"His favourites used to receive very liberal assistance from him; and such was the submission and deference with which he was treated, such the desire to obtain his regard, that three of the boys, of whom Mr Hector was sometimes one, used to come in the morning as his humble attendants and carry him to school."
After a year at another school at Stourbridge, he returned home:
"The two years which he spent at home, after his return from Stourbridge, he passed in what he thought idleness, and was scolded by his father for his want of steady application. He had no settled plan of life, nor looked forward at all, but merely lived from day to day. Yet he read a great deal in a desultory manner, without any scheme of study, as chance threw books in his way, and inclination directed him through them. He used to mention one curious instance of his casual reading, when but a boy. Having imagined that his brother had hid some apples behind a large folio upon an upper shelf in his father's shop, he climbed up to search for them. There were no apples; but the large folio proved to be Petrarch, whom he had seen mentioned in some preface, as one of the restorers of learning. His curiosity having been thus excited, he sat down with avidity, and read a great part of the book. What he read during these two years he told me, was not works of mere amusement, 'not voyages and travels, but all literature, Sir, all ancient writers, all manly.'"
Johnson's father at this time used to set up a bookstall on market-days at neighbouring towns. One day he asked his son to go with him to Uttoxeter. Samuel refused, being too proud to stand at the stall in the market-place.
Again we feel inclined to think our hero rather a prig of a fellow—too lazy to do regular work of his own, too proud to help his father. Why couldn't he do a day's work and then spend his leisure in the open air, fishing or playing games?
Here we must go back a little and look at the sadder side of Johnson's boyhood. He was never healthy. From his father he inherited a "vile melancholy" and he "had the misfortune to be much afflicted with the scrophula, or king's evil, which disfigured a countenance naturally well formed, and hurt his visual nerves so much, that he did not see at all with one of his eyes, though its appearance was little different from that of the other."
At that time it was still believed that this disease could be cured by a touch of the reigning king or queen. So Mrs Johnson "carried him to London, where he was actually touched by Queen Anne...." Being asked if he could remember Queen Anne, "He had," he said, "a confused, but somehow a sort of solemn recollection of a lady in diamonds, and a long black hood."
But it did Johnson no good. Neither then, nor in later life, was he freed of the burden of ill-health and we can now better understand why "he never joined with the other boys in their ordinary diversions: his only amusement was in winter, when he took a pleasure in being drawn upon the ice by a boy barefooted, who pulled him along by a garter fixed round him; no very easy operation as his size was remarkably large. His defective sight, indeed, prevented him from enjoying the common sports."
Three habits, at least, Dr Johnson learned in boyhood which he continued to practise as a man—to hate the Whigs, to love books, and to endure pain.