extremely wide range of literature; when he entered Oxford in 1728 the
Master of his college assured him that he was the best qualified applicant
whom he had ever known. Johnson, on his side, was not nearly so well
pleased with the University; he found the teachers incompetent, and his
pride suffered intensely from his poverty, so that he remained at Oxford
little more than a year. The death of his father in 1731 plunged him into a
distressingly painful struggle for existence which lasted for thirty years.
After failing as a subordinate teacher in a boarding-school he became a
hack-writer in Birmingham, where, at the age of twenty-five, he made a
marriage with a widow, Mrs. Porter, an unattractive, rather absurd, but
good-hearted woman of forty-six. He set up a school of his own, where he
had only three pupils, and then in 1737 tramped with one of them, David
Garrick, later the famous actor, to London to try his fortune in another
field. When the two reached the city their combined funds amounted to
sixpence. Sir Robert Walpole, ruling the country with unscrupulous
absolutism, had now put an end to the employment of literary men in public
life, and though Johnson's poem 'London,' a satire on the city written in
imitation of the Roman poet Juvenal and published in 1738, attracted much
attention, he could do no better for a time than to become one of that
undistinguished herd of hand-to-mouth and nearly starving Grub Street
writers whom Pope was so contemptuously abusing and who chiefly depended on
the despotic patronage of magazine publishers. Living in a garret or even
walking the streets at night for lack of a lodging, Johnson was sometimes
unable to appear at a tavern because he had no respectable clothes. It was
ten years after the appearance of 'London' that he began to emerge, through
the publication of his 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' a poem of the same kind as
'London' but more sincere and very powerful. A little later Garrick, who
had risen very much more rapidly and was now manager of Drury Lane theater,
gave him substantial help by producing his early play 'Irene,' a
representative pseudo-classical tragedy of which it has been said that a