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. He was a zealous high-church man 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.

Johnson's mother was a woman of distinguished understanding. 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 inferiour 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, 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 aid for its preservation.

There is a traditional story of the infant Hercules of toryism,
so curiously characteristick, that I shall not withhold it. It was
communicated to me in a letter from Miss Mary Adye, of Lichfield:

'When Dr. Sacheverel was at Lichfield, Johnson was not quite three years
old. My grandfather Hammond observed him at the cathedral perched upon
his father's shoulders, listening and gaping at the much celebrated
preacher. Mr. Hammond asked Mr. Johnson how he could possibly think of
bringing such an infant to church, and in the midst of so great a crowd.