Anecdotes of Johnson | Page 6

tenderness as well as

true esteem: "Why do you like that man's acquaintance so?" said he.
"Because," replied I, "he is open and confiding, and tells me stories of
his uncles and cousins; I love the light parts of a solid character." "Nay,
if you are for family history," says Mr. Johnson, good-humouredly, "I
can fit you: I had an uncle, Cornelius Ford, who, upon a journey,
stopped and read an inscription written on a stone he saw standing by
the wayside, set up, as it proved, in honour of a man who had leaped a
certain leap thereabouts, the extent of which was specified upon the
stone: 'Why now,' says my uncle, 'I could leap it in my boots;' and he
did leap it in his boots. I had likewise another uncle, Andrew,"
continued he, "my father's brother, who kept the ring in Smithfield
(where they wrestled and boxed) for a whole year, and never was
thrown or conquered. Here now are uncles for you, Mistress, if that's
the way to your heart." Mr. Johnson was very conversant in the art of
attack and defence by boxing, which science he had learned from this
uncle Andrew, I believe; and I have heard him descant upon the age
when people were received, and when rejected, in the schools once held
for that brutal amusement, much to the admiration of those who had no
expectation of his skill in such matters, from the sight of a figure which
precluded all possibility of personal prowess; though, because he saw
Mr. Thrale one day leap over a cabriolet stool, to show that he was not
tired after a chase of fifty miles or more, HE suddenly jumped over it
too, but in a way so strange and so unwieldy, that our terror lest he
should break his bones took from us even the power of laughing.
Michael Johnson was past fifty years old when he married his wife,
who was upwards of forty, yet I think her son told me she remained
three years childless before he was born into the world, who so greatly
contributed to improve it. In three years more she brought another son,
Nathaniel, who lived to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and
of whose manly spirit I have heard his brother speak with pride and
pleasure, mentioning one circumstance, particular enough, that when
the company were one day lamenting the badness of the roads, he
inquired where they could be, as he travelled the country more than
most people, and had never seen a bad road in his life. The two brothers
did not, however, much delight in each other's company, being always
rivals for the mother's fondness; and many of the severe reflections on
domestic life in Rasselas took their source from its author's keen

recollections of the time passed in his early years. Their father, Michael,
died of an inflammatory fever at the age of seventy-six, as Mr. Johnson
told me, their mother at eighty-nine, of a gradual decay. She was slight
in her person, he said, and rather below than above the common size.
So excellent was her character, and so blameless her life, that when an
oppressive neighbour once endeavoured to take from her a little field
she possessed, he could persuade no attorney to undertake the cause
against a woman so beloved in her narrow circle: and it is this incident
he alludes to in the line of his "Vanity of Human Wishes," calling her
"The general favourite as the general friend."
Nor could any one pay more willing homage to such a character,
though she had not been related to him, than did Dr. Johnson on every
occasion that offered: his disquisition on Pope's epitaph placed over
Mrs. Corbet is a proof of that preference always given by him to a
noiseless life over a bustling one; but however taste begins, we almost
always see that it ends in simplicity; the glutton finishes by losing his
relish for anything highly sauced, and calls for his boiled chicken at the
close of many years spent in the search of dainties; the connoisseurs are
soon weary of Rubens, and the critics of Lucan; and the refinements of
every kind heaped upon civil life always sicken their possessors before
the close of it.
At the age of two years Mr. Johnson was brought up to London by his
mother, to be touched by Queen Anne for the scrofulous evil, which
terribly afflicted his childhood, and left such marks as greatly
disfigured a countenance naturally harsh and rugged, beside doing
irreparable damage to the auricular organs, which never could perform
their functions since I knew him; and it was owing to that horrible
disorder, too, that one eye was perfectly useless to him; that defect,
however, was