such a man could be thought by Johnson one of the first 1763. men of letters of the day, was hard to be understood; and Et. 35. harder yet to be borne, that such a man should be a privileged man. "Doctor Goldsmith being a privileged man, "went with him this night" (the first supper at the Mitre) "strutting away, and calling to me with an air of superiority, "like that of an esoteric over an exoteric disciple of a sage of antiquity, I go to Miss Williams." * 66 To be allowed to go to Miss Williams was decisive of Johnson's favour. She was one of his pensioners,† blind and old; was now living in a lodging in Bolt-court, provided by probably account for much of this feeling. "It may also be observed, that Gold- 66 + Others will appear in the course of this narrative, nor can I ever think of Johnson without thinking of the wise, kind words, with which Mrs. Thrale tells us he outraged all the laws of political economy in regard to the poor. "He loved "the poor," she says, as I never yet saw any one else do, with an earnest desire "to make them happy. What signifies, says some one, giving halfpence to common "beggars? they only lay it out in gin or tobacco. And why should they be "denied such sweeteners of their existence, says Johnson it is surely very savage "to refuse them every possible avenue to pleasure, reckoned too coarse for our "own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without "gilding; yet for the poor we delight in stripping it still barer, and are not "ashamed to show even visible displeasure, if ever the bitter taste is taken from "their mouths." After telling us this, the lively little lady adds, that in consequence of these principles he nursed "whole nests" of people in his house, where the lame, the blind, the sick, and the sorrowful found a sure retreat from all the evils whence his little income could secure them. Anecdotes, 84, 85. Mr. Maxwell tells us also, in his collectanea, that "he frequently gave all the silver in his pocket to the poor, who watched him between his house and the tavern where he "dined." Boswell, iii. 133. We learn, too, from another authority, Mr. Harwood, that when visiting Lichfield, towards the latter part of his life, he was accustomed, on his arrival, to deposit with Miss Porter as much cash as would pay his expenses back to London. He could not trust himself with his own money, as he felt himself unable to resist the importunity of the numerous claimants on his benevolence. Ibid, ii. 146. Hawkins notes the same peculiarity. 66 now practised a rule which he often recommended to his friends, always to go "abroad with a quantity of loose money to give to beggars, imitating therein, though 66 "He 1763. 66 him till he should have a room in a house to offer her, as in Et. 35. former days; was familiar with his earlier life and its privations, was always making and drinking tea,* knew intimately all his ways, and talked well; and he never went home at night, however late, supperless or after supper, without calling to have tea with Miss Williams. "Why do you keep that old "certainly without intending it, that good but weak man, old Mr. Whiston, whom I "have seen distributing, in the streets of London, money to beggars on each hand of him, till his pocket was nearly exhausted." Life of Johnson, 395. Good, but weak Whiston-good, but weak Johnson. Well, Hawkins at any rate is not weak on these points, whatever else he may have been. What an unexceptionable poorlaw guardian he must have made! "I shall never forget," says Miss Reynolds, "the impression I felt in Dr. Johnson's favour, the first time I was in his company, on his saying, that as he returned to his lodgings, at one or two o'clock in the 66 morning, he often saw poor children asleep on thresholds and stalls, and that he "used to put pennies into their hands to buy them a breakfast." Croker's Boswell, 834. "I have heard Gray say that Johnson would go out in London with his "pockets full of silver, and give it all away in the streets before he returned "home." Nicholls, in the Works, v. 33. Let me add that Burke, though no mean political economist, had the same habit, and justified it on similar grounds. But it is also to be remarked that, even in the short space of three quarters of a century, society has made such great advances in its care and provision for the poor, that it would be difficult to justify the practice now so easily as Burke and Johnson did. 66 46 66 “Mrs. Williams made it," says Boswell, “with sufficient dexterity, notwith"standing her blindness, though her manner of satisfying herself that the cups were full enough, appeared to me a little awkward; for I fancied she put her "finger down a certain way, till she felt the tea touch it." iii. 102. On the other hand Percy, whose vicarage she visited in Johnson's company in the year following this, says, in a communication to Dr. Robert Anderson: "When she "made tea for Johnson and his friends, she conducted it with so much delicacy, by gently touching the outside of the cup, to feel, by the heat, the tea as it "ascended within, that it was rather matter of admiration than of dislike." And see Hawkins's Life of Johnson, 321-5, &c: "I see her now," says Miss Hawkins, in one of the pleasantest passages of her Memoirs, i. 152, “a pale, "shrunken old lady, dressed in scarlet, made in the handsome French fashion of the "time, with a lace cap, with two stiffened projecting wings on the temples, and a "black lace hood over it... Her temper has been recorded as marked with the Welsh "fire, and this might be excited by some of the meaner inmates of the upper floors" [of Dr. Johnson's house]; "but her gentle kindness to me I never shall forget, "or think consistent with a bad temper." The bad temper seems nevertheless indisputable. "Age, and sickness, and pride," Johnson himself writes a few years later, "have made her so peevish, that I was forced to bribe the maid to stay "with her by a secret stipulation of half-a-crown a week over her wages." Boswell, vi. 263. In another letter he writes to Mrs. Thrale: "Williams hates "every body. Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams. Desinculins "hates them both. Poll loves none of them." Piozzi Letters (1788), ii. 38; "blind woman in your house? 1763. asked Beauclerc. "Why, "sir," answered Johnson," she was a friend to my poor 66 wife, and was in the house with her when she died. She "has remained in it ever since, sir." Beauclerc's friendships with women were not of the kind to help his appreciation of such gallantry as this; though he seems to have known none, in even the circles of fashion, so distinguished, that he did not take a pride in showing them his rusty-coated philosopher-friend. The then reader of the Temple, Mr. Maxwell, has described the levees at Inner Temple-lane. He seldom called at twelve o'clock in the day, he says, without finding Johnson in bed, or declaiming over his tea to a party of morning visitors, chiefly men of letters, among whom Goldsmith, Murphy, Hawkesworth (an old friend and fellow-worker under Cave), and Langton, are named as least often absent. Sometimes learned ladies were there, too; and particularly did he remember a French lady of wit and fashion doing him the honour of a visit. It was in the summer of this year: and the lady was no other than the famous Countess de Boufflers, acknowledged leader of French society, mistress of the Prince of Conti, aspiring to be his wife, and of course, in the then universal fashion of the savantes, philosophes, and beaux esprits of Paris, an Anglomane. She had even written a tragedy in English and see 28-9. Poll was a Miss Carmichael, who, with Mrs. Desmoulins and her Et. 35. 1763. Et. 35. 66 prose, on a subject from the Spectator; and was now on a round of visitings, reading her tragedy, breakfasting with Walpole, dining with the Duke of Grafton, supping at Beauclerc's, out of patience with every body's ridiculous abuse of every body that meddled in politics, and out of breath with her own social exertions. "Dans ce pays-ci," she exclaimed, “ c'est un effort perpétuel pour se divertir;" and, exhausted with it herself, she did not seem to think that any one else succeeded any better. It was a few days after Horace Walpole's great breakfast at Strawberry-hill, where he describes her with her eyes a foot deep in her head, her hands dangling and scarce able to support her knitting-bag, that Beauclerc took her to see Johnson. They sat and talked with him some time; and were retracing their way up Inner Temple-lane to the carriage, when all at once they heard a voice like thunder, and became conscious of Johnson hurrying after them. On nothing priding himself more than on his politeness, he had taken it into his head, after a little reflection, that he ought to have done the honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality; and, eager to show himself a man of gallantry, was now hurrying down the staircase in violent agitation. He overtook them before they reached the Temple-gate, and, brushing in between Beauclerc and the Countess, seized her hand and conducted her to her coach.* His dress was a rusty brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes by way of slippers, a little shrivelled * Boswell, vi. 25-6. "When our visit was ended," says Hannah More, describing herself and her sister calling on Johnson in the year of Goldsmith's death, "he "called for his hat, as it rained, to attend us down a long winding to our coach." Memoirs, i. 49. And Miss Reynolds expressly tells us (Croker, 832), that he never suffered any lady to walk from his house to her carriage, through Bolt-court, unattended by himself to hand her into it; and if any obstacle prevented it from driving off, "there he would stand by the door of it, and gather a mob around "him: indeed they would begin to gather the moment he appeared handing the "lady down the steps into Fleet-street." wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. "A con"siderable crowd of people gathered round," says Beauclerc, "and were not a little struck by this singular appearance.' The hero of the incident would be the last person to be moved by it. The more the state of his toilet dawned upon him, the less likely would he be to notice it. There was no more remarkable trait in Johnson, and certainly none in which he more contrasted with the subject of this narrative, than that, as Miss Reynolds was always surprised to remark in him, no external circumstances ever prompted him to make the least apology for them, or to seem even sensible of their existence. It was not many months after this that he went to see Goldsmith in a new lodging in the locality which not Johnson alone has rendered illustrious, but its association with a line of the greatest names of English literature; the Dorsets, Raleighs, Seldens, Clarendons, Beaumonts, Fords, Marstons, Wycherleys, and Congreves. He had taken rooms on the then library staircase of the Temple. They were a humble set of chambers enough (one Jeffs, the butler of the society, shared them with him); and, on Johnson's prying and peering about in them, after his short-sighted fashion, flattening his face against every object he looked at, Goldsmith's uneasy sense of their deficiencies broke out. "I shall soon be in "better chambers, sir, than these," he 66 said. Nay, sir," Nil te quæsiveris "extra." Invaluable advice! could Goldsmith, blotting out remembrance of his childhood and youth, and looking solely and steadily on the present and the future, but have dared to act upon it. 1763. Æt. 35. |