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