148 Anecdotes.
��found friends, far remote indeed from literary questions, who may yet be diverted from melancholy by my description of Johnson's manners, warmed to virtue even by the distant re flexion of his glowing excellence, and encouraged by the relation of his animated zeal to persist in the profession as well as V practice of Christianity.
SAMUEL JOHNSON was the son of Michael Johnson, a book seller at Litchfield, in Staffordshire ; a very pious and worthy man, but wrong-headed, positive, and afflicted with melancholy, as his son, from whom alone I had the information, once told me : his business, however, leading him to be much on horseback, contributed to the preservation of his bodily health, and mental sanity x ; which, when he staid long at home, would sometimes be about to give way ; and Mr. Johnson said, that when his work-shop, a detached building, had fallen half down for want of money to repair it, his father was not less diligent to lock the door every night, though he saw that any body might walk in at the back part, and knew that there was no security obtained by barring the front door. ' This (says his son) was madness, you may see, and would have been discoverable in other instances of the prevalence of imagination, but that poverty prevented it from playing such tricks as riches and leisure encourage.' Michael was a man of still larger size and greater strength than his son ; who was reckoned very like him 2 , but did not delight in talking much of his family ' one has (says he) so little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary V One day, however, hearing me praise a favourite friend with partial tenderness as well as true esteem ; ' Why do you like that man's acquaintance so?' said he: Because, replied I, he is open and confiding, and tells me stories of his uncles and cousins ; I love the light parts of a solid character. ' Nay, if you are for family history (says Mr. Johnson good-humouredly) / can fit you:
thirteen years of age and her two written to entertain.'
brothers were still younger,' it is I Life, i. 35, and ante, p. 132.
absurd to describe them (even if 2 His likeness is given in Murray's
there had been more than one lady) Johnsoniana, ed. 1836, p. 464.
as ' the lords and ladies it was 3 Ante, p. 132.
I had
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