Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies I.djvu/171

 Anecdotes.

��he absolutely loathed his father's caresses, because he knew they were sure to precede some unpleasing display of his early abilities ; and he used, when neighbours came o'visiting, to run up a tree that he might not be found and exhibited, such, as no doubt he was, a prodigy of early understanding. His epitaph upon the duck he killed by treading on it at five years old,

Here lies poor duck

That Samuel Johnson trod on ; If it had liv'd it had been good luck,

For it would have been an odd one;

is a striking example of early expansion of mind, and knowledge of language x ; yet he always seemed more mortified at the recol lection of the bustle 2 his parents made with his wit, than pleased with the thoughts of possessing it. * That (said he to me one day) is the great misery of late marriages 3, the unhappy produce of them becomes the plaything of dotage : an old man's child

��1 Boswell made the following re cord in his note-book : ' Miss Por ter told me in Johnson's presence at Litch field, Monday, 25 March, 1776, that his mother told her, that when he was in petticoats he was walking by his father's side & carelessly trode upon a duck, one of thirteen, & killed it. So then this duck, it was said to him, must be buried, & he must make an epitaph for it. Upon which he made these lines :

" Under this stone lyes Mr. Duck, Whom Samuel Johnson trode on;

He might have liv'd if he had luck, But then he'd been an odd one."

Dr. Johnson said that his father made one half of this epitaph. That he was a foolish old man, that is to say was foolish in talking of his children. But I trust to his mother's relation of what happened in his child hood rather than to his own recollec tion ; and Miss Porter assured him, in my presence, upon his mother's authority, that he had made this

��epitaph himself. But he assures me, 21 Sept., 1777, that he remembers his father making it.' Morrison Autographs, second series, i. 367. See Life, i. 40.

Horace Walpole, with the words 'expansion of mind' in view, writes : ' The Signora talks of her Doctor's expanded mind, and has contributed her mite to show that never mind was narrower.' Wai- pole's Letters, ix. 48.

2 Bustle was a favourite word of Johnson's. See Letters, i. 196; ii. 147, 164.

In his last note on Coriolanus he says : ' There is perhaps too much bustle in the first act and too little in the last.' Reynolds perhaps caught the word from him, when he write of one of Rubens's pictures : ' The bustle, which is in every part of the picture, makes a fine contrast to the character of resignation in the cruci fied Saviour.' Reynolds's Works, ed. 1824, ii. 216.

3 Life, ii. 128.

(continued

�� �