restoration and eighteenth century || portrait of a grub: samuel boyse

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Portrait of a Grub: Samuel BoyseAuthor(s): Edward HartSource: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 7, No. 3, Restoration and EighteenthCentury (Summer, 1967), pp. 415-425Published by: Rice UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/449599 .

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Portrait of a Grub: Samuel Boyse EDWARD HART

ONE OF SAMUEL BOYSE'S qualifications as a subject for this paper is that he is almost unknown; for obscurity itself is part of the definition of a Grub. In the dim- ness of an eighteenth-century past the colony of Grubs appears to the casual reader only in the mass; it is an anomaly that one of them should even have a name. We see them best, perhaps, through the eyes of Pope in An Essay on Criticism:

Some neither can for wits nor critics pass, As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass. Those half-learned witlings, numerous in our isle, As half-formed insects on the banks of Nile; Unfinished things, one knows not what to call, Their generation's so equivocal. (1.38-43)

Here is some sub-human form of life: crawling larvae des- tined never to sprout wings and fly. These are the unfledged poets, the translators, the hacks. My purpose here is to lift one of these, still alive and wriggling, from his habitat.

The habitat of the Grub was, of course, Grub Street. We must remember that, despite the aptness of Pope's metaphor, the street along which the hack writers congregated was a real street, defined thus by Samuel Johnson: "Grub-street, 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."'l Through an irony of which only nineteenth-century romantics could have been capable, the name of Grub Street was changed in 1830 to Milton Street.2

Since I have already mentioned Johnson's name, it is proper that I should produce him as the defender of the Grub Street writers. They are, he writes with his characteristic humanity, "a race of beings equally obscure and equally indigent, who because their usefulness is less obvious to vulgar apprehen- sions, live unrewarded and die unpitied, and who have been

1See Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. ed. L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934), I, 296.

2Hill and Powell, IV, 513.



PORTRAIT OF A GRUB

long exposed to insult without a defender, and to censure without an apologist."3

I have discovered no one among the minor writers of the eighteenth century to whom Johnson's comments apply more aptly than to Samuel Boyse. And it is fitting in more ways than one that Boyse should be introduced through Johnson, for Johnson knew him well and at least once collected money for his relief. But important as this fact may have been to Boyse at that time, more important to us now is the fact that the greater part of our knowledge of Boyse was preserved by men who acted as Johnson's dictionary amanuenses; and Johnson himself made contributions to the biography.

The first of Johnson's amanuenses to write a life of Boyse was a Scot by the name of Robert Shiels. The life is contained in a five-volume work called Gibber's Lives of the Poets (1753), through which title, said John Nichols, "a double literary fraud was here intended. Theophilius Gibber, who was then in the King's Bench, had ten guineas for the use of his name, which was put ambiguously Mr. Cibber, in order that it might pass for his father Colley's. The real publisher was Mr. Robert Shiels, an amanuensis of Dr. Johnson, on whose authority I relate this anecdote, and who gave to Shiels many particulars in the life of Samuel Boyse."4

This, briefly, is a summary of the account Shiels gives us of Boyse. He was born in Dublin in 1708. His father was a dissenting minister of some eminence. Young Boyse was edu- cated at a private school in Dublin, and, at the age of eigh- teen, was sent to the University of Glasgow, where he fell in love with a Miss Atcheson and married her during his nineteenth year. He discontinued his studies at Glasgow and took his wife and his wife's sister back to Dublin to be supported by his father, who had very little besides what was given him by his congregation. While young Boyse "spent his time in the most abject trifling," his wife "naturally of a very volatile sprightly temper, either grew tired of him, or became en- amour'd of variety" and "pursued intrigues with other men;

'Rambler, No. 145. 'Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1812), V, 308 n. Shiels undoubtedly did the chief part of the work on Cibber's Lives of the Poets, but the work performed by Theophilus Gibber was greater than Shiels had led Johnson to believe. See "Early Lives of the Poets" in Walter Raleigh, Six Essays on Johnson (Oxford, 1927), pp. 119-126.

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and what is still more surprising, not without the knowledge of her husband, who had either too abject a spirit to resent it; or was bribed by some lucrative advantage, to which he had a mind mean enough to stoop. Though never were three people of more libertine characters than young Boyse, his wife, and sister-in-law."

Boyse so completely went through the small estate that when his father died he had to be buried at the expense of his congregation. Soon after, Boyse was in Edinburgh where for a time he enjoyed the patronage of some of the greatest people, among them the Countess of Eglinton, who, later on and in her eighty-fifth year was visited by Boswell and Johnson on their tour to the Hebrides. Also his patroness was the Duchess of Gordon, who gave him a letter recommending him for a place in the customs. But on the day he should have gone it happened to be raining and Boyse lost the position for failing to put in an appearance.

After wearing out the patience of his patrons and the credit of the merchants of Edinburgh, Boyse went to London. He carried with him a letter of introduction to Pope from the Duchess of Gordon, but upon visiting Twickenham once and not finding Pope at home, he never returned. The chances are that Pope would not have liked him anyway, Shiels tells us, since Boyse possessed no graces of person or conversation to indicate the abilities he possessed. He was unable to feel at home with anyone of higher rank. In the presence of those above him, he became abject and grovelling, Shiels writes, "not having sufficient confidence or politeness to converse familiarly with them; a freedom to which he was intitled by the power of his genius."

Lacking a rich patron, Boyse often wrote begging letters to his friends, sometimes convincing them that he was on the verge of death, only to have them discover the dying man on the streets the next day. His tastes were so extravagant and luxurious that when he could obtain any money he dined by himself on the richest foods and wines while his wife and child were starving at home. Under these circumstances his wife turned to prostitution and Boyse continued his promis- cuous ways, so that they were frequently, according to Shiels, "reproaching one another for the acquisition of a disease, which both deserved because mutually guilty."

About 1740 he appears to have fallen into the greatest

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possible poverty. All his clothes were pawned and he wrote verses for a magazine as he sat propped in bed, wrapped in a blanket in which he had cut a hole for his writing arm. Boyse's second biographer, John Nichols, added at this point the fact that it was Johnson who collected money by sixpences to re- deem Boyse's clothes, which in two days after were pawned again."5 Johnson also told Nichols about another of Boyse's tricks. If he had been employed to translate a book, he would translate a page and pawn the book. If the employer redeemed the book, he would do another page, and so on until it was finished.6 At times Boyse had to go out into the streets dressed in a kind of paper shirt he devised for himself, "with," as Shiels said, "the additional inconvenience of the want of breeches." As he made his appearance once at a printer's house, "he found several women, whom his extraordinary appearance obliged immediately to retire."

Mrs. Piozzi, in her Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, revealed a tale Johnson had told her.

There was a Mr. Boyce too, . . . of whose ingenuity and distress I have heard Dr. Johnson tell some curious anecdotes; particularly, that when he was almost per- ishing with hunger, and some money was produced to purchase him a dinner, he got a bit of roast beef, but could not eat it without ketchup, and laid out the last half-guinea he possessed in truffles and mushrooms, eating them in bed too, for want of clothes, or even a shirt to sit up in.7

After this time Boyse moved to Reading, where he was employed in writing a history. It was there that his wife died. He had made an affectation of being very fond of a little lap-dog, and on the death of his wife, not being able to afford mourning clothes for himself, he "step'd into a little shop, purchased half a yard of black ribbon, which he fixed round his dog's neck by way of mourning for the loss of his mis- tress." Later, Boyse returned to London and remarried. He showed some signs of living an improved life, but fell into a lingering illness and died in 1749. "The remains of this son of the Muses," says Shiels, "were with very little ceremony

'Select Collection, VIII, 288. 'Select Collection, VIII, 288. 7Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes are reproduced in full in Johnsonian Miscel- lanies, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford, 1897), I, 141-350. For the quotation given here see p. 228.

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hurried away by the parish officers, and thrown amongst common beggars."

During his lifetime Boyse wrote enough verses to fill six volumes. He translated many books, mostly from the French, and turned Chaucer into modern English at the rate of three- pence a line. Many of his verses were published in the Gentle- man's Magazine with the signatures of Y and Alceus. "His talents, largely imitative," writes Mr. Edward A. Bloom, "have been obscured by a career of dissipation. Boyse, never- theless, has always been accepted as at least a peripheral literary figure on the strength of such writings as 'Deity: A Poem' (1740), his modernization of Chaucer (1741), and 'Albion's Triumph' (1743). In his own day Boyse had the en- couragement of highly-regarded English writers like Pope and Fielding, and of the Reverend James Hervey."8

Boyse's greatest recognition came from his poem "Deity." Shiels reports that when Pope was asked whether he had written it, he replied "that he was not the author, but that there were many lines in it, of which he should not be ashamed." Fielding also had a high regard for the poem, and Boyse achieved some kind of immortality when Fielding quoted some twelve lines from "Deity" in Tom Jones. As Mr. Bloom has pointed out, however, Fielding had recommended the poem earlier in the Champion for 12 February 1740. In his review of "Deity" Fielding quoted the same twelve lines that he later put into Tom Jones.9 In the introductory chapter of Book VII, Fielding, after quoting the lines from Macbeth about the poor player strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage, continues: "For which hackneyed quotation I will make the reader amends by a very noble one, which few, I believe, have read. It is taken from a poem called the Deity, published about nine years ago, and long since buried in obliv- ion; a proof that good books, no more than good men, do always survive the bad." Among the twelve lines quoted by Fielding are these:

See the vast Theatre of Time display'd, While o'er the scene succeeding heroes tread!

Then at Thy nod the phantoms pass away;

""The Paradox of Samuel Boyse," Notes and Queries, I (April 1954), 163. "Notes and Queries, 164-165.

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No traces left of all the busy scene, But that remembrance says-The things have been.

The obscurity of Boyse is preserved inviolate; his lines that share the immortality of Tom Jones are not even accompanied by their author's name.

Two other biographies of Boyse have been written since Shiels wrote his for Cibber's Lives of the Poets. The first of these, by John Nichols, appeared as notes to several of Boyse's poems in A Select Collection of Poems, edited by Nichols in eight volumes, 1780-1782, and intended to be a supplement to the collections of Dodsley and Pearch. The second biography is that of Norman Moore in the Dictionary of National Biog- raphy.10

At the end of his life of Boyse in the DNB, Moore lists only four sources: Gibber's Lives, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Sloane MS. 4033 B (which is one of Boyse's begging letters), and Boyse's works.1l Thus Nichols was entirely neglected as a source, though I should point out in passing that Nichols sup- plied Boswell with the best of his information on Boyse. Be- cause of Moore's failure to discover Nichols, his life of Boyse in the DNB shares many of the defects present in Shiels's work. The main defect is that Boyse remains essentially un- believable as a human being; he is picturesque, almost gro- tesque, but not quite real. It is in the humanizing, the making real of Boyse that Nichols could have contributed a great deal toward what should have been the best biography. To supply the lacking elements I shall now return to Nichols and his notes.

The first mention of Boyse in the Select Collection is in a biographical note in the second volume.'2 In the note Nichols summarized the account of Shiels, but added one new piece of information regarding Boyse's death. The information came to Nichols through Joseph Giles, the editor of a miscellany, who claimed to have been told it by the bookseller William Sandby. According to them, Boyse was found dead in his bed, pen in hand, and his hand through the hole in the blanket.

101 have not included a third account, that in the Annual Register for 1764, II, 54-58, because it is taken directly from Shiels.

1References to other manuscripts in the British Museum and to other works in which Boyse is mentioned will be found in n. 2 to Chapter XII of James L. Clifford, Young Sam Johnson (New York, 1955), p. 349.

1Pp. 161-163.

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After the publication of the second volume of the Select Collection, a great deal more information about Boyse came to Nichols, who was well known by his contemporaries to be the editor of the Gentleman's Magazine. During the course of his lifetime he received thousands of letters revising opinions, correcting facts, and supplying additional information to works already in print. Thus, much of Nichols' new information on Boyse came from correspondents. But part, and an important part, came directly from Samuel Johnson, with whom Nichols had become better acquainted after his publication of the first note on Boyse.13 In volume eight of the Select Collection, Nichols makes a correction: "The circumstance related by Mr. Giles about his [Boyse's] death, Dr. Johnson assures me, is not true; it being supposed that, in a fit of intoxication, he was run over by a coach; at least, he was brought home in such a condition as to make this probable, but too far gone to give the least account of the accident."14 From the information we already have before us, it is evident that the forces that produce myths were already at work on Boyse even while those who had known him were still alive, making him a little more picturesque but a little less real than he was.

Also a supplier of information to Nichols on the subject of Boyse was Francis Stewart, another of Johnson's Scottish amanuenses. Regarding Boyse's death, Stewart wrote in a letter: "Poor Mr. Boyse was one evening last winter attacked in Westminster by two or three soldiers, who not only robbed him, but used him so barbarously, that he never recovered the bruises he received. . ."15 This, if it is the truth, is the least romantic way to die of the three versions given us. From other information Stewart supplies he appears to be a reliable witness, and it seems also that he knew Boyse more intimately than the others. He tells us, for instance, that for some months before his death Boyse had given up all liquors except an occasional glass of wine, that his wife was a careful nurse during his illness, and that he burned a great many of his

3Nichols's acquaintance with Johnson probably began in 1778, the date of Johnson's first letter to Nichols being 27 July of that year. The first four volumes of the Select Collection were issued in 1780 and the second four, in 1782. 'Pp. 288-290. 5Select Collection, pp. 288-290.

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private papers shortly before his death. Stewart informs us further that he tried without success to collect enough money for Boyse's burial, and that three more of Johnson's amanuenses and he attended Boyse's corpse to the grave.

An unidentified correspondent of Nichols wrote concern- ing Boyse: "I knew him well from the year 1732 to the time of his death; have often relieved his necessities, and frequently corresponded with him. I have preserved, I believe, at least 30 of his letters; and have, in manuscript, some of his poems that were never published. I never saw any thing in his wife's conduct that deserved censure. ... He was a man of learning; when in company with those by whom he was not awed, an entertaining companion.. "'16 There is a certain ambiguity here as to which of Boyse's wives this correspondent refers when he says he "never saw any thing . . . that deserved censure." It is possible, however, that he refers to the first wife, as no one had censured the second. Since the correspondent had known Boyse since 1732 and the first wife had died about 1745, he must have known her; and here the matter must rest, with at least the shadow of a question darkening still further the obscurity in which lie Boyse and his "volatile sprightly" wife.

There were others who communicated information to Nichols. Among these was a man whom I identify tentatively as William Cuming, a physician whose father was an Edin- burgh merchant. Dr. Cuming lived in Edinburgh until 1735, when he left to spend nine months in Paris, upon which occa- sion Boyse wrote an ode. Cuming also spent some time after this in London and was living in Dorchester at the time he corresponded with Nichols. (He may even have been the correspondent referred to above who had known Boyse since 1732, though there is no way of knowing for sure.) Some notes on Boyse in the Select Collection, however, are signed C, and these I conclude to be Cuming's.

In one of the notes signed C is the following description of Boyse: "In regard to his person, he was of a middle size, of a thin habit, slovenly in his dress, which was increased by his necessities, very near-sighted, and his hearing imperfect; these circumstances, added to his natural diffidence, and his not having been accustomed to appear in good company but as

6Select Collection, pp. 288-290.

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necessitous, and a mendicant, gave him an awkward sheepish air, which by no means prejudiced strangers in his favour."'17

I suspect that it was Dr. Cuming also who reports that Boyse introduced him to Henry Brooke, the author of The Fool of Quality, in 1738. The comments that follow appear as a note to one of Boyse's poems called "Epistle to Henry Brooke, Esq."

During our acquaintance, poor Boyse, by his irregulari- ties, somehow gave offence to Mr. Brooke, who for a time declined his visits. Boyse, sensible of his fault, (for no man's repentance was more poignant for the time, but, alas! it was brief and fleeting) addressed to Mr. Brooke this penitentiary epistle, which, with a solemn promise of amendment, restored him to favour.'8

Many more details such as these I have described were added by Nichols through his known and unknown correspondents. The effect of nearly all these details is an amelio- ration of the account given by Shiels and by Moore. Some of the bizarre quality begins to fade into ordinary struggle of the kind any penurious writer might have to endure; and some of the picturesque quality begins to dissolve into ordinary pain. As true as this is, however, of the effect produced by the details already cited, it is even more true of certain letters written by Boyse himself to friends, describing his own situation. A number of these letters were included by Nichols in the Select Collection, and a few excerpts are worth atten- tion. This fragment is from a letter Boyse wrote in July 1741.

I have no great reason to brag of the success of the poem "The Deity," though "The Champion" early recommended it. Divine poetry is not the taste of the age, but hope it shall be the support of mine. It is the only subject I now take pleasure in. I have all last summer been employed by Mr. [Edward] Cave [editor of the Gentleman's Magazine] in French translation, a prov- ince highly agreeable to me, and the most profitable business stirring. ... I have the prospect of having a new translation from the French in a few days; but Booksellers are so undistinguishing, and Authors, or rather Scriblers, so plenty, that Learning, unless sup-

7Select Collection, VI, 348. "Select Collection, p. 347. As nearly as I can tell, Cuming, Boyse, and

Brooke were all in London in 1738.

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ported, bids fair to starve between them. I hope the best, as I begin to be a little known, and would ende- avour, as far as I could, to support a good character in the literary way.

All I am sorry for, is, that the taste runs strong against every thing that is just and sensible-unless it is consecrated by the infallibility of a Pope, whose ipse dixit is as much reversed as that of his Holiness at Rome.19

In June 1747 Boyse wrote again to the friend to whom he had sent the previous letter. At this later time, Boyse was living in Reading, employed by David Henry, a brother-in-law of Cave, who became editor of the Gentleman's Magazine after Cave's death and immediately before Nichols became editor. In the early part of this letter, the friend tells us, Boyse "affectingly laments the loss of his first wife Emilia, and describes his situation as 'not wholly uncomfortable.' " Boyse writes:

My salary is wretchedly small (half a guinea a week) both for writing the history and correcting the press; but, I bless God, I enjoy a greater degree of health than I have known for many years, and a serene melancholy, which I prefer to the most poignant sen- sations of pleasure I ever knew.

All I sigh for, is a settlement with some degree of independence, for my last stage of life, that I may have the comfort of my poor dear girl to be near me, and close my eyes.20

Through Boyse's own letters we see him best, and this seems a good place to leave him with his dream of enough

literary success to provide at least the luxury of a peaceful death. It seems clear that to some extent Boyse was infected with a romantic respect for melancholy, but this does not detract from the pathos; for it is also clear that he had literary ambitions, that he did not intend to sink ever deeper into poverty, neglect, and a pauper's grave.

Another and fuller biography of Boyse may not be written. After all, he was a Grub. It must have been almost through accident that he was put in the Dictionary of National Biog- raphy in the first place, that accident being that he had some association with Samuel Johnson, another writer who

tSelect Collection, pp. 329-331. "0Select Collection, pp. 329-331.

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began in much the same way that Boyse began, but who ended differently. But I shall not apologize for removing Boyse from his dark niche for a moment; he is a mutilated monu- ment to defeated aspirations and a brother of all those who have gambled and lost on an uncertain talent.

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY



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