"
After so many essays and volumes of Johnsoniana, what remains for the
present writer? Perhaps, what has not been attempted; a short, yet full,
a faithful, yet temperate, history of Dr. Johnson.
SAMUEL JOHNSON was born at Lichfield, September 7, 1709, O. S[b]. His
father, Michael Johnson, was a bookseller in that city; a man of large,
athletic make, and violent passions; wrong-headed, positive, and, at
times, afflicted with a degree of melancholy, little short of madness.
His mother was sister to Dr. Ford, a practising physician, and father of
Cornelius Ford, generally known by the name of parson Ford, the same who
is represented near the punch-bowl in Hogarth's Midnight Modern
Conversation. In the life of Fenton, Johnson says, that "his abilities,
instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and
dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and the
wise." Being chaplain to the earl of Chesterfield, he wished to attend
that nobleman on his embassy to the Hague. Colley Cibber has recorded
the anecdote. "You should go," said the witty peer, "if to your many
vices you would add one more." "Pray, my lord, what is that?"
"Hypocrisy, my dear doctor." Johnson had a younger brother named
Nathaniel, who died at the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Michael
Johnson, the father, was chosen, in the year 1718, under bailiff of
Lichfield; and, in the year 1725, he served the office of the senior
bailiff.
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