Since the man’s work fails to account for his leadership and influence, we examine his personality; and here everything is interesting.  Because of a few oft-quoted passages from Boswell’s biography, Johnson appears to us as an eccentric bear, who amuses us by his growlings and clumsy antics.  But there is another Johnson, a brave, patient, kindly, religious soul, who, as Goldsmith said, had “nothing of the bear but his skin”; a man who battled like a hero against poverty and pain and melancholy and the awful fear of death, and who overcame them manfully. “That trouble passed away; so will this,” sang the sorrowing Deor in the first old Anglo-Saxon lyric; and that expresses the great and suffering spirit of Johnson, who in the face of enormous obstacles never lost faith in God or in himself.  Though he was a reactionary in politics, upholding the arbitrary power of kings and opposing the growing liberty of the people, yet his political theories, like his manners, were no deeper than his skin; for in all London there was none more kind to the wretched, and none more ready to extend an open hand to every struggling man and woman who crossed his path.  When he passed poor homeless Arabs sleeping in the streets he would slip a coin into their hands, in order that they might have a happy awakening; for he himself knew well what it meant to be hungry.  Such was Johnson,—­a “mass of genuine manhood,” as Carlyle called him, and as such, men loved and honored him.[194]

Life of Johnson.  Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, in 1709.  He was the son of a small bookseller, a poor man, but intelligent and fond of literature, as booksellers invariably were in the good days when every town had its bookshop.  From his childhood Johnson had to struggle against physical deformity and disease and the consequent disinclination to hard work.  He prepared for the university, partly in the schools, but largely by omnivorous reading in his father’s shop, and when he entered Oxford he had read more classical authors than had most of the graduates.  Before finishing his course he had to leave the university on account of his poverty, and at once he began his long struggle as a hack writer to earn his living.

At twenty-five years he married a woman old enough to be his mother,—­a genuine love match, he called it,—­and with her dowry of L800 they started a private school together, which was a dismal failure.  Then, without money or influential friends, he left his home and wife in Lichfield and tramped to London, accompanied only by David Garrick, afterwards the famous actor, who had been one of his pupils.  Here, led by old associations, Johnson made himself known to the booksellers, and now and then earned a penny by writing prefaces, reviews, and translations.