been industriously circulated and believed, that he never was in good
company till late in life, and, consequently had been confirmed
in coarse and ferocious manners by long habits, is wholly without
foundation. Some of the ladies have assured me, they recollected him
well when a young man, as distinguished for his complaisance.

In the forlorn state of his circumstances, he accepted of an offer to be
employed as usher in the school of Market-Bosworth, in Leicestershire,
to which it appears, from one of his little fragments of a diary, that
he went on foot, on the 16th of July.

This employment was very irksome to him in every respect, and he
complained grievously of it in his letters to his friend Mr. Hector, who
was now settled as a surgeon at Birmingham. The letters are lost; but
Mr. Hector recollects his writing 'that the poet had described the dull
sameness of his existence in these words, "Vitam continet una dies" (one
day contains the whole of my life); that it was unvaried as the note of
the cuckow; and that he did not know whether it was more disagreeable
for him to teach, or the boys to learn, the grammar rules.' His general
aversion to this painful drudgery was greatly enhanced by a disagreement
between him and Sir Wolstan Dixey, the patron of the school, in whose
house, I have been told, he officiated as a kind of domestick chaplain,
so far, at least, as to say grace at table, but was treated with what
he represented as intolerable harshness; and, after suffering for a few
months such complicated misery, he relinquished a situation which all
his life afterwards he recollected with the strongest aversion, and even
a degree of horrour. But it is probable that at this period, whatever
uneasiness he may have endured, he laid the foundation of much future
eminence by application to his studies.