owever, on all proper seasons, such as the approach of an election,
I throw a suitable dash or two into my sermons, which I have the
pleasure to hear is not disagreeable to Sir Thomas and the other
honest gentlemen my neighbors, who have all promised me these five
years to procure an ordination for a son of mine, who is now near
thirty, hath an infinite stock of learning, and is, I thank Heaven, of
an unexceptionable life; tho, as he was never at a university, the
bishop refuses to ordain him. Too much care can not indeed be taken in
admitting any to the sacred office; tho I hope he will never act so as
to be a disgrace to any order, but will serve his God and his country
to the utmost of his power, as I have endeavored to do before him;
nay, and will lay down his life whenever called to that purpose. I am
sure I have educated him in those principles; so that I have acquitted
my duty, and shall have nothing to answer for on that account. But I
do not distrust him, for he is a good boy; and if Providence should
throw it in his way to be of as much consequence in a public light as
his father once was, I can answer for him he will use his talents as
honestly as I have done."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: From "Tom Jones, a Foundling," Book 3, Chapter 2.]

[Footnote 19: From Book 16, Chapter 5, of "The History of Tom Jones, a
Foundling."]

[Footnote 20: This was a letter from Sophia Weston, hoping "that
Fortune may be sometime kinder to us than at present."]

[Footnote 21: From Book 2, Chapter 8, of "The Adventures of Joseph
Andrews."]

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Born in 1709, died in 1784; son of a bookseller; educated at
Oxford, where he made a translation into Latin of Pope's
"Messiah"; established a school near Lichfield in 1736,
which soon failed; among its pupils David Garrick, with whom
he went to London in 1737; issued the plan of his
"Dictionary" in 1747, and published it in two volumes in
1755; published "The Vanity of Human Wishes" in 1749;
started _The Rambler_, a periodical, in 1750; writing nearly
the whole of it; wrote "Rasselas" in 1759; went to Scotland
with Boswell in 1773; published an edition of Shakespeare in
1765.

I

ON PUBLISHING HIS "DICTIONARY"[22]

It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life to
be rather driven by the fear of evil than attracted by the prospect of
good; to be exposed to censure without hope