tance are often discovered, there was in him a mixture of that
disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the
effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about
those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general
sensation of gloomy wretchedness. From him then his son inherited,
with some other qualities, 'a vile melancholy,' which in his too strong
expression of any disturbance of the mind, 'made him mad all his life,
at least not sober.' Michael was, however, forced by the narrowness of
his circumstances to be very diligent in business, not only in his shop,
but by occasionally resorting to several towns in the neighbourhood,
some of which were at a considerable distance from Lichfield. At that
time booksellers' shops in the provincial towns of England were very
rare, so that there was not one even in Birmingham, in which town old
Mr. Johnson used to open a shop every market-day. He was a pretty good
Latin scholar, and a citizen so creditable as to be made one of the
magistrates of Lichfield; and, being a man of good sense, and skill in
his trade, he acquired a reasonable share of wealth, of which however
he afterwards lost the greatest part, by engaging unsuccessfully in a
manufacture of parchment. He was a zealous high-church man and royalist,
and retained his attachment to the unfortunate house of Stuart, though
he reconciled himself, by casuistical arguments of expediency and
necessity, to take the oaths imposed by the prevailing power.

Johnson's mother was a woman of distinguished understanding. I asked
his old school-fellow, Mr. Hector, surgeon of Birmingham, if she was not
vain of her son. He said, 'she had too much good sense to be vain,
but she knew her son's value.' Her piety was not inferiour to her
understanding; and to her must be ascribed those early impressions
of religion upon the mind of her son, from which the world afterwards
derived so much benefit. He told me, that he remembered distinctly
having had the first notice of Heaven, 'a place to which good people
went,' and hell, 'a place to which bad people went,' communicated to him
by her, when a little child in bed with her; and that it might be the
better fixed in his memory, she sent him to repeat it to Thomas Jackson,
their man-servant; he not being in the way, this was not done; but there
was no occasion for any artificial aid for its preservation.

There is a traditional story of the