nds.
Unfortunately the prejudice occasioned by Johnson's unsightly exterior
was not confined to the vulgar, insomuch that it has been thought to be
the reason why so few parents committed their children to his care, for
he had only three pupils. This unscholarlike appearance it must have
been that made the bookseller in the Strand, to whom he applied for
literary employment, eye him archly, and recommend it to him rather to
purchase a porter's knot. But, as an old philosopher has said, every
thing has two handles. It was, perhaps, the contrast between the body
and the mind, between the incultum corpus, and the ingenium, which
afterwards was one cause of his being received so willingly in those
circles of what is called high life, where any thing that is exceedingly
strange and unusual is apt to carry its own recommendation with it.
Failing in his attempt at Edial, he was disposed once more to engage in
the drudgery of an usher, and offered himself in that capacity to the
Rev. William Budworth, master of the grammar-school at Brewood, in
Staffordshire, celebrated for having been the place in which Bishop Hurd
received his education, under that master. But here again nature stood
in his way; for Budworth was fearful lest a strange motion with the
head, the effect probably of disease, to which Johnson was habitually
subject, might excite the derision of his scholars, and for that reason
declined employing him. He now resolved on trying his fortune in the
capital.

Among the many respectable families in Lichfield, into whose society
Johnson had been admitted, none afforded so great encouragement to his
literary talents as that of Mr. Walmsley, who lived in the Bishop's
palace, and was registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, and whom he has
so eloquently commemorated in his Lives of the Poets. By this gentleman
he was introduced in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Colson, Lucasian Professor
of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, and the master of an
academy, "as a very good scholar, and one who he had great hopes would
turn out a fine dramatic writer, who intended to try his fate with a
tragedy, and to get himself employed in some translation, either from
the Latin or the French." The tragedy on which Mr. Walmsley founded his
expectations of Johnson's future eminence as a dramatic poet, was the
Irene. A shrewd sally of humour, to which the reading of this piece gave
rise, evinces the terms of familiarity on which he was with