The Project Gutenberg EBook of Samuel Johnson, by Leslie Stephen

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Title: Samuel Johnson

Author: Leslie Stephen

Release Date: February 11, 2004 [EBook #11031]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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SAMUEL JOHNSON

BY

LESLIE STEPHEN

NEW YORK

1878

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.
CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE

CHAPTER II.
LITERARY CAREER

CHAPTER III.
JOHNSON AND HIS FRIENDS

CHAPTER IV.
JOHNSON AS A LITERARY DICTATOR

CHAPTER V.
THE CLOSING YEARS OF JOHNSON'S LIFE

CHAPTER VI.
JOHNSON'S WRITINGS

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

CHAPTER I.

CHILDHOOD AND EARLY LIFE.

Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709. His father, Michael
Johnson, was a bookseller, highly respected by the cathedral clergy, and
for a time sufficiently prosperous to be a magistrate of the town, and,
in the year of his son's birth, sheriff of the county. He opened a
bookstall on market-days at neighbouring towns, including Birmingham,
which was as yet unable to maintain a separate bookseller. The tradesman
often exaggerates the prejudices of the class whose wants he supplies,
and Michael Johnson was probably a more devoted High Churchman and Tory
than many of the cathedral clergy themselves. He reconciled himself with
difficulty to taking the oaths against the exiled dynasty. He was a man
of considerable mental and physical power, but tormented by
hypochondriacal tendencies. His son inherited a share both of his
constitution and of his principles. Long afterwards Samuel associated
with his childish days a faint but solemn recollection of a lady in
diamonds and long black hood. The lady was Queen Anne, to whom, in
compliance with a superstition just dying a natural death, he had been
taken by his mother to be touched for the king's evil. The touch was
ineffectual. Perhaps, as Boswell suggested, he ought to have been
presented to the genuine heirs of the Stuarts in Rome. Disease and
superstition had thus stood by his cradle, and they never quitted him
during life. The demon of hypochondria was always lyi