Samuel Johnson, the distinguished
lexicographer. His father, whose home was at Lichfield, was a bookseller
and had a bookstall in Uttoxeter Market, which he attended on market
days. The story is told that on one occasion, not feeling very well, he
asked his son, Samuel, to take his place, who from motives of pride
flatly refused to do so. From this illness the old man never recovered,
and many years afterwards, on the anniversary of that sorrowful day, Dr.
Samuel Johnson, then in the height of his fame, came to the very spot in
the market-place where this unpleasant incident occurred and did
penance, standing bareheaded for a full hour in a pitiless storm of wind
and rain, much to the surprise of the people who saw him.
[Illustration: THE WHITE CATTLE OF CHARTLEY.]
We now bade good-bye to the River Dove, leaving it to carry its share of
the Pennine Range waters to the Trent, and walked up the hill leading
out of the town towards Abbots Bromley. We soon reached a lonely and
densely wooded country with Bagot's Wood to the left, containing trees
of enormous age and size, remnants of the original forest of Needwood,
while to the right was Chartley Park, embracing about a thousand acres
of land enclosed from the same forest by the Earl of Derby, about the
year 1248.
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