deal of pain by refusing to hear the verses the children could recite, or
the songs they could sing, particularly one friend who told him that his
two sons should repeat Gray's "Elegy" to him alternately, that he might
judge who had the happiest cadence. "No, pray, sir," said he, "let the
dears both speak it at once; more noise will by that means be made, and the
noise will be sooner over." He told me the story himself, but I have
forgot who the father was.

Mr. Johnson's mother was daughter to a gentleman in the country, such as
there were many of in those days, who possessing, perhaps, one or two
hundred pounds a year in land, lived on the profits, and sought not to
increase their income. She was, therefore, inclined to think higher of
herself than of her husband, whose conduct in money matters being but
indifferent, she had a trick of teasing him about it, and was, by her son's
account, very importunate with regard to her fears of spending more than
they could afford, though she never arrived at knowing how much that was, a
fault common, as he said, to most women who pride themselves on their
economy. They did not, however, as I could understand, live ill together
on the whole. "My father," says he, "could always take his horse and ride
away for orders when things went badly." The lady's maiden name was Ford;
and the parson who sits next to the punch-bowl in Hogarth's "Modern
Midnight Conversation" was her brother's son. This Ford was a man who
chose to be eminent only for vice, with talents that might have made him
conspicuous in literature, and respectable in any profession he could have
chosen. His cousin has mentioned him in the lives of Fenton and of Broome;
and when he spoke of him to me it was always with tenderness, praising his
acquaintance with life and manners, and recollecting one piece of advice
that no man surely ever followed more exactly: "Obtain," says Ford, "some
general principles of every science; he who can talk only on one subject,
or act only in one department, is seldom wanted, and perhaps never wished