I am fully aware of the objections which may be made to the minuteness on some occasions of my detail of Johnson's conversation, and how happily it is adapted for the petty exercise of ridicule by men of superficial understanding and ludicrous fancy: but I remain firm and confident in my opinion that minute particulars are frequently characteristic, and always amusing, when they relate to a distinguished man. I am therefore exceedingly unwilling that anything, however slight, which my illustrious friend thought it worth his while to express with any degree of point should perish. For this almost superstitious reverence, I have found very old and venerable authority, quoted by our great modern prelate, Secker, in whose tenth sermon there is the following passage: 'Rabbi David Kimchi, a noted Jewish commentator, who lived about five hundred years ago, explains that passage in the first Psalm, His leaf also shall not wither, from Rabbins yet older than himself, thus: That even the idle talk, so he expresses it, of a good man ought to be regarded; the most superfluous things he saith are always of some value. And other ancient authors have the same phrase, nearly in the same sense.' Of one thing I am certain, that considering how highly the small portion which we have of the tabletalk and other anecdotes of our celebrated writers is valued, and how earnestly it is regretted that we have not more, I am justified in preserving rather too many of Johnson's sayings than too few, especially as from the diversity of dispositions it cannot be known with certainty beforehand whether what may seem trifling to some, and perhaps to the collector himself, may not be most agreeable to many; and the greater number that an author can please in any degree, the more pleasure does there arise to a benevolent mind. To those who are weak enough to think this a degrading task, and the time and labour which have been devoted to it misemployed, I shall content myself with opposing the authority of the greatest man of any age, Julius Cæsar, of whom Bacon observes that 'in his book of Apophthegms which he collected we see that he esteemed it more honour to make himself but a pair of tables, to take the wise and pithy words of others, than to have every word of his own to be made an apophthegm or an oracle.'1 Having said thus much by way of introduction, I commit the following pages to the candour of the public. SAMUEL JOHNSON was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on the 18th of September, N.s. 1709; and his initiation into the Christian Church was not delayed; for his baptism is recorded in the register of St. Mary's parish in that city, to have been performed on the day of his birth: his father is there styled Gentleman, a circumstance of which an ignorant panegyrist has praised him for not being proud, when the truth is that the appellation of Gentleman, though now lost in the indiscriminate assumption of Esquire, was commonly taken by those who could not boast of gentility. His father was Michael Johnson, a native of Derbyshire, of obscure extraction, who settled in Lichfield as a bookseller and stationer. His mother was Sarah Ford, descended from an ancient race of substantial yeomanry in Warwickshire. They were well advanced 1 Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Book 1. in years when they married, and never had more than two children, both sons; Samuel, their first-born, who lived to be the illustrious character whose various excellence I am to endeavour to record, and Nathanael, who died in his twenty-fifth year.1 Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of a large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance are often discovered, there was in him a mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute inquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sensation of gloomy wretchedness. From him then his son inherited, with some other qualities, ‘a vile melancholy,' which in his too strong expression of any disturbance of the mind, made him mad all his life, at least not sober.'2 Michael was, however, forced by the narrowness of his circumstances to be very diligent in business, not only in his shop, but by occasionally resorting to several towns in the neighbourhood, some of which were at a considerable 3 1 [Nathanael was born in 1712, and died in 1737. Their father, Michael Johnson, was born at Cubley, in Derbyshire, in 1656, and died at Lichfield in 1731, at the age of seventy-six. Sarah Ford, his wife, was born at King's-Norton,* in the county of Warwick, in 1669, and died at Lichfield in January 1759, in her ninetieth year.-M.] 2 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 3rd ed., p. 213. 3 Extract of a letter, dated 'Trentham, St. Peter's day, 1716,' written by the Rev. George Plaxton, chaplain at that time to Lord Gower, which may serve to show the high estimation in which the father of our great moralist was held :- Johnson, the Lichfield librarian, is now here; he propagates learning all over this diocess, and advanceth knowledge to its just height; all the clergy here are his pupils, and suck all they have from him; Allen cannot make a warrant without his precedent, nor our quondam John Evans draw a recognisance sine directione Michaelis.-Gentleman's Magazine, Oct. 1791. • King's-Norton is here stated to be in Warwickshire, on the authority of Dr. Johnson (see his inscription for his mother's tomb), but it is in Worcestershire, probably on the confines of the county of Warwick. distance from Lichfield. At that time booksellers' shops, in the provincial towns of England, were very rare; so that there was not one even in Birmingham, in which town old Mr. Johnson used to open a shop every market-day. He was a pretty good Latin scholar, and a citizen so creditable as to be made one of the magistrates of Lichfield; and being a man of good sense, and skill in his trade, he acquired a reasonable share of wealth, of which, however, he afterwards lost the greatest part, by engaging unsuccessfully in a manufacture of parchment. He was a zealous highchurchman and royalist, and retained his attachment to the unfortunate house of Stuart, though he reconciled himself, by casuistical arguments of expediency and necessity, to take the oaths imposed by the prevailing power. There is a circumstance in his life somewhat romantic, but so well authenticated, that I shall not omit it. A young woman of Leek in Staffordshire, while he served his apprenticeship there, conceived a violent passion for him; and though it met with no favourable return, followed him to Lichfield, where she took lodgings opposite to the house in which he lived, and indulged her hopeless flame. When he was informed that it so preyed upon her mind that her life was in danger, he with a generous humanity went to her and offered to marry her, but it was then too late her vital power was exhausted; and she actually exhibited one of the very rare instances of dying for love. She was buried in the cathedral of Lichfield; and he, with a tender regard, placed a stone over her grave with this inscription: : Here lies the body of Mrs. ELIZABETH BLANEY, a stranger; 20th of September 1694. Johnson's mother was a woman of distinguished understanding.1 I asked his old schoolfellow, Mr. Hector, surgeon, of Birmingham, if she was not vain of her son. He said, 'She had too much good sense to be vain, but she knew her son's value.' Her piety was not inferior to her understanding; and to her must be ascribed those early impressions of religion upon the mind of her son, from which the world afterwards derived so much benefit. He told me that he remembered distinctly having had the first notice of Heaven, a place to which good people went,' and Hell, 'a place to which bad people went,' communicated to him by her, when a little child in bed with her; and that it might be the better fixed in his memory, she sent him to repeat it to Thomas Jackson, their man-servant; he not being in the way, this was 1[It was not, however, much cultivated, as we may collect from Dr. Johnson's own account of his early years, published by R. Phillips, 8vo, 1805, a work undoubtedly authentic, and which, though short, is curious and well worthy of perusal. 'My father and mother (says Johnson) had not much happiness from each other. They seldom conversed, for my father could not bear to talk of his affairs, and my mother, being unacquainted with books, cared not to talk of anything else. Had my mother been more literate, they had been better companions. She might have sometimes introduced her unwelcome topic with more success if she could have diversified her conversation. Of business she had no distinct conception, and therefore her discourse was composed only of complaint, fear, and suspicion. Neither of them ever tried to calculate the profits of trade or the expenses of living. My mother concluded that we were poor because we lost by some of our trades, but the truth was that my father, having in the early part of his life contracted debts, never had trade sufficient to enable him to pay them and to maintain his family: he got something, but not enough. It was not till about 1768 that I thought to calculate the returns of my father's trade, and, by that estimate, his probable profits. This, I believe, my parents never did.'-M.] |