Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous. Sarah K. Bolton
He could repeat it perfectly, having looked it over but twice. He left school at sixteen, spending two years at home in helping his parents, and studying earnestly. One day, his father, being ill, asked him to go to a neighboring town and take his place in selling books at a stall on market-day. He was proud, and did not go. Fifty years afterward, in his greatness, then an old man, he went to this stall, and, with uncovered head, remained for an hour in the rain where his father had formerly stood, exposed to the sneers of the bystanders and the inclemency of the weather. It showed the repentance of a noble soul for disobedience to a parent.
At nineteen, he entered Pembroke College, Oxford, where he acted as servant. He used to go daily to his friend Taylor, and get lectures second-hand, till his feet, showing through his worn-out shoes, were perceived by the students, and he ceased going. A rich young man secretly put a pair of new shoes at his door, which he indignantly threw out of the window. He was willing to work and earn, but would not receive charity. At the end of three years he became so poor that he was obliged to leave college, his father dying soon after.
After various experiences, he sought the position of usher at a school, but was refused because it was thought that the boys would make fun of his ugliness. He finally obtained such a place, was treated with great harshness, and left in a few months. Strange to say, the poor, lonely scholar, only twenty-six, now fell in love with a widow forty-eight years old. After obtaining his mother's consent, he married her, and the union proved a most happy one. With the little money his wife possessed, he started a school, and advertised for pupils; but only three came, and the school soon closed. In despair he determined to try London, and see if an author could there earn his bread. In that great city he lived for some time on nine cents a day. One publisher to whom he applied suggested to him that the wisest course would be to become a porter and carry trunks.
A poem written at this time, entitled "London," for which he received fifty dollars, one line of which was in capital letters,
"SLOW RISES WORTH BY POVERTY DEPRESSED,"
attracted attention; and Pope, who was then at the height of his fame, asked Dublin University to give to the able scholar the degree of M.A., that he might thus be able to take the principalship of a school, and earn three hundred dollars a year; but this was refused. Out of such struggles come heroic souls.
When he was forty, he published the "Vanity of Human Wishes," receiving seventy-five dollars, asserted by many to be the most impressive thing of its kind in the language. The lines, show his struggles. A drama soon after, played by the great actor, David Garrick, brought him nearly a thousand dollars; but the play itself was a failure. When asked by his friends how he felt about his ill success, he replied, "Like the monument," meaning that he continued firm and unmoved, like a column of granite. Fame was coming at last, after he had struggled in London for thirteen years – and what bitterness they had brought!
"There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail,"
For two years he worked almost constantly on a paper called the "Rambler." When his wife said that, well as she had thought of him before, she had never considered him equal to this, he was more pleased than with any praise he ever received. She died three days after the last copy was published, and Johnson was utterly prostrated. He buried himself in hard work in his garret, a most inconvenient room; but he said, "In that room I never saw Mrs. Johnson." Her wedding-ring was placed in a little box, and tenderly kept till his death.
Three years afterward, his great work, his Dictionary, appeared, for which he received eight thousand dollars; but, as he had been obliged to employ six assistants for seven years, he was still poor, but now famous. The Universities of Oxford and Dublin, when he no longer needed their assistance, hastened to bestow their degrees upon him. Even George III. invited him to the royal palace, – a strange contrast to a few years before, when Samuel Johnson was under arrest for a debt of thirty dollars! When asked by Reynolds how he had obtained his accuracy and flow of language in conversation, he replied, "By trying to do my best on every occasion and in every company." About this time his aged mother died, and in the evenings of one week, to defray her funeral expenses, he wrote "Rasselas," and received five hundred dollars for it. He wrote in his last letter to her, "You have been the best mother, and I believe the best woman, in the world. I thank you for your indulgence to me, and beg forgiveness of all that I have done ill, and of all that I have omitted to do well." His last great work was "The Lives of the Poets."
He received now a pension of fifteen hundred dollars a year, for his valuable services to literature, but never used more than four hundred dollars for himself. He took care of a blind woman of whom he said, "She was a friend to my poor wife, and was in the house when she died, she has remained in it ever since," of a mother and daughter dependent upon an old family physician, and of two men whom nobody else would care for. Once when he found a poor woman on the street late at night, he took her home, and kept her till she was restored to health. His pockets were always filled with pennies for street Arabs; and, if he found poor children asleep on a threshold, he would slip money into their hands that, when they awakened, they might buy a breakfast. When a servant was dying who had been in the family for forty-three years, he prayed with her and kissed her, the tears falling down his cheeks. He wrote in his diary, "We kissed and parted – I humbly hope to meet again, and part no more." He held, rightly, that Christianity levels all distinctions of rank.
He was very tender to animals. Once, when in Wales, a gardener brought into the house a hare which had been caught in the potatoes, and was told to give it to the cook. Dr. Johnson asked to have it placed in his arms; then, taking it to the window, he let it go, shouting to it to run as fast as possible. He would buy oysters for his cat, Hodge, that the servants, from seeing his fondness for it, might be led to treat it kindly.
He died at the age of seventy-five, such men as Burke and Reynolds standing by his bedside. Of the latter, he begged that he would "read his Bible, and never paint on Sundays." His last words were to a young lady who had asked his blessing: "God bless you, my dear!" He was buried with appropriate honors in Westminster Abbey, and monuments are erected to him in St. Paul's Cathedral, and at Lichfield. The poor boy, nearly blind, became "the brightest ornament of the eighteenth century."
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
On a low slab in a quiet spot, just north of the Church of Knight Templars, in London, are the simple words, "Here lies Oliver Goldsmith." The author of the "Vicar of Wakefield" needs no grander monument; for he lives in the hearts of the people.
Oliver Goldsmith was born in Pallas, Ireland, in 1728, the son of a poor minister, who, by means of tilling some fields and assisting in a parish outside his own, earned two hundred dollars a year for his wife and seven children! When about six years old, Oliver nearly died of smallpox, and his pitted face made him an object of jest among the boys. At eight he showed great fondness for books, and began to write verses. His mother pleaded for a college education for him, but there seemed little prospect of it. One day, when a few were dancing at his uncle's house, the little boy sprang upon the floor and began to dance. The fiddler, to make fun of his short figure and homely face, exclaimed, "Æsop!" The boy, stung to the quick, replied: —
"Heralds, proclaim aloud! all saying,
'See Æsop dancing and his monkey playing;'"
when, of course, the fiddler became much chagrined.
All his school life Oliver was painfully diffident, but a good scholar. His father finally earned a better salary, and the way seemed open for college, when, lo! his sister, who had the opportunity of marrying a rich man, was obliged – so thought the public opinion of the day – to have a marriage portion of $2,000, and poor Oliver's educational hopes were blasted. He must now enter Trinity College, Dublin, as a sizar (servant), wear a coarse black gown without sleeves, a red cap, – the badge of servitude, – sweep the courts, carry dishes, and be treated with contempt, which nearly crushed his sensitive nature.
A year and a half later his father died, and his scanty means ceased from that source. To keep from starving he wrote ballads, selling them to street musicians at $1.25 apiece, and stole out at night to hear them sung. Often he shared this pittance with some one more wretched than himself.