ight his way through the world. He remained during
about five years in the midland counties. At Lichfield, his birthplace
and his early home, he had inherited some friends and acquired others.
He was kindly noticed by Henry Hervey, a gay officer of noble family,
who happened to be quartered there. Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of
the ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished parts,
learning, and knowledge of the world, did himself honour by patronising
the young adventurer, whose repulsive person, unpolished manners, and
squalid garb moved many of the petty aristocracy of the neighbourhood to
laughter or to disgust. At Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no
way of earning a livelihood. He became usher of a grammar school in
Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of a
country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable to his
haughty spirit. He repaired to Birmingham, and there earned a few
guineas by literary drudgery. In that town he printed a translation,
little noticed at the time, and long forgotten, of a Latin book about
Abyssinia. He then put forth proposals for publishing by subscription
the poems of Politian, with notes containing a history of modern Latin
verse: but subscriptions did not come in; and the volume never appeared.

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in love. The
object of his passion was Mrs Elizabeth Porter, a widow who had children
as old as himself. To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a
short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy
colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were
not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels. To Johnson, however,
whose passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish
ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in the same
room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he called her, was
the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his
admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted; for she was as poor as
himself. She accepted, with a readiness which did her little honour,
the addresses of a suitor who might have been her son. The marriage,
however, in spite of occasional wranglings, proved happier than might
have been expected. The lover continued to be under the illusions of the
wedding-day till the lady died in her sixty-fourth year. On her monument
he placed an inscription ex