Levett,Captain Garrick,father of the great ornament of the British stage;but above all,Mr.Gilbert Walmsley,Register of the Prerogative Court of Lichfield,whose character,long after his decease,Dr.Johnson has,in his Life of Edmund Smith,thus drawn in the glowing colours of gratitude:
'Of Gilbert Walmsley,thus presented to my mind,let me indulge myself in the remembrance.I knew him very early;he was one of the first friends that literature procured me,and I hope that,at least,my gratitude made me worthy of his notice.
'He was of an advanced age,and I was only not a boy,yet he never received my notions with contempt.He was a whig,with all the virulence and malevolence of his party;yet difference of opinion did not keep us apart.I honoured him and he endured me.
'At this man's table I enjoyed many cheerful and instructive hours,with companions,such as are not often found--with one who has lengthened,and one who has gladdened life;with Dr.James,whose skill in physick will be long remembered;and with David Garrick,whom I hoped to have gratified with this character of our common friend.But what are the hopes of man!I am disappointed by that stroke of death,which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations,and impoverished the publick stock of harmless pleasure.'
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.
Walmsley'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.
In the forlorn state of his circumstances,he accepted of an offer to be employed as usher in the 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.
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 cuckow;and that he did not know whether it was more disagreeable for him to teach,or the boys to learn,the grammar rules.'His general aversion to this painful drudgery was greatly enhanced by a disagreement between him and Sir Wolstan Dixey,the patron of the school,in whose house,I have been told,he officiated as a kind of domestick 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,he relinquished a situation which all his life afterwards he recollected with the strongest aversion,and even a degree of horrour.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.Warren,with whom Mr.Hector lodged and boarded.Mr.Warren was the first established bookseller in Birmingham,and was very attentive to Johnson,who he soon found could be of much service to him in his trade,by his knowledge of literature;and he even obtained the assistance of his pen in furnishing some numbers of a periodical Essay printed in the newspaper,of which Warren was proprietor.After very diligent inquiry,I have not been able to recover those early specimens of that particular mode of writing by which Johnson afterwards so greatly distinguished himself.
He continued to live as Mr.Hector's guest for about six months,and then hired lodgings in another part of the town,finding himself as well situated at Birmingham as he supposed he could be any where,while he had no settled plan of life,and very scanty means of subsistence.He made some valuable acquaintances there,amongst whom were Mr.Porter,a mercer,whose widow he afterwards married,and Mr.Taylor,who by his ingenuity in mechanical inventions,and his success in trade,acquired an immense fortune.
But the comfort of being near Mr.Hector,his old school-fellow and intimate friend,was Johnson's chief inducement to continue here.
His juvenile attachments to the fair sex were very transient;and it is certain that he formed no criminal connection whatsoever.
Mr.Hector,who lived with him in his younger days in the utmost intimacy and social freedom,has assured me,that even at that ardent season his conduct was strictly virtuous in that respect;and that though he loved to exhilarate himself with wine,he never knew him intoxicated but once.
