t to lock the door every night,
though he saw that anybody might walk in at the back part, and knew that
there was no security obtained by barring the front door. "_This_," says
his son, "was madness, you may see, and would have been discoverable in
other instances of the prevalence of imagination, but that poverty
prevented it from playing such tricks as riches and leisure encourage."
Michael was a man of still larger size and greater strength than his son,
who was reckoned very like him, but did not delight in talking much of
his family: "One has," says 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 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,