of money to pay for a lodging, was likely also at times to be condemned to idleness for want of a light.
[354] At the back of this letter is written: ‘Sir, Please to publish the enclosed in your paper of first, and place to acc’t of Mr. Edward Cave. For whom I am, Sir, your hum. ser’t J. Bland. St. John’s Gate, April 6, 1738.’ London therefore was written before April 6.
[355] Boswell misread the letter. Johnson does not offer to allow the printer to make alterations. He says:—‘I will take the trouble of altering any stroke of satire which you may dislike.’ The law against libel was as unjust as it was severe, and printers ran a great risk.
[356] Derrick was not merely a poet, but also Master of the Ceremonies at Bath; post, May 16, 1763. For Johnson’s opinion of his ‘Muse’ see post under March 30, 1783. Fortune, a Rhapsody, was published in Nov. 1751. Gent. Mag. xxi. 527. He is described in Humphrey Clinker in the letters of April 6 and May 6.
[357] See post, March 20, 1776.
[358] Six years later Johnson thus wrote of Savage’s Wanderer:—‘From a poem so diligently laboured, and so successfully finished, it might be reasonably expected that he should have gained considerable advantage; nor can it without some degree of indignation and concern be told, that he sold the copy for ten guineas.’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 131. Mrs. Piozzi sold in 1788 the copyright of her collection of Johnson’s Letters for £500; post, Feb. 1767.
[359] The Monks of Medmenham Abbey. See Almon’s Life of Wilkes, iii. 60, for Wilkes’s account of this club. Horace Walpole (Letters, i. 92) calls Whitehead ‘an infamous, but not despicable poet.’
[360] From The Conference, Churchill’s Poems, ii. 15.
[361] In the Life of Pope Johnson writes:—‘Paul Whitehead, a small poet, was summoned before the Lords for a poem called Manners, together with Dodsley his publisher. Whitehead, who hung loose upon society, sculked and escaped; but Dodsley’s shop and family made his appearance necessary.’ Johnson’s Works, viii. 297. Manners was published in 1739. Dodsley was kept in custody for a week. Gent. Mag. ix. 104. ‘The whole process was supposed to be intended rather to intimidate Pope [who in his Seventeen Hundred and Thirty-Eight had given offence] than to punish Whitehead, and it answered that purpose.’ CHALMERS, quoted in Parl. Hist. x. 1325
[362] Sir John Hawkins, p. 86, tells us:—‘The event is antedated, in the poem of London; but in every particular, except the difference of a year, what is there said of the departure of Thales, must be understood of Savage, and looked upon as true history.’ This conjecture is, I believe, entirely groundless. I have been assured, that Johnson said he was not so much as acquainted with Savage when he wrote his London. If the departure mentioned in it was the departure of Savage, the event was not antedated but foreseen; for London was published in May, 1738, and Savage did not set out for Wales till July, 1739. However well Johnson could defend the credibility of second sight [see post, Feb. 1766], he did not pretend that he himself was possessed of that faculty. BOSWELL. I am not sure that Hawkins is altogether wrong in his account. Boswell does not state of his own knowledge that Johnson was not acquainted with Savage when he wrote London. The death of Queen Caroline in Nov. 1737 deprived Savage of her yearly bounty, and ‘abandoned him again to fortune’ (Johnson’s Works, viii. 166). The elegy on her that he composed on her birthday (March 1) brought him no reward. He was ‘for some time in suspense,’ but nothing was done. ‘He was in a short time reduced to the lowest degree of distress, and often wanted both lodging and food’ (Ib. p. 169). His friends formed a scheme that ‘he should retire into Wales.’ ‘While this scheme was ripening’ he lodged ‘in the liberties of the Fleet, that he might be secure from his creditors’ (Ib. p. 170). After many delays a subscription was at length raised to provide him with a small pension, and he left London in July 1739 (Ib. p 173). London, as I have shewn, was written before April 6, 1738. That it was written with great rapidity we might infer from the fact that a hundred lines of The Vanity of Human Wishes were written in a day. At this rate London might have been the work of three days. That it was written in a very short time seems to be shown by a passage in the first of these letters to Cave. Johnson says:—‘When I took the liberty of writing to you a few days ago, I did not expect a repetition of the same pleasure so soon; … but having the enclosed poem, &c.’ It is probable that in these few days the poem was written. If we can assume that Savage’s elegy was sent to the Court not later than March 1—it may have been sent earlier—and that Johnson’s poem was written in the last ten days of March, we have three weeks for the intervening events. They are certainly not more than sufficient, if indeed they are sufficient. The coincidence is certainly very striking between Thales’s retirement to ‘Cambria’s solitary shore’ and Savage’s retirement to Wales. There are besides lines in the poem—additions to Juvenal and not translations—which curiously correspond with what Johnson wrote of Savage in his Life. Thus he says that Savage ‘imagined that he should be transported to scenes of flowery felicity; … he could not bear … to lose the opportunity of listening, without intermission, to the melody of the nightingale, which he believed was to be heard from every bramble, and which he did not fail to mention as a very important part of the happiness of a country life’ (Ib. p. 170). In like manner Thales prays to find:—
‘Some pleasing bank where verdant osiers play,
Some peaceful vale, with nature’s paintings gay.
*
There every bush with nature’s musick rings;
There every breeze bears health upon its wings.’
Mr. Croker objects that ‘if Thales had been Savage, Johnson could never have admitted into his poem two lines that point so forcibly at the drunken fray, in which Savage stabbed a Mr. Sinclair, for which he was convicted of murder:—
“Some frolic drunkard, reeling from a feast, Provokes a broil, and stabs you in a jest.”’
But here Johnson is following Juvenal. Mr. Croker forgets that, if Savage was convicted of murder, ‘he was soon after admitted to bail, and pleaded the King’s pardon.’ ‘Persons of distinction’ testified that he was ‘a modest inoffensive man, not inclined to broils or to insolence;’ the witnesses against him were of the lowest character, and his judge had shewn himself as ignorant as he was brutal. Sinclair had been drinking in a brothel, and Savage asserted that he had stabbed him ‘by the necessity of self defence’ (Ib. p. 117). It is, however, not unlikely that Wales was suggested to Johnson as Thales’s retreat by Swift’s lines on Steele, in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (v. 181), published only three years before London:—
‘Thus Steele who owned what others writ,
And flourished by imputed wit,
From perils of a hundred jails
Withdrew to starve and die in Wales.’
[363] The first dialogue was registered at Stationers’ Hall, 12th May, 1738, under the title One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight. The second dialogue was registered 17th July, 1738, as One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, Dialogue 2. Elwin’s Pope, iii. 455.
David Hume was in London this spring, finding a publisher for his first work, A Treatise of Human Nature. J. H. Burton’s Hume, i. 66.
[364] Pope had published Imitations of Horace.
[365] P. 269. BOSWELL. ‘Short extracts from London, a Poem, become remarkable for having got to the second edition in the space of a week.’ Gent. Mag. viii. 269. The price of the poem was one shilling. Pope’s satire, though sold at the same price, was longer in reaching its second edition (Ib. p. 280).
[366]
‘One driven by strong benevolence of soul