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Johnsoniana; or, Supplement to Boswell [ed. by J.W. Croker].
Johnsoniana or Supplement to Boswell - ed. by J.W. Croker Author:James Boswell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: violence, and walked away in apparent agitation. I never durst make any further inquiries. 7. Education of Children. Mr. Johnson was exceedingly disposed t... more »o the general indulgence of children, and was even scrupulously and ceremoniously attentive not to offend them: he had strongly persuaded himself of the difficulty people always find to erase early impressions either of kindness or resentment, and said, " he should never have so loved his mother when a man, had she not given him coffee she could ill afford, to gratify his appetite when a boy." " If you had had children, Sir," said I, " would you have taught them any thing ?" " I hope," replied he, " that I should have willingly lived on bread and water to obtain instruction for them ; but I would not have set their future friendship to hazard, for the sake of thrusting into their heads knowledge of things for which they might not perhaps have either taste or necessity. You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have done, that they do not delight in your company. No science can be communicated by mortal creatures without attention from the scholar ; no attention can be obtained from children without the infliction of pain, and pain is never remembered without resentment." That something should be learned was, however, so certainly his opinion, that I have heard him say, how education had been often compared to agriculture, yet that it resembled it chiefly in this : " that if nothing is sown, no crop," says he, " can be obtained." His contempt of the lady who fancied her son could be eminent without study, because Shakspeare was found wanting in scholastic learning, was expressed in terms so gross and so well known, I will not repeat them here. The remembrance of what had passed in his...« less