ouple of guineas. As far as I am able to learn, Brother Augustine
Birrell is the only one of the Brethren who has as yet purchased a copy.
The other book, our Brother Birkbeck Hill's biography, is to be issued
next week by Mr. Edward Arnold, who has kindly placed an early copy at my
disposal. In both these volumes there is much food for reflection for
all good Johnsonians. Dr. Johnson's ancestry, it may be, makes little
appeal to the crowd, but it will to the Brethren. There is no more
favourite subject for satire than the tendency to minute study of an
author and his antecedents. But the lover of that author knows the
fascination of the topic. He can forgive any amount of zeal. I confess
that personally I stand amazed at the variety and interest of Mr. Reade's
researches. Let me take a sample case of his method before coming to the
main issue. In the opening pages of Boswell's _Johnson_ there is some
account of Mr. Michael Johnson, the father. The most picturesque
anecdote told of Johnson Senior is that concerning a young woman of Leek
in Staffordshire, who while he served his apprenticeship there conceived
a passion for him, which he did not return. She followed him to
Lichfield, where she took lodgings opposite to the house in which he
lived, and indulged her hopeless flame. Ultimately she died of love and
was buried in the Cathedral at Lichfield, when Michael Johnson put a
stone over her grave. This pathetic romance has gone unchallenged by all
Boswell's editors, even including our prince of editors, Dr. Birkbeck
Hill. Mr. Reade, it seems to me, has completely shattered the story,
which, as all Johnsonian students know, was obtained by Boswell from Miss
Anna Seward. Mr. Reade is able to show that Michael Johnson had been
settled in Lichfield for at least eleven years before the death of
Elizabeth Blaney, that for five years she had been the much appreciated
domestic in a household in that city. Her will indicates moreover a
great affection for her mistress and for that mistress's son; she leaves
the boy a gold watch and his mother the rest of her belongings. The only
connexion that Michael Johnson would seem to have had with the woman was
that he and his brother were called in after her decease to make an
inventory of her little property. I think that these little facts about
Mistress Blaney, her five years' residence at Lichfield apparently in a
most comfortable position, her omission of Michael John