mankind.  And, though his external circumstances doubtless determined his method, there was much in his character which made it congenial.  Johnson’s religious emotions were such as to make habitual reserve almost a sanitary necessity.  They were deeply coloured by his constitutional melancholy.  Fear of death and hell were prominent in his personal creed.  To trade upon his feelings like a charlatan would have been abhorrent to his masculine character; and to give them full and frequent utterance like a genuine teacher of mankind would have been to imperil his sanity.  If he had gone through the excitement of a Methodist conversion, he would probably have ended his days in a madhouse.

Such considerations, however, were not, one may guess, distinctly present to Johnson himself; and the offer of a college fellowship or of private patronage might probably have altered his career.  He might have become a learned recluse or a struggling Parson Adams.  College fellowships were less open to talent then than now, and patrons were never too propitious to the uncouth giant, who had to force his way by sheer labour, and fight for his own hand.  Accordingly, the young scholar tried to coin his brains into money by the most depressing and least hopeful of employments.  By becoming an usher in a school, he could at least turn his talents to account with little delay, and that was the most pressing consideration.  By one schoolmaster he was rejected on the ground that his infirmities would excite the ridicule of the boys.  Under another he passed some months of “complicated misery,” and could never think of the school without horror and aversion.  Finding this situation intolerable, he settled in Birmingham, in 1733, to be near an old schoolfellow, named Hector, who was apparently beginning to practise as a surgeon.  Johnson seems to have had some acquaintances among the comfortable families in the neighbourhood; but his means of living are obscure.  Some small literary work came in his way.  He contributed essays to a local paper, and translated a book of Travels in Abyssinia.  For this, his first publication, he received five guineas.  In 1734 he made certain overtures to Cave, a London publisher, of the result of which I shall have to speak presently.  For the present it is pretty clear that the great problem of self-support had been very inadequately solved.

Having no money and no prospects, Johnson naturally married.  The attractions of the lady were not very manifest to others than her husband.  She was the widow of a Birmingham mercer named Porter.  Her age at the time (1735) of the second marriage was forty-eight, the bridegroom being not quite twenty-six.  The biographer’s eye was not fixed upon Johnson till after his wife’s death, and we have little in the way of authentic description of her person and character.  Garrick, who had known her, said that she was very fat, with cheeks coloured both by paint and cordials, flimsy and fantastic in dress and