shed by
Houghton, Mifflin Co.]

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Seeking for Dr. Johnson's birthplace, I found it in St. Mary's Square
(Lichfield), which is not so much a square as the mere widening of a
street. The house is tall and thin, of three stories, with a square front
and a roof rising steep and high. On a side-view, the building looks as if
it had been cut in two in the midst, there being no slope of the roof on
that side. A ladder slanted against the wall, and a painter was giving a
livelier hue to the plaster. In a corner-room of the basement, where old
Michael Johnson may be supposed to have sold books, is now what we should
call a dry-goods store, or, according to the English phrase, a mercer's
and haberdasher's shop.

The house has a private entrance on a cross-street, the door being
accessible by several much worn stone-steps, which are bordered by an iron
balustrade. I set my foot on the steps and laid my hand on the balustrade,
where Johnson's hand and foot must many a time have been, and ascending to
the door, I knocked once, and again, and again, and got no admittance.
Going round to the shop-entrance, I tried to open it, but found it as fast
bolted as the gate of Paradise. It is mortifying to be so balked in one's
little enthusiasms; but looking round in quest of somebody to make
inquiries of, I was a good deal consoled by the sight of Dr. Johnson
himself, who happened, just at that moment, to be sitting at his ease
nearly in the middle of St. Mary's Square, with his face turned toward his
father's house.

Of course, it being almost fourscore years since the doctor laid aside his
weary bulk of flesh, together with the ponderous melancholy that had so
long weighed him down--the intelligent reader will at once comprehend that
he was marble in his substance, and seated in a marble chair, on an
elevated stone-pedestal. In short, it was a statue, sculptured by Lucas,
and placed here in 1838, at the expense of Dr. Law, the reverend
chancellor of the Diocese.

The figure is colossal (tho perhaps not much more so than the mountainous
doctor himself) and looks down upon the spectator from its pedestal of ten
or twelve feet high, with a broad and heavy benignity of aspect, very like
in feature to Sir Joshua Reynold's portrait of Johnson, but calmer and
sweeter in expression. Several big books are piled up beneath his chair,
and, if I mistake not, he holds a volume in his hand, thus blinking forth
at the world