s good
friend Dr. Hector in 1733 is historically famous; his translations and
writings while here have been often noted; his marriage with the widow
Porter duly chronicled; but it is due to the researches of the learned
Dr. Langford that attention has been lately drawn to the interesting
fact that Johnson, who was born in 1709, actually came to Birmingham in
his tenth year, on a visit to his uncle Harrison, who in after years, in
his usual plain-speaking style, Johnson described as "a very mean and
vulgar man, drunk every night, but drunk with little drink, very
peevish, very proud, very ostentatious, but, luckily, not rich." That
our local governors have a due appreciation of the genius of the famed
lexicographer is shown by the fact of a passage-way from Bull Street to
the Upper Priory being named "Dr. Samuel Johnson's Passage!"

~Jubilees.~--Strange as it may appear to the men of the present day,
there has never been a National holiday yet kept equal to that known as
the Jubilee Day of George the Third. Why it should have been so seems a
great puzzle now. The celebration began in this town at midnight of the
24th October, 1809, by the ringers of St. Philip's giving "five times
fifty claps, an interim with the same number of rounds, to honour the
King, Queen, the Royal Family, the Nation, and the loyal town of
Birmingham." At six o'clock next morning the sluggards were aroused with
a second peal, and with little rest the bells were kept swinging the
whole day long, the finale coming with a performance of "perpetual claps
and clashings" that must have made many a head ache. There was a Sunday
school jubilee celebrated September 14, 1831. The fiftieth year's
pastorate of Rev. John Angell James was kept September 12, 1855, and the
Jubilee Day of the Chapel in Carr's Lane, September 27, 1870; of Cannon
Street Chapel, July 16, 1856; of the Rev. G. Cheatle's pastorate, at
Lombard Street Chapel, January 11, 1860; of the Missionary Society,
September 15, 1864; of Pope Pius the Ninth, in 1877, when the Roman
Catholics of this town sent him L1,230. being the third largest
contribution from England.

~Jubilee Singers.~--This troupe of coloured minstrels gave their first
entertainment here in the Town Hall April 9, 1874.

~Jury Lists.~--According to the Jury Act, 6 George IV., the
churchwardens and overseers of every parish in England are required to
make out an alphabetical list before the 1st September in each year of
all me