lords and ladies it was written to entertain. This objection is however now at an end, as I have found friends, far remote indeed from literary questions, who may yet be diverted from melancholy by my description of Johnson's manners, warmed to virtue even by the distant reflexion of his glowing excellence, and encouraged by the relation of his animated zeal to perfist in the profession as well as practice of Christianity. SAMUEL JOHNSON was the son of Michael Johnson, a bookfeller at Litchfield, in Staffordshire; a very pious and worthy man, but wrong-headed, positive, and afflicted with melancholy, as his fon, from whom alone I had the information, once told me : his business, however, leading him to be much on horfeback, contributed to the preservation of his bodily health, and mental sanity; which, when he staid long at home, would fometimes be about to give way; and Mr. Johnson said, that when his work-shop, a detached building, had fallen half down for want of money to repair it, his father was not less diligent to lock the door every night, though he faw that any body might walk in at the back part, and knew that there was no security obtained by barring the front door. "This (fays his fon) was madness, you may fee, and would have been difcoverable in other instances of the prevalence of imagination, but that poverty prevented it from playing fuch tricks as riches and leifure encourage." Michael was a man of still larger size and greater strength than his fon, who was reckoned very like him, but did not delight in talking much of his family" one has (fays he) so little pleasure in reciting the anecdotes of beggary." One day, however, hearing me praise a favourite friend with partial 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 coufins; I love the light parts of a folid character. "Nay, if you are for family history, says Mr. Johnson goodhumouredly, I can fit you: I had an uncle, Cornelius Ford, who, upon a journey, stopped and read an infcription written on a stone he saw standing by the way-fide, 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 amufement, much to the admiration of those who had no expectation of his skill in fuch matters, from the fight of a figure which precluded all possibility of personal prowess; though, because he saw Mr. Thrale one day leap over a cabriolet stool, to shew that he was not tired after a chace of fifty miles or more, be fuddenly jumped over it too; but in a way so strange and so unwieldy, that our terror left 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 fon told me she remained three years childlefs before he was born into the world, who so greatly contributed to improve it. In three years more she brought another fon, Nathaniel, who lived to be twentyseven 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 enquired 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-fix, as Mr. Johnson told me : their mother at eighty-nine, of a gradual decay. She was flight in her per |