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. "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.] 2 [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 exciseable 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 tanner, 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 au 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: 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.] 1 [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.] p. 6. lent was her character, and so blameless her life, that Piozzi, 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. Nor could any one pay more willing homage to such a character, though she had not been related to him, than did Dr. Johnson on every occasion that offered : his disquisition on Pope's epitaph placed over Mrs. Corbet, is a proof of that preference always given by him to a noiseless life over a bustling one.] She was a woman of distinguished understanding. [It was not, however, Mr. Malone observes, much cultivated, as may be collected from Dr. Johnson's own account. My father and mother (said he) had not much Account happiness from each other. She had no value. for p. 14. 66 They his relations; those indeed whom we knew of were of Life, of Life, P. 14. Account 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. My father considered tea as very expensive, and discouraged my mother from keeping company with the neighbours, and from paying visits or receiving them. She lived to say, many years after, that if the time were to pass again, she would not comply with such unsocial injunctions. 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."] I asked his old school-fellow, 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 inscribed 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 not done; but there was no occasion for any artificial Piozzi, aid for its preservation. [When he related this cir p. 21, 22. [This is told nearly in the same words in the Account of the Life, and is an additional proof of the authenticity of that little work.-ED.] 2 [Mrs. Piozzi says a workman, and, in this instance, her account is more likely to be accurate than Boswell's. This trifle is observed to justify thus early the editor's opinion, that even in the small matters in which Boswell delights to accuse Mrs. Piozzi of inaccuracy, she is sometimes probably as correct as he is. ED.] |