Lives of the English Poets: From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of Johnson's Lives — John Shaqi
Lives of the English Poets: From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of Johnson's LivesCary, Henry Francis
General
Lives of the English Poets: From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of Johnson's Lives
Cary, Henry Francis
Poets, English -- Biography
Failing in his attempt at Edial, he was disposed once more to engage in
the drudgery of an usher, and offered himself in that capacity to the
Rev. William Budworth, master of the grammar-school at Brewood, in
Staffordshire, celebrated for having been the place in which Bishop Hurd
received his education, under that master. But here again nature stood
in his way; for Budworth was fearful lest a strange motion with the
head, the effect probably of disease, to which Johnson was habitually
subject, might excite the derision of his scholars, and for that reason
declined employing him. He now resolved on trying his fortune in the
capital.
Among the many respectable families in Lichfield, into whose society
Johnson had been admitted, none afforded so great encouragement to his
literary talents as that of Mr. Walmsley, who lived in the Bishop's
palace, and was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, and whom he has
so eloquently commemorated in his Lives of the Poets. By this gentleman
he was introduced in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Colson, Lucasian Professor
of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and the master of an
academy, "as a very good scholar, and one who he had great hopes would
turn out a fine dramatic writer, who intended to try his fate with a
tragedy, and to get himself employed in some translation, either from
the Latin or the French." The tragedy on which Mr. Walmsley founded his
expectations of Johnson's future eminence as a dramatic poet, was the
Irene. A shrewd sally of humour, to which the reading of this piece gave
rise, evinces the terms of familiarity on which he was with his patron;
for, on Walmsley's observing, when some part of it had been read, that
the poet had already involved his heroine in such distress, that he did
not see what further he could do to excite the commiseration of the
audience, Johnson replied, "that he could put her into the
Ecclesiastical Court." Garrick, who was to be placed at Colson's
academy, accompanied his former instructor on this expedition to London,
at the beginning of March, 1737. It does not appear that Mr. Walmsley's
recommendation of him to Colson, whom he has described under the
character of Gelidus[2], in the twenty-fourth paper of the Rambler, was
of much use. He first took lodgings in Exeter-street in the Strand, but
soon retired to Greenwich, for the sake of completing his tragedy, which
he used to compose, walking in the Park.
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