had the scheme of writing his life constantly in view; as he was well apprised of this circumstance, and from time to time obligingly satisfied my inquiries by communicating to me the incidents of his early years; and as I have spared no pains in obtaining materials concerning him, I flatter myself that few biographers have entered upon such a work as this with more advantages, independent of literary abilities, in which I am not vain enough to compare myself with some great names who have gone before me in this kind of writing.”  The “Life” was a signal success at the time of its publication, and even yet is unrivalled in the field of biography.  Boswell latterly resided permanently in London, and was proprietor of, and principal contributor to, the “London Magazine”.  He died in his house in Great Portland Street on May 19, 1795.

I.—­Parentage and Education

Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on September 18,1709, and was baptised on the day of his birth.  His father was Michael Johnson, a native of Derbyshire, of obscure extraction, who settled in Lichfield as a bookseller and stationer.  His mother was Sarah Ford, descended of an ancient race of substantial yeomanry in Warwickshire.  They were well advanced in years when they were married, and never had more than two children, both sons—­Samuel, their first born, whose various excellences I am to endeavour to record, and Nathaniel, who died in his twenty-fifth year.

Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of a large and robust body, and of a strong and active mind; yet there was in him a mixture of that disease the nature of which eludes the most minute inquiry, 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.”  Old Mr. Johnson 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.

Young Johnson had the misfortune to be much afflicted with the scrofula, or king’s evil, which disfigured a countenance naturally well formed, and hurt his visual nerves so much that he did not see at all with one of his eyes, though its appearance was little different from that of the other.  Yet, when he and I were travelling in the Highlands of Scotland, and I pointed out to him a mountain, which, I observed, resembled a cone, he corrected my inaccuracy by showing me that it was indeed pointed at the top, but that one side of it was larger than the other.  And the ladies with whom he was acquainted agree that no man was more nicely and minutely critical in the elegance of female dress.