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 were married,
and never had more than two children, both sons--Samuel, their first
born, whose various excellences I am to endeavour to record, and
Nathaniel, who died in his twenty-fifth year.

Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of a large and robust body, and of a
strong and active mind; yet 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." Old Mr. Johnson 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.

Young Johnson had the misfortune to be much afflicted with the scrofula,
or king's evil, which disfigured a countenance naturally well formed,
and hurt his visual nerves so much that he did not see at all with one
of his eyes, though its appearance was little different from that of the
other. Yet, when he and I were travelling in the Highlands of Scotland,
and I pointed out to him a mountain, which, I observed, resembled a
cone, he corrected my inaccuracy by showing me that it was indeed