erned? It was certainly not indifference to family ties,
because Brother Birkbeck Hill publishes many interesting letters written
by Johnson in old age, when finding that he had a certain sum of money to
bequeath, he looked around to see if there were any of his own kin
living. The number of letters the old man wrote, inquiring for this or
that kinsman, are quite pathetic. It seems to me that it was really due
to an ignorant vagueness as to his family history. During his early
years his family had passed from affluence to penury. They were of a
type very common in England, but very rare in Scotland and Ireland, that
take no interest whatever in pedigrees, and never discuss any but their
immediate relations, with whom, in the case of the Johnsons, very
friendly terms did not prevail. I think we should be astonished if we
were to go into some shops in London of sturdy prosperous tradesmen in
quite as good a position as old Michael Johnson, and were to try and draw
out one or other individual upon his ancestry. We should promptly come
against a blank wall.

What then do we know of Johnson's father from the ordinary sources? That
he was a bookseller at Lichfield, and that he was Sheriff of that city in
the year that his son Samuel was born; that he feasted the citizens, as
Johnson tells us, in his _Annals_, with "uncommon magnificence." He is
described by Johnson as "a foolish old man," because he talked with too
fond a pride of his children and their precocious ways. He was a zealous
High Churchman and Jacobite. We are told by Boswell further, on the
authority of Mr. Hector of Birmingham, that he opened a bookstall once a
week in that city, but lost money by setting up as a maker of parchment.
"A pious and most worthy man," Mrs. Piozzi tells us of him, "but wrong-
headed, positive and affected with melancholia." "I inherited a vile
melancholy from my father," Johnson tells us, "which has made me mad all
my life." When he died in 1731 his effects were estimated at 20 pounds.
"My mother had no value for his relations," Johnson tells us. "Those we
knew were much lower than hers." Of Michael Johnson's brother, Andrew,
Johnson's uncle, we know still less. From the various Johnson books we
only cull the story mentioned in Mrs. Piozzi's _Anecdotes_. She relates
that Johnson, after telling her of the prowess of his uncle, Cornelius
Ford, at jumping, went on to say that he had another uncle, Andrew--"my
father's bro