Johnson left school at sixteen and spent two years at home, probably in learning his father’s business.  This seems to have been the chief period of his studies.  Long afterwards he said that he knew almost as much at eighteen as he did at the age of fifty-three—­the date of the remark.  His father’s shop would give him many opportunities, and he devoured what came in his way with the undiscriminating eagerness of a young student.  His intellectual resembled his physical appetite.  He gorged books.  He tore the hearts out of them, but did not study systematically.  Do you read books through? he asked indignantly of some one who expected from him such supererogatory labour.  His memory enabled him to accumulate great stores of a desultory and unsystematic knowledge.  Somehow he became a fine Latin scholar, though never first-rate as a Grecian.  The direction of his studies was partly determined by the discovery of a folio of Petrarch, lying on a shelf where he was looking for apples; and one of his earliest literary plans, never carried out, was an edition of Politian, with a history of Latin poetry from the time of Petrarch.  When he went to the University at the end of this period, he was in possession of a very unusual amount of reading.

Meanwhile he was beginning to feel the pressure of poverty.  His father’s affairs were probably getting into disorder.  One anecdote—­it is one which it is difficult to read without emotion—­refers to this period.  Many years afterwards, Johnson, worn by disease and the hard struggle of life, was staying at Lichfield, where a few old friends still survived, but in which every street must have revived the memories of the many who had long since gone over to the majority.  He was missed one morning at breakfast, and did not return till supper-time.  Then he told how his time had been passed.  On that day fifty years before, his father, confined by illness, had begged him to take his place to sell books at a stall at Uttoxeter.  Pride made him refuse.  “To do away with the sin of this disobedience, I this day went in a post-chaise to Uttoxeter, and going into the market at the time of high business, uncovered my head and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather; a penance by which I trust I have propitiated Heaven for this only instance, I believe, of contumacy to my father.”  If the anecdote illustrates the touch of superstition in Johnson’s mind, it reveals too that sacred depth of tenderness which ennobled his character.  No repentance can ever wipe out the past or make it be as though it had not been; but the remorse of a fine character may be transmuted into a permanent source of nobler views of life and the world.