is not true, as has been erroneously related, that he was assistant to the famous Anthony Blackwall, whose merit has been honoured by the testimony of Bishop Hurd[1], who was his scholar; for Mr. Blackwall died on the 8th of April, 1730[2], more than a year before Johnson left the University[3].
This employment was very irksome to him in every respect, and he complained grievously of it in his letters to his friend Mr. Hector, who was now settled as a surgeon at Birmingham. The letters are lost; but Mr. Hector recollects his writing 'that the poet had described the dull sameness of his existence in these words, "Vitam continet una dies" (one day contains the whole of my life); that it was unvaried as the note of the cuckow; and that he did not know whether it was more disagreeable for him to teach, or the boys to learn, the grammar rules.' His general aversion to this painful drudgery was greatly enhanced by a disagreement between him and Sir Wolstan Dixey, the patron of the school, in whose house, I have been told, he officiated as a kind of domestick chaplain, so far, at least, as to say grace at table, but was treated with what he represented as intolerable harshness[4]; and, after suffering for a few months such complicated misery[5], he relinquished a situation which
- ↑ Bishop Hurd does not praise Blackwall, but the Rev. Mr. Budworth, headmaster of the grammar school at Brewood, who had himself been bred under Blackwall. Malone. Mr. Nichols relates (Post, Dec. 1784) that Johnson applied for the post of assistant to Mr. Budworth.
- ↑ See Gent. Mag. Dec. 1784, p. 957. Boswell.
- ↑ See ante, p. 91.
- ↑ The patron's manners were those of the neighbourhood. Hutton, writing of this town in 1770, says,—'The inhabitants set their dogs at me merely because I was a stranger. Surrounded with impassable roads, no intercourse with man to humanize the mind, no commerce to smooth their rugged manners, they continue the boors of nature.' Life of W. Hutton, p. 45.
- ↑ It appears from a letter of Johnson's to a friend, dated Lichfield, July 27, 1732, that he had left Sir Wolstan Dixie's house recently, before that letter was written. Malone.
lished in Notes and Queries, 6th S. x. 421, shews that for a short time he was tutor to the son of Mr. Whitby of Heywood.
all
