Piozzi,

[The elder Johnson was, as his son informed Mrs. p. 2, 5. Piozzi, a very pious and worthy man, but wrong

headed, positive, and afflicted with melancholy: 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 Dr. 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 any body 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 Mrs. Piozzi praise a favourite friend: "Why do you like that man's acquaintance so?" said he. " Because," replied she, "he is open and confiding, and tells me

to know, as far as may be permitted to us, the nature of our own intellect, its powers and its weaknesses;-medically, it might be possible, by early and systematic treatment, to avert or mitigate the disease which, there is reason to suppose, is now often unknown or mistaken;-legally, it would be desirable to have any additional means of discriminating between guilt and misfortune, and of ascertaining with more precision the nice bounds which divide moral guilt from what may be called physical errors;-and in the highest and most important of all the springs of human thought or action, it would be consolatory and edifying to be able to distinguish with greater certainty rational faith and judicious piety, from the enthusiastic confidence or the gloomy despondence of disordered imaginations. The memory of every man who has lived, not inattentively, in society, will furnish him with instances to which these considerations might have been usefully applied. But in reading the life of Doctor Johnson (who was conscious of the disease and of its cause, and of whose blood there remains no one whose feelings can be now offended), they should be kept constantly in view; not merely as a subject of general interest, but as elucidating and explaining many of the errors, peculiarities, and weaknesses of that extraordinary man.-ED.]

stories of his uncles and cousins: I love the light Piozzi, parts of a solid character." "Nay, if you are for P. 2, 5. family history (said Dr. 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 way-side, 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, said 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."]

[Miss Seward, who latterly showed a great deal of malevolence towards Johnson, delighted to repeat a story that one of his uncles had suffered the last penalty of the law. "Shortly after Mr. Porter's death, Johnson asked his mother's consent to marry the old widow. After expressing her surprise at a request so extraordinary- No, Sam, my willing consent you will never have to so preposterous a union. You are not twenty-five, and she is turned fifty. If she had any prudence, this request had never been made to me. Where are your means of subsistence? Porter has died poor, in consequence of his wife's expensive habits. You have great talents, but as yet have turned them into no profitable channel.'-' Mother, I have not deceived Mrs. Porter; I have told her the worst of me; that I am of mean extraction; that I have no money; and that I have had an uncle hanged.' She replied, that she valued no one more or less for his descent; that she had no more money than myself; and that, though she had rot had a relation hanged, she had fifty who deserved hanging."" (Seward's Letters, vol. i, p. 45.) This account was given to Mr. Boswell, who, as Miss Seward could not have known it of her own knowledge, asked the lady for her authority. Miss Seward, in reply, quoted Mrs. Cobb, an old friend of Johnson's, who resided at Lichfield. To her, then, Boswell addressed himself; and, to his equal satisfaction and surprise, was answered that Mrs. Cobb had not only never told such a story, but that she had not even ever heard of it.-(Gent. Mag. vol. 63, p. 1009.) It is painful to have to add, that notwithstanding this denial, Miss Seward persisted in her story to the last. The report as to the hanging was probably derived from a coarse passage in the Rev. Donald M.Nicol's Remarks on Dr. Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides. "But whatever the Doctor may insinuate about the present scarcity of trees in Scotland, we are much deceived by fame if a very near ancestor of his, who was a native of that country, did not find to his cost that a tree was not quite such a rarity in his days.” (P. 18. ed. 1779.) That some Scotchman, of the name of Johnston, may have been hanged in the seventeenth century, is very likely; but there seems no reason whatsoever to believe that any of Dr. Johnson's family were natives of Scotland.—ED.]

2 [The reader is requested to observe, that Dr. Johnson used familiarly to designate Mrs. Thrale (Piozzi) as his "mistress."-ED.]

Account of Life, p. 27.

[Of some other members of his family he gave the following account:

"This Whitsuntide (1719), I and my brother were sent to pass some time at Birmingham; I believe a fortnight. Why such boys were sent to trouble other homes, I cannot tell. My mother had some opinion that much improvement was to be had by changing the mode of life. My uncle, Harrison, was a widower; and his house was kept by Sally Ford, a young woman of such sweetness of temper, that I used to say she had no fault. We lived most at uncle Ford's, being much caressed by my aunt, a good-natured, coarse woman, easy of converse, but willing to find something to censure in the absent. My uncle, Harrison, did not much like us, nor did we like him. He was a very mean and vulgar man, drunk every night, but drunk with little drink; very peevish, very proud, very ostentatious, but, luckily, not rich. At my aunt Ford's I eat so much of a boiled leg of mutton1, that she used to talk of it. My mother, who had lived in a narrow sphere, and was then affected by little things, told me seriously that it would be hardly ever forgotten. Her mind, I think, was afterwards very much enlarged, or greater evils wore out the care of less.

"I staid after the vacation was over some days; and remember, when I wrote home, that I desired the horses to come on Thursday of the first school week; and not till then. I was much pleased with a rattle to my whip, and wrote of it to my mother.

1

"When my father came to fetch us home, he told

[All these trifles-since Dr. Johnson in the height of his fame (for the Account must have been written subsequent to 1768) thought them worth recording-appear worth quoting. It will be seen hereafter that his voracious love of a leg of mutton adhered to him through life; and the prophecy of his mother, that it never would be forgotten, is realised in a way the good woman could not have anticipated.-ED.]

the ostler that he had twelve miles home, and two Account

of Life,

boys under his care. This offended me. He had p. 29.

then a watch', which he returned when he was to pay for it."] Michael Johnson 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 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 [as has been stated] 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. [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.] He was a zealous high-church man

[The convenience of a watch, now so general, Doctor Johnson himself, as Sir J. Hawkins reports (p. 460), did not possess till 1768.-ED.]

[Johnson, in his Dictionary, defines “EXCISE, a hateful tax, levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid ;" and in the Idler (No. 65), he calls a Commissioner of Excise "one of the lowest of all human beings." This violence of language seems so little reasonable, that the Editor was induced to suspect some cause of personal animosity; this mention of the trade in parchment (an exciscable article) afforded a clue, which has led to the confirmation of that suspicion. In the records of the Excise Board is to be found the following letter, addressed to the supervisor of excise at Lichfield: July 27, 1725.-The Commissioners received yours of the 22d instant, and since the justices would not give judgment against Mr. Michael Johnson, the tonner, notwithstanding the facts were fairly against him, the Board direct that the next time he offends, you do not lay an information against him, but send an

Piozzi, p. 6.

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 somewhat1 romantick, 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

20 of September, 1694.

Johnson's mother [was slight in her person, and rather below than above the common size. So excel

affidavit of the fact, that he may be prosecuted in the Exchequer." It does not appear whether he offended again, but here is a sufficient cause of his son's animosity against Commissioners of Excise, and of the allusion in the Dictionary to the special jurisdiction under which that revenue is administered. The reluctance of the justices to convict will appear not unnatural, when it is recollected that M. Johnson was, this very year, chief magistrate of the city. -ED.]

[The romantic part of this story does not seem otherwise authenticated than by an assertion in the Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 55, p. 100, on, as it would seem, the doubtful authority of Miss Seward, that Doctor Johnson had told it. Admitting that he did so, it is to be observed that the fact happened fifteen years before his birth; and his father may be excused if he gave to his wife and son a romantic account of an affair of this nature. Such delicacy of sentiment and conduct as is here ascribed to these young and humble lovers is, it is to be feared, very rare in persons of any age or station, and would seem to require better authentication than can be found for the details of this story-ED.]