Samuel Johnson was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookseller at Lichfield,
in Staffordshire; a very pious and worthy man, but wrong-headed, positive,
and afflicted with melancholy, as his son, from whom alone I had the
information, once told me: his business, however, leading him to be much
on horseback, contributed to the preservation of his bodily health and
mental sanity, which, when he stayed long at home, would sometimes be about
to give way; and Mr. Johnson said, that when his workshop, a detached
building, had fallen half down for want of money to repair it, his father
was not less diligent to lock the door every night, though he saw that
anybody might walk in at the back part, and knew that there was no security
obtained by barring the front door. "THIS," says his son, "was madness,
you may see, and would have been discoverable in other instances of the
prevalence of imagination, but that poverty prevented it from playing such
tricks as riches and leisure encourage." Michael was a man of still larger
size and greater strength than his son, who was reckoned very like him, but
did not delight in talking much of his family: "One has," says he, "SO
little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary." One day, however,
hearing me praise a favourite friend with partial tenderness as well as
true esteem: "Why do you like that man's acquaintance so?" said he.
"Because," replied I, "he is open and confiding, and tells me stories of
his uncles and cousins; I love the light parts of a solid character."
"Nay, if you are for family history," says Mr. Johnson, good-humouredly,
"_I_ can fit you: I had an uncle, Cornelius Ford, who, upon a journey,
stopped and read an inscription written on a stone he saw standing by the
wayside, set up, as it proved, in honour of a man who had leaped a certain
leap thereabouts, the extent of which was specified upon the stone: 'Why
now,' says my uncle, 'I could leap it in my boots;' and he did leap it in
his boots. I had likewise another uncle, Andrew," continued he, "my
father's brother, who kept the ring in Smithfield (where they wrestled and