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posed to have expressed his feelings on the occasion in one of his Letters in the 'Rambler:'-I delayed my departure for a time, to finish the performance by which I was to draw the first notice of mankind upon me. When it was completed I hurried to London, and considered every moment that passed before its publication as lost in a kind of neutral existence, and cut off from the golden hours of happiness and fame.' He offered the precious manuscript to Mr. Fleetwood, the patentee of Drury Lane Theatre, who not only rejected it, but, as we may conclude from the language of the author in his 'Life of Savage' a few years later, accompanied his refusal with some gratuitous indignities, such as a vulgar and ignorant manager would be likely to inflict upon unknown genius in distress. Hence Johnson speaks of the getting a play brought upon the stage as an undertaking in a very high degree vexatious and disgusting to an ingenuous mind,' and the reason he assigns is, that it is necessary to submit to the dictation of actors-a class of persons whom he characterises as being all but universally 'contemptuous, insolent, petulant, selfish, and brutal.' In his own case he appears to have resolved not to expose himself to a second insult from a second manager. He turned away from the theatre with irritated dignity, and, putting back his tragedy into his desk, bent his steps to the bookseller. His months of labour had been thrown away, and there was nothing in the fictitious distresses of his tragedy half so pathetic as the condition of its author.

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The person to whom he had recourse was Cave, the publisher of the Gentleman's Magazine.' He addressed to him a complimentary Latin ode, and was enrolled among the regular contributors to his periodical. What was of far greater importance, Johnson, in March, 1738, had completed one of his immortal productions. This was his London, in imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal.' He sent it to Cave without telling him from whose pen it proceeded, and asked for generous treatment, because the author, he said, 'lies at present under very disadvantageous circumstances of fortune.' The poem was shown to Dodsley, that his consent might be got to have his name put as one of the publishers on the title-page. Dodsley saw its merit, declared it was a creditable thing to be concerned in,' and ultimately bought the copyright for ten guineas, to the exclusion of Cave, whose judgment in literature is shown, by this indifference, to have been nothing at all. I might perhaps,' says Johnson, have accepted of less, but that Paul Whitehead had a little before got ten guineas for a poem, and I would not take less than Paul Whitehead.' 'I knew,' Johnson writes, under an assumed character, in the Rambler,' that no performance is so favour· ably

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ably read as that of a writer who suppresses his name, and therefore resolved to remain concealed till those by whom literary reputation is established had given their suffrages too publicly to retract them.' This may be presumed to be the reason why 'London' appeared anonymously. The event justified his calculation. His poem came out the same morning with Pope's satire entitled '1738;' and, though no just comparison can be drawn between writers by contrasting a single production of each, it was a grand triumph for the new author that he had eclipsed a piece which ranks among the better works of the old. Accordingly the language of literary circles was,- Here is an unknown poet greater even than Pope!' and a second edition was called for before the end of a week. The curiosity of Pope himself was excited. He inquired after the writer, and, being told that he was an obscure person of the name of Johnson, he replied, "He will soon be déterré.' The many circumstances in the Satire of Juvenal which were applicable to his own situation and prospects had, there can be no question, suggested the undertaking to him, and he marked one point of resemblance in particular by printing in capital letters the line,—

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6 SLOW RISES WORTH BY POVERTY DEPRESSED.'

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Viewed in connexion with Johnson's history, what pathos there is in this emphasis of type! Hark ye, Clinker,' says Matthew Bramble, aer listening to the allegations against the outcast parish lad, you are a most notorious offender. You stand convicted of sickness, hunger, wretchedness, and want.'

Humble as were Johnson's notions, they exceeded his earnings. An Irish painter whom he met at Birmingham told him he could live very well for thirty pounds a-year. He was to rent a garret for eighteenpence a-week, to breakfast on bread and milk for a penny, dine for sixpence, spend threepence at a coffee-house for the sake of good company, and do without supper. Ten pounds were allowed for clothes and linen, and visits were to be paid on clean-shirt days. Johnson dined at first, much to his own satisfaction, for eightpence. But, like the Thales of his 'London,' every moment left his little less,' and for a long time he was reduced to subsist upon fourpence-halfpenny a-day. His poem, which increased his fame, did not improve his circumstances. It appeared in the month of May, and in September he signs himself to Cave, Yours, Impransus.' At a later period of his literary life he was sometimes without food for forty-eight hours, and his abstinence could not have been much less at a time when he intimated by his signature that he had eaten no dinner for want of the money to procure it. He had relin

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quished school-keeping for literature, and now in the extremity of his distress was eager to get from literature back to schoolkeeping, preferring anything, as he said, to being starved to death in translating for booksellers.' The mastership of the school at Appleby, in Leicestershire, was vacant. The trustees resided in the neighbourhood of Lichfield, and had made up their minds to nominate him to the post. But the statutes required that he should be a Master of Arts, and a common friend solicited the University of Oxford, through Dr. Adams, to confer the degree upon him. The request was refused. Johnson said proudly in later days, in allusion to the number of poets his college had produced, Sir, we are a nest of singing-birds!' If this had been the case in 1738 with the University at large, they would not have refused an honorary degree to the author of London'—a man who, while he resided among them, had shown his scholarship by the published translation of the Messiah,' who had never tasted their endowments, and who had been prevented by poverty alone from attaining in the regular course what he now asked to deliver him from a poverty as great as that indigence which cut short his college career and which was the sole cause of his being compelled to prefer the request. The Universities have seldom been backward to encourage talent, but the extreme privations to which struggling merit is often exposed make it proper to mark with censure even a rare departure from justice, that the authorities may never again be betrayed into a careless rejection of such imperative claims as those of Johnson. Oxford having declined to qualify him for his office, an attempt was made, through Lord Gower, to induce Swift to ask the favour of the University of Dublin. But with Dublin Johnson had no connexion, and it is not surprising that nothing should have come of the application. The sixty pounds a-year endowment, which Lord Gower said in his letter would make the poor man happy for life,' was for ever lost to him, and his next idea was to become an advocate at Doctors' Commons. ́ I am,' he said, 'a total stranger to these studies, but whatever is a profession and maintains numbers must be within the reach of common abilities and some amount of industry.' Here again he was stopped by want of a degree, which was an indispensable qualification, and he was thrown back upon his starving work of translation. He was in the same dilemma with Macbeth,— There is nor flying hence, nor tarrying here;' but, like Macbeth, he tarried because he could not fly. He made no more efforts to escape from his destiny. His lot henceforth was that of an author; and, having seen how his mind was formed, and Vol. 103.-No. 206. by

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by what concurrence of circumstances he was forced upon his painful profession, we must leave him for the present, and reserve for another opportunity the discussion of the literary portion of his history and the enumeration of the traits of his noble character.

ART. II.-1. Scènes de la Vie de Bohème. Par Henry Mürger. Paris, 1854.

2. Les Buveurs d'Eau. Par Henry Mürger. Paris, 1855. 3. Les Aventures de Mademoiselle Mariette. Par Champfleury. Paris, 1857.

4. Friends of Bohemia; or Phases of London Life. 2 vols. By E. M. Whitty. London, 1857.

THE Bohemia of which we are about to treat is not that rich

and pleasant province that lies between the Moravian and the Giant Mountains, and which, even in these its days of dependency, still retains as its metropolis the third city of continental Europe. Neither are the Bohemians of these pages the inhabitants of that border-land of the Sclavonic and Teutonic peoples whose energetic ancestors grasped and lost the prize of Protestant liberty, nor even that strange nomad race, the refuse of some oriental migration or invasion, that has been invested with this among other pseudo-historic names by the more western nations, who have desired to connect these mysterious intruders with some locality from which it was supposed they had wandered.

The metaphor has since been taken a step further: the appellation of that singular remnant of a distant world which has now remained for centuries an alien spot in the midst of our most advanced communities, has been transferred to the men of every race and age who, by affinity of temperament and similar eccentricity of habits, are led to exhibit the same moral characteristics or to adopt an analogous mode of life. The history of this Bohemia, if properly written, would be as long, and ought to be as learned, as Mr. Buckle's History of Civilization,' for the one is the inevitable reverse of the other; and although in earlier times the territory is less distinct and the population less definite, yet, as mankind leave the tent and the kettle and imprison themselves in houses and kitchens, the Bohemian, under one title or other, will always be found outside. Multiple, indeed, are the forms of the out-of-door resistance of mankind to the unceasing development of the wants and the satisfactions of their species;

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various as the physical energies that have sustained the children of Nature in health and delight, from the days of the Satyrs, the country-gentlemen of ancient Greece, to the British deer-stalker on the Highland hills; various as the powers of genius and the faculties of art, that have kept gay and glorious the minds of men under all privations and through all the chances of fortune,-the Homeric rhapsodist, the vagrant troubadour, the 'poor scholar,' the free-mason, the strolling player,-Blake at his easel and Burns at the plough; various as the basest and the loftiest affections of the human heart,—the love of license and antipathy to order that make the robber and the rebel, and the aspiration after a purer law and a higher order that drives the prophet into the desert.

As might be expected from the curious satisfaction with which even the honest follow the intricacies of fraud, and even the gentle the violences of crime, the details of the hostility of this people against the elementary ordinances of society, as exhibited in the filibuster whose life is ever on the hazard, or in the rogue whose repose is the prison, have been in all times especially attractive. It is difficult, in truth, to make the adventures of the most virtuous mariner as interesting as those of the buccaneer, or the pecuniary ventures of the most fortunate merchant as amusing as the tricks of Guzman de Alfarache or the raids of Rob Roy. It is not the first French novel we read that reveals to us this disposition of our minds, but the first story book in which we look out for the mishaps of the naughty boy. No prince of Abyssinia, however wise, can compete with the solitary prince of Bohemia-Robinson Crusoe, and even the ruffians of Alsatia have acquired a romantic esteem and taken rank as belonging to a Bohemian dependency.

But there is another district of Bohemia, the interest in which i sless readily acknowledged, but which assuredly deserves it still more. If our imaginations are touched and our sympathies affected by the dark faces that come upon us under the secluded hedgerow, and the waggon-tents that startle the rider across the open moor, what shall we say to the fate of the Gipsy, dissociated from all the requirements of his nature,-the free air, the clear light, the liberty of movement, and earning his daily bread in the factory or the mine? Surely the romance and pathos of his destiny must increase in proportion as he is encumbered and closed in by the demands and powers of an antagonistic society, and yearns towards some distant and unknown Peshawur, the cradle, and it may be yet the habitation, of his race. And this is the condition of the intellectual Bohemian, the Artist, or the Man of Letters, to whom a certain moral freedom seems a necessity of existence, who instinctively rebels against the established rules of society, more because they are established than for any other

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