son from her will,
and the fact that he had been in Lichfield at least six months before she
arrived, are conclusive.

There is another picturesque fact about Michael Johnson that Mr. Reade
has brought to light. It would seem that twenty years before his
marriage to Sarah Ford, he had been on the eve of marriage to a young
woman at Derby, Mary Neyld; but the marriage did not take place, although
the marriage bond was drawn out. Mary was the daughter of Luke Neyld, a
prominent tradesman of Derby; she was twenty-three years of age at the
time and Michael twenty-nine. Even Mr. Reade's industry has not been
able to discover for us why at the very last moment the marriage was
broken off. It explains, however, why Michael Johnson married late in
life and his melancholia. The human romance that Mr. Reade has unveiled
has surely a certain interest for Johnsonians, for had Michael Johnson
brought his first love affair to a happy conclusion, we should not have
had the man described twenty years later as "possessed of a vile
melancholy," who, when his wife's tongue wagged too much, got upon his
horse and rode away. There would have been no Samuel Johnson, and there
would have been no Johnson Club--a catastrophe which the human mind finds
it hard to conceive of. Two years after the breaking off of her
engagement with Michael Johnson, I may add, Mary Neyld married one James
Warner.

Mr. Reade also calls in question another statement of Boswell's, that
Michael Johnson was really apprenticed at Leek in Staffordshire; our only
authority for this also is the excellent Anna Seward. Further, it is
sufficiently curious that the names of two Samuel Johnsons are recorded
as being buried in one of the churches at Lichfield, one before our
Samuel came into the world, the other three years later: of these, one
died in 1654, the other in 1712. But these points, although of a certain
interest, have nothing to do with Dr. Johnson's ancestry. Now before we
left our homes this evening, each member of the Johnson Brotherhood, as
is his custom, turned up Brother Birkbeck Hill's invaluable index to see
what Johnson had to say upon the subject of ancestry. We know that the
Doctor was very keen upon the founding of a family; that when Mr. Thrale
lost his only son Johnson's sympathies went out to him in a double way,
and perhaps in the greater degree because as he said to Boswell, "Sir,
don't you know how you yourself think? Sir, he wished to