Boswells Life of Johnson | Page 8

time booksellers' shops in the provincial towns of England were very
rare, so that there was not one even in Birmingham, in which town old
Mr. Johnson used to open a shop every market-day. He was a pretty
good Latin scholar, and a citizen so creditable as to be made one of the
magistrates of Lichfield; and, being a man of good sense, and skill in
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. He answered, because it was impossible to keep him
at home; for, young as he was, he believed he had caught the publick
spirit and zeal for Sacheverel, and would have staid for ever in the
church, satisfied with beholding him.'
Nor can I omit a little instance of that jealous independence of spirit,
and impetuosity of temper, which never forsook him. The fact was
acknowledged to me by himself, upon the authority of his mother. One
day, when the servant who used to be sent to school to conduct him
home, had not come in time, he set out by himself, though he was then
so near-sighted, that he was obliged to stoop down on his hands and
knees to take a view of the kennel before he ventured to step over it.
His school-mistress, afraid that he might miss his way, or fall into the
kennel, or be run over by a cart, followed him at some distance. He
happened to turn about and perceive her. Feeling her careful attention
as an insult to his manliness, he ran back to her in a rage, and beat her,
as well as his strength would permit.
Of the power of his memory, for which he was all his life eminent to a
degree almost incredible, the following early instance was told me in
his presence at Lichfield, in 1776, by his step-daughter, Mrs. Lucy
Porter, as related to her by his mother. When he was a child in
petticoats, and had learnt to read, Mrs. Johnson one morning put the
common prayer-book into his hands, pointed to the collect for the day,
and said, 'Sam, you must get this by heart.' She went up stairs, leaving
him to study it: But by the time she had reached the second floor, she
heard him following her. 'What's the matter?' said she. 'I can say it,' he
replied; and repeated it distinctly, though he could not have read it
more than twice.
But there has been another story of his infant precocity generally
circulated, and generally believed, the truth of which I am to refute
upon his own authority. It is told, that, when a child of three years old,

he chanced to tread upon a duckling, the eleventh of a brood, and killed
it; upon which, it is said, he dictated to his mother the following
epitaph:
'Here lies good master duck, Whom Samuel Johnson trod on; If it had
liv'd, it had been GOOD