Anecdotes of Johnson | Page 9

kitchen, he kept on steadily enough till, coming to the Ghost scene, he
suddenly hurried upstairs to the street door that he might see people
about him. Such an incident, as he was not unwilling to relate it, is
probably in every one's possession now; he told it as a testimony to the
merits of Shakespeare. But one day, when my son was going to school,
and dear Dr. Johnson followed as far as the garden gate, praying for his
salvation in a voice which those who listened attentively could hear
plain enough, he said to me suddenly, "Make your boy tell you his
dreams: the first corruption that entered into my heart was
communicated in a dream." "What was it, sir?" said I. "Do not ask me,"
replied he, with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation.
I never durst make any further inquiries. He retained a strong aversion
for the memory of Hunter, one of his schoolmasters, who, he said, once
was a brutal fellow, "so brutal," added he, "that no man who had been
educated by him ever sent his son to the same school." I have, however,
heard him acknowledge his scholarship to be very great. His next
master he despised, as knowing less than himself, I found, but the name
of that gentleman has slipped my memory. Mr. Johnson was himself
exceedingly disposed to the general indulgence of children, and was
even scrupulously and ceremoniously attentive not to offend them; he
had strongly persuaded himself of the difficulty people always find to
erase early impressions either of kindness or resentment, and said "he
should never have so loved his mother when a man had she not given

him coffee she could ill afford, to gratify his appetite when a boy." "If
you had had children, sir," said I, "would you have taught them
anything?" "I hope," replied he, "that I should have willingly lived on
bread and water to obtain instruction for them; but I would not have set
their future friendship to hazard for the sake of thrusting into their
heads knowledge of things for which they might not perhaps have
either taste or necessity. You teach your daughters the diameters of the
planets, and wonder when you have done that they do not delight in
your company. No science can be communicated by mortal creatures
without attention from the scholar; no attention can be obtained from
children without the infliction of pain, and pain is never remembered
without resentment." That something should be learned was, however,
so certainly his opinion that I have heard him say how education had
been often compared to agriculture, yet that it resembled it chiefly in
this: "That if nothing is sown, no crop," says he, "can be obtained." His
contempt of the lady who fancied her son could be eminent without
study, because Shakespeare was found wanting in scholastic learning,
was expressed in terms so gross and so well known, I will not repeat
them here.
To recollect, however, and to repeat the sayings of Dr. Johnson, is
almost all that can be done by the writers of his life, as his life, at least
since my acquaintance with him, consisted in little else than talking,
when he was not absolutely employed in some serious piece of work;
and whatever work he did seemed so much below his powers of
performance that he appeared the idlest of all human beings, ever
musing till he was called out to converse, and conversing till the fatigue
of his friends, or the promptitude of his own temper to take offence,
consigned him back again to silent meditation.
The remembrance of what had passed in his own childhood made Mr.
Johnson very solicitous to preserve the felicity of children: and when
he had persuaded Dr. Sumner to remit the tasks usually given to fill up
boys' time during the holidays, he rejoiced exceedingly in the success
of his negotiation, and told me that he had never ceased representing to
all the eminent schoolmasters in England the absurd tyranny of
poisoning the hour of permitted pleasure by keeping future misery
before the children's eyes, and tempting them by bribery or falsehood to
evade it. "Bob Sumner," said he, "however, I have at length prevailed

upon. I know not, indeed, whether his tenderness was persuaded, or his
reason convinced, but the effect will always be the same. Poor Dr.
Sumner died, however, before the next vacation."
Mr. Johnson was of opinion, too, that young people should have
POSITIVE, not GENERAL, rules given for their direction. "My
mother," said he, "was always telling me that I did not BEHAVE
myself properly, that I should endeavour to learn BEHAVIOUR, and
such cant; but when I replied that she ought to tell me what to do, and