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 table-talk, 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." [Advancement of Learn- . ing, Book I.]

Having said thus much by way of Introduction, I commit the following pages to the candour of the public.

SAMUEL JOHNSON was born in 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 of an ancient race of substantial yeomanry in Warwickshire. They were well advanced 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 Nathaniel, who died in his twenty-fifth year."

1 The title Gentleman had still, in 1709, some degree of its original meaning, and as Mr. Johnson served the office of sheriff of Lichfield in that year, he seems to have been fully entitled to it. The Doctor, at his entry on the books of Pembroke College, and at his matriculation, designated himself as filius generosi.—CROKER.

2 Michael Johnson, the father of Samuel, was a bookseller at Lichfield; a very pious and worthy man, but wrong-headed, positive, and afflicted with melancholy, as his son, from whom alone I had the information, once told me: his business, however, leading him to be much on horseback, contributed to the preservation of his bodily health, and mental sanity; which, when he stayed long at home, would sometimes be about to give way; and Mr. Johnson, said, that when his workshop, a detached building, had fallen half down for want of money to repair it, his father was not less diligent to lock the door every night, though he saw that anybody might walk in at the back part, and knew that there was no security obtained by barring the front door. "This (said his son) was madness, you may see, and would have been discoverable in other instances of the prevalence of imagination, but that poverty prevented it from playing such tricks as riches and leisure encourage." Michael was a man of still larger size and greater strength than his son, who was reckoned very like him, but did not delight in talking much of his family-" One has (says he) so little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary!" One day, however, hearing me praise a favourite friend with partial tenderness and true esteem: "Why do you like that man's acquaintance so?" said he. "Because," replied I, "he is open and confiding, and tells me stories of his uncles and cousins; I love the light parts of a solid character." "Nay, if you are for family history (says Mr. Johnson, good-humouredly), I can fit you: I had an uncle, Cornelius Ford, who, upon a journey, stopped and read an inscription written on a stone he saw standing by the wayside, set up, as it proved, in honour of a man who had leaped a certain leap thereabouts, the extent of which was specified upon the stone: Why now, says my uncle, I could leap it in my boots; and he did leap it in his boots. I had likewise another uncle, Andrew (continued he), my father's brother, who kept the ring in Smithfield (where they wrestled and boxed), for a whole year, and never was thrown or conquered. Here now are uncles for you, mistress, if that's the way to your heart."

Michael Johnson was past fifty years old when he married his wife, who was upwards of forty; yet, I think her son told me she remained three years childless before he was born into the world, who so greatly contributed to improve it. In three years more she brought another son, Nathaniel, who lived to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old,* and of whose manly spirit I have heard his brother speak with pride and pleasure, mentioning one circumstance,

Nathaniel was born in 1712, and died in 1737. Their father, Michael Johnson, was born at Cubley in Derbyshire, in 1656, at 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 Worcester, in 1669, and died at Lichfield, in January, 1759, in her ninetieth year. King's Norton Dr. Johnson supposed to be in Warwickshire (see his inscription for his mother's tomb), but it is in Worcestershire, probably on the confines of the county of Warwick.-MALONE,

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 enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of

particular enough, that when the company were one day lamenting the badness of the roads, he inquired where they could be, as he travelled the country more than most people, and had never seen a bad road in his life. The two brothers did not, however, much delight in each other's company, being always rivals for the mother's fondness; and many of the severe reflections on domestic life in Rasselas, took their source from its author's keen recollections of the time passed in his early years. Their father, Michael, died of an inflammatory fever, at the age of seventy-six, as Mr. Johnson told me: their mother at eighty-nine, of a gradual decay. She was slight in her person, he said, and rather below than above the common size. So excellent was her character, and so blameless her life, that when an oppressive neighbour once endeavoured to take from her a little field she possessed, he could persuade no attorney to undertake the cause against a woman so beloved in her narrow circle; and it is this incident he alludes to in the line of his "Vanity of Human Wishes," calling her

"The general favourite as the general friend."

Mrs. Piozzi.

Note by Mr. Croker.-There seems some difficulty in arriving at a satisfactory opinion as to Michael Johnson's real condition and circumstances. That in the latter years of his life he was poor, is certain; and Dr. Johnson (in the "Account of his early Life") not only admits the general fact of poverty, but gives several instances of what may be called indigence: yet, on the other hand, there is evidence, that for near fifty years he occupied a respectable rank amongst his fellow-citizens, and appears in the annals of Lichfield on occasions not bespeaking poverty. In 1687, a subscription for recasting the cathedral bells was set on foot, headed by the bishop, dean, etc., aided by the neighbouring gentry: Michael Johnson's name stands the twelfth in the list; and his contribution, though only 10s., was not comparatively contemptible; for no one, except the bishop and dean, gave so much as £10. Baronets and knights gave a guinea or two, and the great body of the contributors gave less than Johnson. (Harwood's Lichfield, p. 69.) In 1694, we find him burying in the Cathedral, and placing a marble stone over a young woman in whose fate he was interested. His house, a handsome one, and in one of the best situations in the town, was his own freehold; and he appears to have added to it, for we find in the books of the corporation the following entry: "1708, July 13. Agreed, that Mr. Michael Johnson, bookseller, have a lease of his encroachment of his house in Sadler's Street, for forty years, at 2s. 6d. per an." And this lease, at the expiration of the forty years was renewed to the Doctor as a mark of the respect of his fellow-citizens. In 1709, Michael Johnson served the office of sheriff of the county of the city of Lichfield. In 1718, he was elected junior bailiff; and in 1725, senior bailiff, or chief magistrate. Thus respected and apparently thriving in Lichfield, the following extract of a letter, written by the Rev. George Plaxton, chaplain to Lord Gower, will show the high estimation in which the father of our great moralist was held in the neighbouring country: "Trentham, St Peter's day, 1716. Johnson, the Lichfield librarian, is now here; he propagates learning all over this diocese, 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 recognizance sine directione Michaelis." (Gentleman's Magazine, October, 1791.) On the whole, it seems probable that the growing expenses of a family,

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." 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 neighborhood, some of which were at a considerable 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

and losses in trade, had in his latter years reduced Mr. Johnson, from the state of competency which he had before enjoyed, to very narrow circumstances.

The following is the title-page and address to his customers, of one of Michael Johnson's Sale Catalogues, in Mr. Upcott's collection:

"A Catalogue of choice books, in all faculties, divinity, history, travels, law, physic, mathematics, philosophy, poetry, etc., together with bibles, common-prayers, shop-books, pocketbooks, etc. Also fine French prints, for staircases and large chimney-pieces; maps, large and small. To be sold by Auction, or he who bids most, at the Talbot, in Sidbury, Worcester. The sale to begin on Friday, the 21st of this instant March, 1717-18, exactly at six o'clock in the afternoon, and to continue till all be sold. Catalogues are given out at the place of sale, or by Michael Johnson of Lichfield.

"To all Gentlemen, Ladies, and others, in and near Worcester:

"I have had several auctions in your neighbourhood, as Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Evesham, etc., with success, and am now to address myself, and try my fortune with you.

"You must not wonder that I begin every day's sale with small and common books; the reason is, a room is some time a filling; and persons of address and business seldom coming first, they are entertainment till we are full: they are never the last books of the best kind of that sort, for ordinary families and young persons, etc. But in the body of the catalogue you will find law, mathematics, history; and for the learned in divinity, there are Drs. South, Taylor, Tillotson, Beveridge, Flavel, etc., the best of that kind: and to please the Ladies, I have added store of fine pictures and paper-hangings; and, by the way, I would desire them to take notice, that the pictures shall always be put up by the noon of that day they are to be sold, that they may be viewed by daylight.

"I have no more, but to wish you pleased, and myself a good sale, who am your humble servant,

"M. JOHNSON."]

engaging unsuccessfully' in a manufacture of parchment. He was a zealous high-churchman and a 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.

She departed this Life

20th of September, 1694.

Johnson's mother was a woman of distinguished understanding. I asked his old school-fellow, Mr. Hector, surgeon, of Bermingham, 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,

1 In this undertaking, nothing prospered; they had no sooner bought a large stock of skins, than a heavy duty was laid upon that article, and from Michael's absence by his many avocations as a bookseller, the parchment business was committed to a faithless servant, and thence they gradually declined into strait circumstances.-Gent. Mag., vol. Iv. p.100.