Excerpt from Samuel Johnson Samuel johnson, afterwards so loyal a eulogist of London, only came up to it when he had already experimented in life in various parts of the country. He was born at Lich field in 1709; his father was a bookseller, and a worthy, if somewhat sombre type, of that old thinking middle class of England (now so nearly extinct) of which his celebrated son will always be the great historic incarna tion. He went to Oxford, to Pembroke College, where venerable tales are told of his independ ence and eccentricity: he became a master in a school at Market Bosworth, and subsequently the assistant of a bookseller in Birmingham. In his twenty-fifth ear occurred the curious and brief episode ofy his marriage he married a widow named Porter; she was considerably older than himself, and died very soon after the union. He spoke of her very, rarely in after life but then always with marked tender ness. Failing in a second attempt at the trade of schoolmaster, he came to London with David Garrick, his friend and pupil; and be gan reporting parliamentary debates for Tbc. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.