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SAMUEL JOHNSON was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on the 18th of September, N.S., 1709; and his initiation into the Christian church was not delayed; for his baptism is recorded, in the register of St. Mary's parish in that city, to have been performed on the day of his birth:' His father is there styled Gentleman,' a circumstance of which an ignorant panegyrist has praised him for not being proud; when the truth is, that the appellation of Gentleman, though now lost in the indiscriminate assumption of Esquire, was commonly taken by those who could not boast of gentility. His father was Michael Johnson,3 a native of Derbyshire, of obscure extraction, who settled in Lichfield as a bookseller and stationer. His mother was Sarah Ford, descended of 1 Extract from Register of Baptisms in St. Mary's Church, Lichfield.

Sept. 1709

Bap. Sam. Son of Mich. Johnson. gen1-7.

i. e. 18. New Stile.-Editor.

2 The title Gentleman had still, in 1709, some degree of its original meaning, and as Mr. Johnson served the office of sheriff of Lichfield in that year, he seems to have been in some measure entitled to it. At his entry on the books of Pembroke college, and at his matriculation, he designated himself as filius generosi.—Croker.

3 1657. Michaell the sonne of William Johnson and Catherine his wife was baptized April 20.

"Copied from the Register belonging to the Parish of Cubley in Derbyshire. This part of the Register is so much injured by time, that it is uncertain whether the date is April 20 or the 2nd. I think it is the 20th. Father's Register." Endorsement in Johnson's handwriting. Pocock MSS.

The following account of the Ford family, derived from the will of Dr. Joseph Ford, a physician, drawn up by Mf. Edward Ford, author of an excellent History of Enfield, has been obligingly communicated to me. WILLIAM FORD.

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This determines some disputed points: 1. That, though Dr. Samuel

an ancient race of substantial yeomanry in Warwickshire. They were well advanced in years when they married,' and never had more than two children, both sons; Samuel, their first-born, who lived to be the illustrious character whose various excellence 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, as in the most solid rocks veins of unsound substance 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, and 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 neigh

Swinfen was his godfather, he was named after an uncle, Samuel, and his brother after an uncle, Nathaniel.

2. That he had two relatives of the name Cornelius Ford; the one his uncle, the other the eldest son of Dr. Ford (the physician,) and therefore his cousin. By the former, Johnson was brought up till his fifteenth year : whether this uncle was in orders is not specified, either by Boswell or in the above pedigree. The other Cornelius Ford, Johnson's cousin, was the "Parson Ford" of Hogarth's "Modern Midnight Conversation," whom, at Streatham, May 12th, 1778, he calls "my acquaintance and relation, my mother's nephew," and whom he further describes in the life of Fenton ("Lives of the Poets") "as a clergyman at that time too well known, whose abilities, instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and the wise."-Editor.

1 "Mr. John Hannett, of Henley-in-Arden, has discovered in the Register of Packwood Church the entry of the marriage of Johnson's parents. The following is a verbatim copy: Michell Johnsones of Litchfield and Sara Ford married June ye 19th. 1706."—Notes and Queries. Third series. Vol. ii., p. 384 (1862).-Editor.

2 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 3rd edit., p. 213.

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