, praying
for his salvation in a voice which those who listened attentively could
hear plain enough, he said to me suddenly, "Make your boy tell you his
dreams: the first corruption that entered into my heart was communicated
in a dream." "What was it, sir?" said I. "Do not ask me," replied he,
with much violence, and walked away in apparent agitation. I never durst
make any further inquiries. He retained a strong aversion for the memory
of Hunter, one of his schoolmasters, who, he said, once was a brutal
fellow, "so brutal," added he, "that no man who had been educated by him
ever sent his son to the same school." I have, however, heard him
acknowledge his scholarship to be very great. His next master he
despised, as knowing less than himself, I found, but the name of that
gentleman has slipped my memory. Mr. Johnson was himself exceedingly
disposed to the general indulgence of children, and was even scrupulously
and ceremoniously attentive not to offend them; he had strongly persuaded
himself of the difficulty people always find to erase early impressions
either of kindness or resentment, and said "he should never have so loved
his mother when a man had she not given him coffee she could ill afford,
to gratify his appetite when a boy." "If you had had children, sir,"
said I, "would you have taught them anything?" "I hope," replied he,
"that I should have willingly lived on bread and water to obtain
instruction for them; but I would not have set their future friendship to
hazard for the sake of thrusting into their heads knowledge of things for
which they might not perhaps have either taste or necessity. You teach
your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder when you have
done that they do not delight in your company. No science can be
communicated by mortal creatures without attention from the scholar; no
attention can be obtained from children without the infliction of pain,
and pain is never remembered without resentment." That something should
be learned was, however, so certainly his opinion that I have heard him
say how education had been often compared to agriculture, yet that it
resembled it chiefly in this: "That if nothing is sown, no crop," says
he, "can be obtained." His contempt of the lady who fancied her son
could be eminent without study, because Shakespeare was found wanting in
scholastic learning, was expressed in terms so gross and so well known, I
will not repeat them here.