He grew old there in his _gim-crack_ of a palace, cultivating his flowers and his complexion; tiptoeing while he could over his waxed floors in lavender suit, with embroidered waistcoat and "partridge silk stockings," with _chapeau bas_ held before him--very reverent to any visitor of {88} distinction--and afterward (he lived almost into this century), when gout seizes him, I seem to see still--as once before[19]--the fastidious old man shuffling up and down from drawing-room to library--stopping here and there to admire some newly arrived bit of pottery--pulling out his golden snuff-box and whisking a delicate pinch into his old nostrils--then dusting his affluent shirt-frills with the tips of his dainty fingers, with an air of gratitude to Providence for having created so fine a gentleman as Horace Walpole, and of gratitude to Horace Walpole for having created so fine a place as Strawberry Hill. _Young Mr. Johnson._ And now what a different man we come upon, living just abreast of him in that rich English century and that beautiful English country! We go into Staffordshire and to the old town of Lichfield, to find the boy who afterward became the great lexicographer[20] and the great talker. The {89} house in which he was born is there upon a corner of the great broadened street, opposite St. Mary's Church. We get a pleasant glimpse of the house on a page of _Our Old Home_, by Hawthorne; and another glimpse of the colossal figure of Dr. Johnson, seated in his marble chair, upon that Lichfield market-place. His father was a bookseller; held, too, some small magistracy; was eminently respectable; loved books as well as sold them, and had a corresponding inaptitude for business. The son added to indifferent schooling, here and there, a habit of large browsing along his father's shelves; was a great, ungainly lout of a boy, but marvellously quick-witted. With some help from his father, and some from friends, and with a reputation for making verses, and tastes ranging above bookstalls, he entered at Oxford when nineteen; but {90} the stings of poverty smote him there early; and after three years of irregular attendance, he left--only to find his father lapsing into bankruptcy and a fatal illness. On the settlement of the old bookseller's estate, £20 only was the portion of the son. Then follow some dreary years; he is hypochondriac and fears madness; he is under-teacher in a school; he offers to do job-work for the book-makers; he translates the narrative of a Portuguese missionary about Abyssinia; he ponders over a tragedy of _Irene_. Not much good comes of all this, when--on a sudden, our hero, who is now twenty-six, marries a widow--who admired his talents--who is twenty years his senior and has £800. Johnson was not a person to regard closely such little discrepancies as that difference in age--nor she, I suppose.