66 
Dr. JOHNSON. 
(In Commemoration of Bicentenary). 
(Illustrated by the Lantern). 
By Rev. C. S. SARGISSON. October 5th, 1909. 
The J ohnson of common apprehension is the hero of Boswell’s 
‘ Life,” a study incomparable, indeed, but incomplete in 
giving results only, not processes. The introduction of most 
readers to Johnson is coincident with Boswell’s meeting with 
him in 1763, when Johnson was fifty-four and had two-thirds 
of his life behind him. Of his early life little is known, and 
his ancestry has received scant attention. His father was 
Michael Johnson, sometime of Cubley, in Derbyshire, and 
afterwards a bookseller in Lichfield, where he held office as 
Junior and as Senior Bailiff and built the house in which his 
son was born. Michael Johnson was a Tory, a High Church- 
man, and an almost Jacobite Royalist, unsuccessful in business, 
and of melancholy temperament. His wife , Samuel’s mother! 
was Sarah Ford, a woman of narrow views and tastes, locally 
esteemed, and the daughter of a substantial Warwickshire 
yeoman, whose family produced several men of note. Her 
uncles, Henry and Joseph Ford, were eminent practitioners, 
the one of law and the other of medicine ; and the notorious 
“ Parson Ford,” chaplain to the Earl of Chesterfield, was the 
physician’s son. The discerning searcher of records will 
find family qualities which come out more or less markedly 
in Samuel Johnson. To every true mother a son owes much, 
and in the matters of intellectual force, moral qualities, and 
counterbalancing breadth and freedom Johnson owed much 
to the stock from which his mother sprang. 
Samuel Johnson was born on 18th September, 1709. He 
suffered early from scrofula, which, in spite of the touch of 
Queen Anne, much disfigured his face ; and his childhood 
was marked by precocity and physical weakness. He left 
school at the age of sixteen, when he began reading omni- 
vorously and indiscriminately in his father’s shop- feeding 
