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
d