propagate his
name." Johnson himself, Boswell tells us, had no pretensions to blood.
"I here may say," he said, "that I have great merit in being zealous for
subordination and the honours of birth; for I can hardly tell who was my
grandfather." Johnson further informed Mrs. Thrale that he did not
delight in talking much of his family: "There is little pleasure," he
says, "in relating the anecdotes of beggary." He constantly deprecated
his origin. According to Miss Seward, he told his wife before he married
her that he was of mean extraction; but the letter in which Miss Seward
gives her version of Johnson's courtship is worth recalling, although I
do not believe a single word of it:--

The rustic prettiness and artless manners of her daughter, the present
Mrs. Lucy Porter, had won Johnson's youthful heart, when she was upon
a visit at my grandfather's in Johnson's school-days. Disgusted by
his unsightly form, she had a personal aversion to him, nor could the
beautiful verses he addressed to her teach her to endure him. The
nymph at length returned to her parents at Birmingham, and was soon
forgotten. Business taking Johnson to Birmingham on the death of his
own father, and calling upon his coy mistress there, he found her
father dying. He passed all his leisure hours at Mr. Porter's,
attending his sick bed, and in a few months after his death, asked
Mrs. Johnson's consent to marry the old widow. After expressing her
surprise at a request so extraordinary--"No, Sam, my willing consent
you will never have to so preposterous a union. You are not twenty-
five, and she is turned fifty. If she had any prudence, this request
had never been made to me. Where are your means of subsistence?
Porter has died poor, in consequence of his wife's expensive habits.
You have great talents, but, as yet, have turned them into no
profitable channel." "Mother, I have not deceived Mrs. Porter: I have
told her the worst of me; that I am of mean extraction; that I have no
money, and that I have had an uncle hanged. She replied, that she
valued no one more or less for his descent; that she had no more money
than myself; and that, although she had not had a relation hanged, she
had fifty who deserved hanging."

Now why did Dr. Johnson take this attitude about his ancestry, so
contrary to the spirit that guided him where other people's genealogical
trees were conc