Norwich bulletin., 1922-04-12
FAMOUS MEN.
SAMUEL JOHNSON.

Samuel Johnson, the famous English Photographer and author, and the man who caused Boswell to write the most interesting biography in the English language, was past seventy years Of age when he finished his dictionary and wrote his Lives of the Poets.''
 Born in 17oS, as a child he was re- markedly precocious, and it is said that before he was three years old he in sisted upon going to church to hear SachevereiI preach. His father was foolishly proud of him and is said to have passed off an epitaph on Good Master Duck" really written by him self, as Samue1's composition at the age of three.
 Johnson was thirty-eight years of age when he first issued his plans for the dictionary, and upon this work he was more or less steadily engaged for the next thirty years. His labors during the preparation of the dictionary must have been enormous, for during a considerable part of the time he was also publishing 1 the Rambler"
 That he was a rapid worker is shown 1 in the fact that to pay the expenses of his mothers funeral he wrote "Ras- seIas" in the evenings of one week, for which he received $500 for the copy right.
 Johnson was sixty-etght years of age when he began his work on the most pernlantly valuable of all his books, his Lives of the English Poets" On May 1 22, TIT, he agreed with the bookselI- CTS to write prefaces for proposed col- lection of the English poets. They judi clously asked him to name his price. They paid him three times as much as he requested.
 The poets were selected by the book sellers, though Blackmore, Watts, Pom fret and Walden were added on John sons advice The first four volumes ap- peared in 1779, when Johnson was
 seventy years of age, and the last six in 1781.
 All through his life Johnson was char l itably inclined, and especially so in his 1 later years. The money he had accun-
 ulated and the pensions he received most ly went to charity He proposed to all 1 low himself, for his OWE support, only $500 a year, but it was never discovered
 that he spent more than two-thirds ot l this amount.
 When Johnson would go forth he | would fill his pockets with small cash which he distributed to beggars in de fance of political economy. When ht
 was told that the recipients only laid fl
 out upon gin or tobacco he replied tha- 1 1t was savage to deny them the few
 coarse pleasures which the rich disdain
 ed. Once, upon coming home late a
 night, he found a poor woman lyins in the street He carried her to hi house on his back and found that sll
 was reduced to the lowest stages O
 want, poverty and disease. He took car
 of her until she was entirely restored t'
 health.
 Johnson's house. in his later years was filled with various waifs and stray: . to whom he gave hospitality, and some
 times support, defending himself by say
 ing that if he did not help them nobod would
 Regarding Johnson's Lives" write , at his advanced age, Lord Broughar
 wrote: "The merit of the work Is yer
 great, whether we regard the matter ( ! the style; for the composition is ia , more easy and natural, far less pompou , and stately, and the diction both nor picturesque and more simple, than in an other of his writings. The Lives of th
 Poets are extremely valuable from th ' knowledge of the life they display an y from that acuteness of investigation an k vigor of expression which his astonishir
 powers of intellect threw on every sul
 ject ln which he engaged.