He was an apprentice of Joseph Henry Green, the distinguished surgeon at St Thomas's, well known for his friendship for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose literary executor Green became.

He graduated at Harvard in 1727, then became an apprentice in his father's counting-room, and for several years devoted himself to business.

2 Samuel Lincoln (c. 1619-1690), the president's first American ancestor, son of Edward Lincoln, gent., of Hingham, Norfolk, emigrated to Massachusetts in 1637 as apprentice to a weaver and settled with two older brothers in Hingham, Mass.

But the most remarkable of the persons with whom at this time Johnson consorted was Richard Savage, an earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, who had seen life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue ribands in St James's Square, and had lain with fifty pounds weight of irons on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate.

He has stated in his autobiography that through all his early years of struggle, when he was successively grocer's apprentice at Fiirstenberg, cabin-boy on the "Dorothea" bound for Venezuela, and, after her wreck, office attendant and then book-keeper in Amsterdam, he nourished a passion for the Homeric story and an ambition to become a great linguist.