Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies I.djvu/432

 ��Essay on

�� ��of the late Mr. Newbery, a man of a projecting head, good taste, and great industry 1. This employment engrossed but little of Johnson's time. He resigned himself to indolence, took no exercise, rose about two, and then received the visits of his friends. Authors, long since forgotten, waited on him as their oracle, and he gave responses in the chair of criticism. He listened to the complaints, the schemes, and the hopes and fears of a crowd of inferior writers, 'who,' he said, in the words of Roger Ascham, ' lived, men knew not how, and died obscure, men 'marked not when*? He believed, that he could give a better history of Grub-street than any man living 3. His house was filled with a succession of visitors till four or five in the evening. During the whole time he presided at his tea-table 4. Tea was pronounced his anathema against the use of tea, Johnson rose in defence of his habitual practice, declaring himself ' in that article a hardened sinner, who had for years diluted his meals with the infusion of that fascinating plant ; whose tea-kettle had no time to cool ; who with tea solaced the midnight hour, and with tea welcomed the morning V

��1 Murphy borrows from Hawkins, p. 364, who describes Newbery as ' a man of a projecting head, a good understanding, and great integrity, who by a fortunate connexion with Dr. James, the physician, and the honest exertions of his own industry, became the founder of a family.' He was the vendor of James's powder. Life, iii. 4, n. 2. See also Letters,

i. 22.

2 Ante, p. 315.

3 Grub Street he defined in his Dictionary as * the name of a street in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems ; whence any mean production is called Grub-street? Life, \. 296. He told Miss Burney that he had never visited it. Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, i. 415.

There were two streets of this name,

��one by Fore Street, Cripplegate, the other by Market Street, Westminster. Dodsley's London, iii. 100. It was to the former street that the name was given. A writer in the Gentle man 's Magazine for 1735, p. 2 6> says that John Fox of the Book of Martyrs lived there. ' The Papists often called him by way of contempt the Grub- street Author.'

4 Life, i. 247.

5 /*.i. 313.

6 ' A hardened and shameless tea- drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the in fusion of this fascinating plant ; whose kettle has scarcely time to cool ; who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnight, and with tea welcomes the morning.' Works, vi. 21.

Hawkins (p. 561) blames Johnson's The

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