1875 contains an engraving of a hunting horn
then in the possession of the late Master of the Cheshire Hounds, and
upon the horn is the inscription: "Thomas Boothby, Esq., Tooley Park,
Leicester. With this horn he hunted the first pack of fox hounds then in
England fifty-five years." He died in 1752. His eldest son took the
maternal name of Skrymsher, and under the title of Thomas Boothby
Skrymsher became M.P. for Leicester, and an important person in his day.
His wife was Anne, daughter of Sir Hugh Clopton of New Place, Stratford-
on-Avon. Admirers of Mrs. Gaskell will remember the Clopton legend told
by her in Howett's _Visits to Remarkable Places_.

I wish that I had time to follow Mr. Reade through all the ramifications
of an interesting family history, but I venture to think that there is
something pathetic in Dr. Johnson's inquiries a fortnight before his
death as to cousins of whose life story he knew nothing, whose well-known
family home of Woodseaves he--the great Lexicographer--could not spell
correctly, and of whose very name he was imperfectly informed. Yet he,
the lover of family trees and of ancestral associations, was all his life
in ignorance of these wealthy connexions and their many substantial
intermarriages.

Before Mr. Reade it was known that Johnson's father was a manufacturer of
parchment as well as a bookseller; but it was supposed that only in his
last few years or so of life did he undertake this occupation which
ruined him. Mr. Reade shows that he had been for thirty years engaged in
this trade in parchment. Brother Birkbeck Hill quotes Croker, who hinted
that Johnson's famous definition of Excise as "a hateful tax levied upon
commodities, and adjudged not by the Common Judge of Property but by
wretches hired by those to whom Excise is paid," was inspired by
recollections of his father's constant disputes with the Excise officers.
Mr. Reade has unearthed documents concerning the crisis of this quarrel,
when Michael Johnson in 1718 was indicted "for useing ye Trade of a
Tanner." The indictment, which is here printed in full, charges him,
"one Michael Johnson, bookseller," "that he did in the third year of the
reign of our Lord George by the Grace of God now King of Great Britain,
for his own proper gain, get up, use and exercise the art, mystery or
manual occupation of a Byrseus, in English a Tanner, in which art,
mystery or manual occupation of a Tanner the said Michael Johnson was no