"However, on all proper seasons, such as the approach of an election, I throw a suitable dash or two into my sermons, which I have the pleasure to hear is not disagreeable to Sir Thomas and the other honest gentlemen my neighbors, who have all promised me these five years to procure an ordination for a son of mine, who is now near thirty, hath an infinite stock of learning, and is, I thank Heaven, of an unexceptionable life; tho, as he was never at a university, the bishop refuses to ordain him. Too much care can not indeed be taken in admitting any to the sacred office; tho I hope he will never act so as to be a disgrace to any order, but will serve his God and his country to the utmost of his power, as I have endeavored to do before him; nay, and will lay down his life whenever called to that purpose. I am sure I have educated him in those principles; so that I have acquitted my duty, and shall have nothing to answer for on that account. But I do not distrust him, for he is a good boy; and if Providence should throw it in his way to be of as much consequence in a public light as his father once was, I can answer for him he will use his talents as honestly as I have done."
FOOTNOTES:
[18] From "Tom Jones, a Foundling," Book 3, Chapter 2.
[19] From Book 16, Chapter 5, of "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling."
[20] This was a letter from Sophia Weston, hoping "that Fortune may be sometime kinder to us than at present."
[21] From Book 2, Chapter 8, of "The Adventures of Joseph Andrews."
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Born in 1709, died in 1784; son of a bookseller; educated at Oxford, where he made a translation into Latin of Pope's "Messiah"; established a school near Lichfield in 1736, which soon failed; among its pupils David Garrick, with whom he went to London in 1737; issued the plan of his "Dictionary" in 1747, and published it in two volumes in 1755; published "The Vanity of Human Wishes" in 1749; started The Rambler, a periodical, in 1750; writing nearly the whole of it; wrote "Rasselas" in 1759; went to Scotland with Boswell in 1773; published an edition of Shakespeare in 1765.