, where he himself had been partly educated. The following letter of thanks to the schoolmaster, who had tried to help him on that occasion, was first published in the Manchester Herald, and afterwards inserted in Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. viii. p. 416.:

"To MR. GEORGE HICKMAN.

"Lichfield, Oct. 30. 1731. "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. But while I ar acknowledging one favour, I must beg another that you would excuse the composition of the verses you desired. 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 prevailed over my dislike of it, yet it proves, upon reflection, so barren, that, to attempt to write

Be

school of Market-Bosworth, in Leicestershire, to which it appears, from one of his little fragments of a diary, that he went on foot, on the 16th of July.

“Julii 16. Bosvortiam pedes petii." But it is not true, as has been erroneously related, that he was assistant to the famous Anthony Blackwall, whose merit has been honoured by the testimony of Bishop Hurd (1), who was his scholar; for Mr. Blackwall died on the 8th of April, 1730(2), 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

upon it, is to undertake to build without materials. As I am yet unemployed, I hope you will, if any thing should offer, remember and recommend, Sir, your humble servant,

"SAM. JOHNSON."]

(1) 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, &c. 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, on the authority of Mr. Nichols, that Johnson proposed himself to Mr. Budworth, as an assistant.]

(2) See Gent. Mag., Dec. 1784, p. 957.

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 (1), 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.

(1) Mr. Malone states, that he had read a letter of Johnson's to a friend, dated July 27. 1732, saying, that he had then recently left Sir Wolstan Dixie's house, and had some hopes of succeeding, either as master or usher, in the school of Ashbourn. If Mr. Malone be correct in the date of this letter, and Mr. Boswell be also right in placing the extract from the diary under the year 1732, Johnson's sojourn at Bosworth could have been not more than ten days, a time too short to be characterised as "a period of complicated misery," and to be remembered during a long life "with the strongest aversion and horror." It seems very extraordinary, that the laborious diligence and the lively curiosity of Hawkins, Boswell, Murphy, and Malone, 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; though it cannot be doubted that, during these five or six important years, he must have collected a large portion of that vast stock of information, with which he afterwards surprised and delighted the world. CROKER.