fula, then widely known in consequence of that belief
as the King's Evil. In obedience to that {40} belief, in the spring of
1712 some poor folk of Lichfield travelled to London with their infant
son, in the hope that Queen Anne would lay her hand upon the child and
make him whole. There were days appointed for the ceremony of the
touch, and on one of those days the Johnsons of Lichfield carried their
little Samuel into the royal presence, and Queen Anne stroked the child
with her hand. For more than seventy years a dim memory remained with
Johnson of a stately lady in black; for more than seventy years the
malady that her touch was thought to heal haunted him. When the man
who had been the sick child died, the third prince of a foreign house
was seated on the throne of England, and the third of the line owed,
unconscious of the debt, no little of his security on his throne and no
little of his popularity with the mass of his people to the struggling
author who had received the benediction of the last Stuart sovereign of
England.

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on September 8,
1709. His father was a bookseller, perhaps too fond of books to be a
good dealer in them. But his crowded shelves were a paradise to his
son when at the age of sixteen he came home from the last of many
schoolings, each of which had taught him much. For two years he read
his way recklessly, riotously, and joyously through his father's
migratory library. He took the advice of the varlet in "The Taming of
the Shrew," and studied what he most affected. His memory was as vast
as his head was huge and his body bulky. He read what he liked, and he
stored his mind with as miscellaneous a mass of knowledge as ever was
heaped up within the pent-house of one human skull. That youthful zeal
and fiery heat of study remained youthful with him to the end of his
many days; the passion for learning never burned low in that mighty
brain. The man who in his old age studied Dutch to test the acquiring
powers of his intellect, and still found them freshly tempered, acted
in his ebullient boyhood as if, like Bacon, he had taken all knowledge
to be his province. The man who in his old age found an exquisite
entertainment in reading a Spanish romance of chivalry, in his eager
{41} boyhood found the Latin poems of Petrarch sweeter than apples.
The great Italian who counted the sonnets to which he owes his
immortality but as the cloud