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 Nathanael, 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, 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 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 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 one of the
magistrates of Lichfield; and, being a man of good sense, and skill in