Johnson, but violently attacked by Churchill, who utters the following imprecation:
'May I (can worse disgrace on manhood fall?)
Be born a Whitehead, and baptiz'd a Paul[1]!'
yet I shall never be persuaded to think meanly of the authour of so brilliant and pointed a satire as Manners[2].
Johnson's London was published in May 1738[3]; and it is
- ↑ From The Conference, Churchill's Poems, ii. 15.
- ↑ 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, vii. 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.
- ↑ 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 birth-day (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
I.—10
remarkable.
