to Cornelius Ford--"Cornelius Ford,
gentleman," he is styled in his marriage settlement. Cornelius died four
months before Samuel Johnson was born. Cornelius had a sister Mary, who
married one Jesson, and their only son, I may mention incidentally,
entered at Pembroke College in 1666, sixty years before his
second-cousin, our Samuel, entered the same college. Another cousin by
marriage was a Mrs. Harriots, to whom Johnson refers in his _Annals_, and
also in his _Prayers and Meditations_. The only one of Cornelius Ford's
family referred to in the biographies is Joseph Ford, the father of the
notorious Parson Ford, Johnson's cousin, of whom he several times speaks.
Joseph was a physician of eminence who settled at Stourbridge. He
married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Hickman. He was a witness to the marriage
of his sister Sarah to Michael Johnson. There can be no doubt but that
the presence of Dr. Ford and his family at Stourbridge accounts for
Johnson being sent there to school in 1725. He stayed in the house of
his cousin Cornelius Ford, not as Boswell says his _uncle_ Cornelius, at
Pedmore, about a mile from Stourbridge. He walked in every day to the
Grammar School. A connexion of the boy, Gregory Hickman, was residing
next to the Grammar School. A kinsman of Johnson and a descendant of
Hickman, Dr. Freer, still lives in the house. I met him at Lichfield
recently, and he has sent me a photograph of the very house, which stands
to-day much as it did when Johnson visited it, and wrote at twenty-two, a
sonnet to Dorothy Hickman "playing at the Spinet." Dorothy was one of
Johnson's three early loves, with Ann Hector and Olivia Lloyd. Dorothy
married Dr. John Turtin and had an only child, Dr. Turtin, the celebrated
physician who attended Goldsmith in his last illness.

I have not time to go through the record of all Dr. Johnson's uncles on
the maternal side, and do full justice to Mr. Reade's industry and
mastery of detail. I may, however, mention incidentally that the uncle
who was hanged, if one was, must have been one of his father's brothers,
for to the Fords that distinction does not seem to have belonged. Much
that is entertaining is related of the cousin Parson Ford, who, after
sharing with the famous Earl of Chesterfield in many of his profligacies,
received from his lordship the Rectory of South Luffenham. There is no
evidence, however, that Chesterfield ever knew that his at one time
chaplain and boon comp