Aetat. 68.] Success at the bar. 179 conversation turned upon the profession of the law in England. JOHNSON. You must not indulge too sanguine hopes, should you be called to our bar. I was told, by a very sensible lawyer, that there are a great many chances against any man's success in the profession of the law; the candidates are so numerous, and those who get large practice so few. He said, it was by no means true that a man of good parts and application is sure of having business, though he, indeed, allowed that if such a man could but appear in a few causes, his merit would be known, and he would get forward; but that the great risk was, that a man might pass half a life-time in the Courts, and never have an opportunity of shewing his abilities'.' Now, at the distance of fifteen years since this conversation passed, the observation which I have had an opportunity of making in Westminster Hall has convinced me, that, however true the opinion of Dr. Johnson's legal friend may have been some time ago, the same certainty of success cannot now be promised to the same display of merit. The reasons, however, of the rapid rise of some, and the disappointment of others equally respectable, are such as it might seem invidious to mention, and would require a longer detail than would be proper for this work. BOSWELL. Boswell began to eat his dinners in the Inner Temple in 1775. Ante, p. 45 note 1, and Letters of Boswell, p. 196. In writing to Temple he thus mentions his career as a barrister. 'Jan. 10, 1789. In truth I am sadly discouraged by having no practice, nor probable prospect of it; and to confess fairly to you, my friend, I am afraid that, were I to be tried, I should be found so deficient in the forms, the quirks and the quiddities, which early habit acquires, that I should expose myself. Yet the delusion of Westminster Hall, of brilliant reputation and splendid fortune as a barrister, still weighs upon my imagination.' Ib. p. 267. Aug. 23, 1789. The Law life in Scotland amongst vulgar familiarity would now quite destroy me. I am not able to acquire the Law of England.' Ib. p. 304. Nov. 28, 1789. I have given up my house and taken good chambers in the Inner Temple, to have the appearance of a lawyer. O Temple! Temple! is this realising any of the towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our conversations and letters? . . . I do not see the smallest opening in Westminster Hall; but I like the scene, though I have attended only one day this last term, being eager to get my Life of Johnson finished.' Ib. p. 314. April 6, 1791. When my book is launched, I shall, if I am alone and in tolerable health and spirits, have some furniture put into my chambers in the Temple, and force myself to sit there some hours a-day, and to attend regularly in Westminster Hall. The chambers cost me £20 yearly, and I may reckon furniture and a lad to attend there occasionally £20 more. I doubt whether I shall get fees equal to the expense.' Ib. p. 335. 'Nov. 22, 1791. I keep chambers open in the Temple, I attend in Westminster Hall, but there is not the least pros pect of my having business.' Ib. 180 Johnson's intimacy with Dr. Taylor. [A.D.1777. We talked of employment being absolutely necessary to preserve the mind from wearying and growing fretful, especially in those who have a tendency to melancholy; and I mentioned to him a saying which somebody had related of an American savage, who, when an European was expatiating on all the advantages of money, put this question: 'Will it purchase occupation?' JOHNSON. Depend upon it, Sir, this saying is too refined for a savage. And, Sir, money will purchase occupation; it will purchase all the conveniences of life; it will purchase variety of company; it will purchase all sorts of entertainment.' I talked to him of Forster's Voyage to the South Seas, which pleased me; but I found he did not like it. 'Sir, (said he,) there is a great affectation of fine writing in it.' BoSWELL. 'But he carries you along with him.' JOHNSON, 'No, Sir; he does not carry me along with him: he leaves me behind him or rather, indeed, he sets me before him; for he makes me turn over many leaves at a time.' On Sunday, September 12', we went to the church of Ashbourne, which is one of the largest and most luminous that I have seen in any town of the same size. I felt great satisfaction in considering that I was supported in my fondness for solemn publick worship by the general concurrence and munificence of mankind. Johnson and Taylor were so different from each other, that I wondered at their preserving an intimacy. Their having been at school and college together, might, in some degree, account for this3; but Sir Joshua Reynolds has furnished me with a p. 344. His chambers, as he wrote to Malone, were 'in the very staircase where Johnson lived.' Croker's Boswell, p. 830. 'Neither of us now can find many whom he has known so long as we have known each other.... We both stand almost single in the world,' (p. 324). On July 15, 1765, he reproaches Taylor with not writing-With all your building and feasting you might have found an hour in some wet day for the remembrance of your old friend. I should have thought that since you have led a life so festive and gay, you would have [invited] me to partake of your hospitality,' (p. 383). stronger Aetat. 68.] Johnson's Sermons. 181 stronger reason; for Johnson mentioned to him, that he had been told by Taylor he was to be his heir. I shall not take upon me to animadvert upon this; but certain it is, that Johnson paid great attention to Taylor. He now, however, said to me, 'Sir, I love him; but I do not love him more; my regard for him does not increase. As it is said in the Apocrypha, "his talk is of bullocks1:" I do not suppose he is very fond of my company. His habits are by no means sufficiently clerical: this he knows that I see; and no man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.' I have no doubt that a good many sermons were composed for Taylor by Johnson. At this time I found, upon his table, a part of one which he had newly begun to write: and Concio pro Tayloro appears in one of his diaries. When to these circumstances we add the internal evidence from the power of thinking and style, in the collection which the Reverend Mr. Hayes has published, with the significant title of Sermons left for publication by the Reverend John Taylor, LL.D., our conviction will be complete3. On Oct. 19, 1779, he says:—'Write to me soon. We are both old. How few of those whom we have known in our youth are left alive!' (p. 461). On April 12, 1784, he writes :-'Let us be kind to one another. I have no friend now living but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth,' (p. 482, and post, April 12, 1784). See ante, p. 131, for his regret on the death of his school-fellow, Henry Jackson, who seemed to Boswell (ante, under March 22, 1776) to be a low man, dull and untaught.' 'One of the old man's miseries,' he wrote (post, Feb. 3, 1778), ‘is that he cannot easily find a companion able to partake with him of the past.' 'I have none to call me Charley now,' wrote Charles Lamb on the death of a friend of his boyhood (Talfourd's Lamb, ed. 1865, p. 145). Such a companion Johnson found in Taylor. That, on the death of his wife, he at once sent for him, not even waiting for the light of morning to come, is 2 Passages in Johnson's Letters to Mrs. Thrale are to the same effect. 'Aug. 3, 1771. Having stayed my month with Taylor I came away on Wednesday, leaving him, I think, in a disposition of mind not very uncommon, at once weary of my stay, and grieved at my departure.' Piozzi Letters, i. 52. 'July 13, 1775. Dr. Taylor and I spend little time together, yet he will not yet be persuaded to hear of parting.' Ib. p. 276. 'July 26, 1775. Having stayed long enough at Ashbourne, I was not sorry to leave it. I hindered some of Taylor's diversions, and he supplied me with very little.' Ib. p. 287. 3 The second volume of these I, however, 182 Cultivating kindness. [A.D. 1777. I, however, would not have it thought, that Dr. Taylor, though he could not write like Johnson, (as, indeed, who could ?) did not sometimes compose sermons as good as those which we generally have from very respectable divines. He shewed me one with notes on the margin in Johnson's hand-writing; and I was present when he read another to Johnson, that he might have his opinion of it, and Johnson said it was 'very well.' These, we may be sure, were not Johnson's; for he was above little arts, or tricks of deception. Johnson was by no means of opinion, that every man of a learned profession should consider it as incumbent upon him, or as necessary to his credit, to appear as an authour. When in the ardour of ambition for literary fame, I regretted to him one day that an eminent Judge had nothing of it, and therefore would leave no perpetual monument of himself to posterity'. 'Alas, Sir, (said Johnson) what a mass of confusion should we have, if every Bishop, and every Judge, every Lawyer, Physician, and Divine, were to write books.' I mentioned to Johnson a respectable person of a very strong mind, who had little of that tenderness which is common to human nature; as an instance of which, when I suggested to him that he should invite his son, who had been settled ten years in foreign parts2, to come home and pay him a visit, his answer was, 'No, no, let him mind his business.' JOHNSON. 'I do not agree with him, Sir, in this. Getting money is not all a man's business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.' In the evening, Johnson, being in very good spirits, entertained Sermons, which was published in 1789, a year after the first, contains the following addition to the title :'To which is added a Sermon written by Samuel Johnson, LL.D., for the Funeral of his Wife.' 'Dr. Taylor had,' writes Murphy (Life, p. 171), 'the LARGEST BULL in England, and some of the best Sermons.' 1 If the eminent judge was Lord Mansfield, we may compare with Boswell's regret the lines in which Pope laments the influence of Westminster Hall and Parliament : 'There truant Windham every muse gave o'er, There Talbot sunk, and was a wit no more. How sweet an Ovid, Murray was The Dunciad, iv. 167. 2 Boswell's brother David had been settled in Spain since 1768. (Boswelliana, p. 5.) He therefore is no doubt the son, and Lord Auchinleck the father. us Aetat. 68.] Jack Wilkes. 183 us with several characteristical portraits. I regret that any of them escaped my retention and diligence. I found, from experience, that to collect my friend's conversation so as to exhibit it with any degree of its original flavour, it was necessary to write it down without delay. To record his sayings, after some distance of time, was like preserving or pickling long-kept and faded fruits, or other vegetables, which, when in that state, have little or nothing of their taste when fresh. I shall present my readers with a series of what I gathered this evening from the Johnsonian garden. 'My friend, the late Earl of Corke, had a great desire to maintain the literary character of his family1: he was a genteel man, but did not keep up the dignity of his rank. He was so generally civil, that nobody thanked him for it.' 'Did we not hear so much said of Jack Wilkes, we should think more highly of his conversation. Jack has great variety of talk, Jack is a scholar, and Jack has the manners of a gentleman2. But after hearing his name sounded from pole to pole, as the phoenix of convivial felicity, we are disappointed in his company. He has always been at me: but I would do Jack a kindness, rather than not. The contest is now over3' 'Garrick's gaiety of conversation has delicacy and elegance: Foote makes you laugh more; but Foote has the air of a buffoon paid for entertaining the company. He, indeed, well deserves his hire'.' 'Colley Cibber once consulted me as to one of his birth-day See ante, ii. 129, and Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 22, 1773. 2 'Jack' had not shown all his manners to Johnson. Gibbon thus describes him in 1762 (Misc. Works, i. 142):-'Colonel Wilkes, of the Buckinghamshire militia, dined with us. I scarcely ever met with a better companion; he has inexhaustible spirits, infinite wit and humour, and a great deal of knowledge; but a thorough profligate in principle as in practice, his life stained with every vice, and his conversation full of blasphemy and indecency. These morals he glories in—for shame is a weakness he has long since sur- 3 See ante, p. 79, note I. 4 Odes, |