The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course of things, have become a Bachelor of Arts: but he was at the end of his resources.Those promises of support on which he had relied had not been kept.His family could do nothing for him.
His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than he could pay.In the autumn of 1731, he was under the necessity of quitting the university without a degree.In the following winter his father died.The old man left but a pittance; and of that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the support of his widow.The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no more than twenty pounds.
His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard struggle with poverty.The misery of that struggle needed no aggravation, but was aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound body and an unsound mind.Before the young man left the university, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a singularly cruel form.He had become an incurable hypochondriac.
He said long after that he had been mad all his life, or at least not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving felons, and for setting aside wills.His grimaces, his gestures, his mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people who did not know him.At a dinner table he would, in a fit of absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe.He would amaze a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's Prayer.He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the hateful place.He would set his heart on touching every post in the streets through which he walked.If by any chance he missed a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the omission.
Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active.At one time he would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell the hour.At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who was many miles off, calling him by his name.But this was not the worst.A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human destiny.
Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot themselves or drown themselves.But he was under no temptation to commit suicide.He was sick of life; but he was afraid of death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded him of the inevitable hour.In religion he found but little comfort during his long and frequent fits of dejection; for his religion partook of his own character.The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendour.The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and discoloured by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul; and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him.
With such infirmities of body and mind, this celebrated man was left, at two-and-twenty, to fight his way through the world.He remained during about five years in the midland counties.At Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired others.He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family, who happened to be quartered there.Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts, learning, and knowledge of the world, did himself honour by patronising the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners, and squalid garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the neighbourhood to laughter or to disgust.At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of earning a livelihood.He became usher of a grammar school in Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his haughty spirit.He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few guineas by literary drudgery.In that town he printed a translation, little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia.He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse: but subscriptions did not come in; and the volume never appeared.