JOHNSON, FRANCIS (1796?–1876), orientalist, spent much time in early manhood in Italy, where he applied himself to the study of oriental languages, and learned Arabic from an Arab. In March 1818 he left Rome in company with Charles (afterwards Sir Charles) Barry, Charles (afterwards Sir Charles) Lock Eastlake, and Kinnaird, an architect, for Athens. After studying antiquities there till June, Johnson and Barry travelled overland to Constantinople, but they parted in August, Johnson returning to Italy, while Barry pursued his travels in Egypt (Lady Eastlake, Memoir of C. L. Eastlake, p. 72; Barry, Sir Charles Barry, pp. 25 sq.). In 1824 Johnson was appointed to the chair of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Telugu in the East India Company's college at Haileybury. He resigned his chair in 1855, was married in 1857, and died at Hertford on 29 Jan. 1876.
The great work of Johnson's life was his ‘Persian Dictionary.’ On its first publication in 1829 it was described as the third edition of Richardson's dictionary. It contained, however, much original matter, especially in respect of the Arabic element in Persian. In 1852 Johnson published a revised and much extended edition under his own name alone. This work is by far the most important contribution to Persian lexicography in any European language. Compound words are treated with especial completeness. Johnson also edited the ‘Gulistān’ of Sa‘di (1863), while in Sanskrit he re-edited, with the addition of a vocabulary and a collation of new manuscripts, H. H. Wilson's text and translation of the ‘Meghadūta’ (1867). His well-known selections from the ‘Mahābhārata’ (1842) and his ‘Hitopadeśa,’ London, 1840, 4to (subsequent editions 1847, 1848, and 1864), have long proved very useful to English beginners in the study of Sanskrit.
[Hertfordshire Mercury, 12 Feb. 1876; Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, new ser. vol. ix., Report for 1876; Johnson's Works.
JOHNSON, GEORGE (1564–1605), puritan, born in 1564 at Richmond in Yorkshire, was son of John, and younger brother of Francis Johnson (1562–1618) [q. v.] He matriculated as a pensioner of Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1580, commenced M.A. in 1588, and, after leaving the university, taught in a school at the house of one Fox in St. Nicholas Lane, London, on the site of the present congregationalists' memorial hall. This house was often used as a place of meeting by the separatists (Harl. MS. 7042, f. 107), and for the part which he played at those gatherings Johnson was, in the spring of 1593, committed by the Bishop of London to the Fleet prison, where, according to a petition addressed by his father to Lord Burghley, he was for a time subjected to extreme ill-usage (Lansdowne MS. 75). In 1597 his sentence was changed to one of banishment, and he sailed for America, in the company of several other separatists. The ship, however, met with disaster, and returned to England with its convoy, without having landed any of its passengers. Johnson now hid himself in Southampton and London, until he was able, in the autumn of the same year, to effect his escape to Holland, where he settled with the colony of banished Englishmen in Amsterdam.
His brother Francis was at this time pastor of the church there; but the two brothers soon violently quarrelled. George resumed attacks begun in England upon what he considered the vain and unseemly conduct of his brother's wife. In appeals to his brother he declared that Mrs. Francis Johnson and the Bishop of London's wife ‘for pride and vaine apparel were ioyned together, that she wore 3, 4, or 5 golde rings at once, moreover her busks and her whalebones in her brest were so manifest that many of ye saints were greeved’—statements which Francis took ‘in so ill part, that he returned taunts and revilings, calling his brother fantasticall, fond, ignorant, Anabaptisticall, and such-like.’ George continued his attacks on Mrs. Francis until Francis brought the three specific charges of being a nourisher of tale-bearers, a slanderer, and a teller of untruths against his brother at a church meeting, and declared that either George should be excommunicated or he would not continue pastor. It was not until 1602, after several years' wrangling, that the church chose the former alternative, and George Johnson was excommunicated, together with his father, who had come over to Holland with a view to composing the strife. In 1604 attacks on Mrs. Francis's mode of dress were renewed by George's followers (cf. Gardiner, History, iv. 145). George had in the meantime returned to
