Chapter 3 No.3

It was a little after the middle of the last century that our story opens again. George II., whose virtues and vices were clock-like in their regularities, was on the throne; Queen Caroline, whom he had always abused and always venerated, was in her grave for twelve or more years past.

Outside politics were ripening for that French and English war-in which a Montcalm and a Wolfe figured upon our side the water, and which has been put in picturesque array by Francis Parkman; the geraniums and oleanders were blossoming over the Portuguese grave of Harry Fielding; Thomson had sung his last notes in his Castle of Indolence and was laid to rest-not in Kelso, or Dryburgh, where his body should have mouldered-but in a little Richmond Church, within gunshot of the "Star and Garter." Gray was still studying the scholarly measures of the Bard, in his beloved Cambridge; Horace Walpole playing the élégant was fattening on his revenues at Strawberry Hill; while Dr. Johnson-notwithstanding the Dictionary and the Rambler-had been latterly (1756) in such sore straits as to appeal to his friend Richardson for the loan of a few guineas to save him from jail; and Richardson, fresh then in his triumphs from Clarissa Harlowe and the great Grandison, was not slow to grant the request,[1] and to enjoy all the more his Kingship among the women, in his great house out at Hammersmith.

London streets.

A sharp walk of a quarter of an hour from St. Paul's would, in that time, take one into the green fields that lay in Islington; and beyond, upon the Waltham road, were the hedges, pikes, and quiet paddocks, through which went galloping-at a little later day-that citizen of "credit and renown," John Gilpin, instead of the clattering suburbs that now stretch nearly all the way between Cheapside and the "Bell" at Edmonton.

Of the many bridges which now span the Thames, only two[2] representatives were in existence; the old Westminster was there in its first freshness, and ferrymen quarrelling with it, because it spoiled their carrying trade to Vauxhall and parts adjacent; and the old London Bridge was cumbered by lumbering houses, held up by trusses and cross-beams, while its openings were so low and its piers so many as to make, at certain stages of the tide, furious cascades which drove great wheels geared to cumbrous pumping machinery, to throw up water for the behoof of London citizens. The old Fleet Prison was in existence, and its smudgy stifling air hung over all that low region above which now leap the great arches of the Holborn Viaduct; and round the corner, in the reek and smoke of Fleet Street, half way between the spire of St. Bride's and the spire of St. Clement's Danes-up a grimy court that is, very likely, just as grimy to-day, lived that Leviathan of a man, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Johnson and Rasselas.

Rasselas.

He had passed through his green days, and the nights when he strolled supperless about London with that poor wretch of a poet Richard Savage. The school at Edial with its three pupils was well behind him; so was the dining behind the screen at Cave's (the bookseller who presided over the Gentleman's Magazine, with St. John's Gate on the cover then, and on the cover now): so was his age of sentiment ended.

His wife Tetty had gone the way of all flesh (1752) and he had mourned her truly: in proof of this may be counted the presence under his roof of a certain old lady, Miss Williams, who is peevish, who is tempestuous, who is blind, who tests the tea with her fingers, who will talk, and then again, she won't talk; yet Johnson befriends her, pensions her-when he has money,-sends home sweetbreads from the tavern for her; and when his friends ask why he tolerates this vixen, he gives the soundest reason that he has-"she was a friend of Tetty; she was with poor Tetty when she died!"

And his brain was as big, or bigger, than his heart; it had made itself felt all over England by long, honest work-by brave, loud speech. He had snubbed the elegant Lord Chesterfield, who would have liked to see his name upon the first page of the great Dictionary. Not an outcast of the neighborhood but had heard of his audacious kindness; not a linkboy but knew him by the chink of his half-pence; not a beggar but had been bettered by his generous dole; not a watchman but knew him by his unwieldy hulk, and his awkward, intrepid walk; and we know him-if we know him at all-not by his Rambler and his Rasselas, so much as by the story of his life. Who rates Rasselas among his or her cherished books of fiction?

What an unlikely, and what a ponderous beginning it has!

"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia!"

When, in days long past, I have read thus far in this elephantine novelette to my children, they were pretty apt to explode upon me with-"Please try something else!" Yet this elephantine novelette has a host of excellent and eloquent moral reflections in it, shouldering and elbowing themselves out from its flimsy dress of fiction. Shall I give a hint of the scheme of this old story? An Abyssinian prince living in the middle of a happy valley, walled in by mountains that are beautiful, and watered by rivers that are musical, in the enjoyment of all luxuries, does at last become restless-as so many people do-not so much from a want, as from the want of a want. So he conspires with Imlac, a poet, to escape from the thraldom of complete ease: a sister of the prince and her handmaid steal away with them; and with plenty of jewels the party enter upon their exploration of the ways of outside life. They encounter hermits whose solitude does not cure their pains, and shepherds whose simplicities do not conquer misfortune, and philosophers whose philosophy does not relieve their anxieties, and scholars whose learning does not make them happy.

Imlac, the poet, sums up their findings in saying-"You will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own." This is its whole philosophy. There are interlarded discourses upon learning, and marriage, and death, and riches, which might have been cut from a Rambler or from a sermon. They travel through upper Egypt, and sojourn in the grand Cairo; but there is no shimmer of the desert, and no flash of crescent or scimitar, and no dreamy orientalism; its Eastern sages talk as if they might have thundered their ponderous sentences from the pulpit of St. Bride's. As a finality-if the tale can be said to have any finality-the princess thinks she would like-of all things-Knowledge: the poor handmaid, who has had her little adventure, by being captured by a Bedouin chief, thinks she would like best a convent on some oasis in the desert; while the prince would like a miniature kingdom whose rule he might administer with justice as easily as one might wind a watch; but all agree that, when the Nile flood favors, they will go contentedly back to the happy valley from which they set out upon their wanderings. It is interesting to know that the story was written by Dr. Johnson on the evenings of a single week; and written-before he had come to his pension[3]-to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral; and it is interesting further to know that the magniloquent tale did forge its way into the front rank of readers at a time when Roderick Random and Tom Jones were comparatively fresh books, and only five years after Mr. Richardson had issued from his book-shop under the shadows of St. Bride's, hardly a gunshot away from the house of Johnson, the voluminous history of Sir Charles Grandison.

The Painter and the Club.

Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Among the friends the Doctor made in those days of Ramblers and Idlers was one Joshua Reynolds,[4] some fourteen years the junior of the Doctor, but sedate and thoughtful beyond his age; with an eye, too, for the beautiful faces of young English girls which had never been opened on them before; and doing artist work that is quite different in quality and motive from that of the old stand-by Mr. Hogarth, who not long before this time had been preaching his painted sermons of the Rake's Progress.

Reynolds had made his trip to Italy, and had brought back from Rome, in addition to his studies of Raphael-an affection of the ear-caught, as he always said, in the draughty corridors of the Vatican, which obliged him ever after to carry an ear-trumpet; but his courtesy and grace and precision of speech made the awkwardness forgotten. Looking at the exquisite child's face of his little Penelope Boothby, expressing all that was most winning in girlhood for him who was so reverent of exterior graces, and looking from this to the leathern, seamy face of Johnson, and his unlaundered linen, and snuffy frills (when he wore any), and it is hard to understand the intimacy of these two men; but there was a tenderness of soul under the Doctor's slouchy ways which the keen painter recognized; and in the painter there was a resolute intellection, which Johnson was not slow to detect, and which presently-when the new Royal Academy was founded by George III.-was to have expression in the great painter's discourses on Art-discourses which for their courageous common-sense will, I think, outrank much of the art-writing of to-day.

Turks-Head Club.

In 1760 (the year after Rasselas appeared) Reynolds moved into a fine house, for that day, in Leicester Square-a quarter now given over mostly to French lodgers; but in its neighborhood one may find a marble bust of the eminent painter; and the house where he gave great steaming dinners-famous for their profusion and disorderly array-is still there, though given over to small artists and sellers of bric-à-brac. His good sister, Miss Fanny, who was his housekeeper, loved painting and poetry, and a drive in the painter's chariot, which he set up in later days, better than she loved housewifery. Over-shrewd ones said that Sir Joshua (the title came to him a few years after with the presidency of the Royal Academy) did not marry because he had wholesome dread of a wife's extravagance; certain it is that he remained a bachelor all his life, and thereby was a fitting person to discuss with the widowed Johnson the formation of a club. The Doctor was always clubably disposed; so he caught at the idea of Sir Joshua, and thence sprung that society-called "The Literary Club" afterward, which held its sessions, first at the Turk's Head, in Gerrard Street, Soho Square-on Monday evenings at the start, and afterward on Fridays-numbering among its early members Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Hawkins, Beauclerk, and Goldsmith. This famous club, though moving from place to place in the closing years of the last century, still preserved its identity; it took a new lease of life in the first quarter of the present century, and it still survives in a very quiet old age, holding its fortnightly meetings-rather sparingly attended, it is true-at Willis's Rooms, St. James's Street, in the west of London. Among recent members may be named Gladstone, Sir Frederick Leighton, Lord Salisbury, the Duke of Argyle, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold.[5]

Some Old Club-men.

Edmund Burke.

Burke,[6] who was among the original nine members, was very much the junior of Johnson; but known to him as a sometime Irish student at law, who had written only a few years before two brilliant treatises; one on Natural Society, and the other on the Sublime and Beautiful.

Later he had done excellent historic work in connection with Dodsley's Annual Register; but he had not yet entered upon that sea of political turmoil over which he was to sweep in so grand a way and with such blaze of triumph. It is possible indeed that he was indebted to the associations of the club for some of the initiative steps toward that wonderful career whose outcome in Parliament, in the courts, and in pamphleteering, has become a component part of the literature of England. Burke, even at that early stage of his progress (his first speech was made in 1766) had all his vast resources at ready command; Johnson did not wish to meet him in debate without warning; true he was afraid of no mere eloquence; he was used to puncturing bloat of that sort; but Burke's most fiery speeches were beaded throughout with globules of thought, which must be grasped and squelched one by one, if mastery were sought. He was impetuous, too, and aggressive, but reverent of the superior age and reputation of the Doctor; and I daresay coyly avoided those American questions which later came to the front, and upon which they held views diametrically opposed. In after years it used to be said that Burke's speeches would empty the benches of the Commons-ye philosophized; and when not heated, spoke with a drawling utterance and a touch of Irish brogue flavoring his voice; indeed he talked so well he was never tired of talking; his sentences so swelled out under the amplitude of his illustrations and allusions that I think he came at last to take a pride in their very longitude, and trailed his gorgeous convolutions of speech with the delighted eagerness with which a fine woman trails her sheen of satins and velvets.

Topham Beauclerk.

Dr. Nugent, a physician of culture, father-in-law of Mr. Burke, was also one of the original members of the club-getting the preferment-as so many in all times do get preferment-simply because son-in-law, father-in-law, or nephew-to somebody else. Another noticeable member of the club was Topham Beauclerk, not by any means the man a casual observer would have taken for an associate of Johnson. He was courtly and elegant in bearing, a man of fashion, smiled upon by such as Lord Chesterfield and Horace Walpole, and who traced his descent back through the first Duke of St. Albans to Nell Gwynne and Charles the Second. He inherited by right, therefore, gayety and humor and wit, and rare histrionic power, and Satan-ry to match. Old Dr. Johnson fairly languished in his admiration of the way in which Topham Beauclerk could tell a story. "It costs me fearful pains," he was used to say; "but this fellow trips through with an airy grace that costs him nothing."

Beauclerk was proud of his membership, and brought his own share of wit, of general information, and of cheery bonhomie to the common reckoning. He married a certain well-known and much-admired Lady Diana Bolingbroke-a divorcée of two days' standing-and treated her shamefully; that being the proper thing for a fashionable man to do, who was emulous of the domestic virtues of George II. At his death, with a large jointure in hand, she had peace; and Burke said, with a humor that was uncommon to him: "It was really enlivening to behold her placed in that sweet house, released from all her cares: ￡1,000 per annum at her disposal, and her husband dead! It was pleasant, it was delightful, to see her enjoyment of the situation!" Beauclerk was too fine a fellow to think well of the domesticities; there was a good deal of the blood of Charles the Second in him. Over and over we come upon such-men of parts squandered in the small interchanges of fashionable life; perpetually saying slight, good things for a dinner-table; telling a story with rare gusto; the envy of heavy talkers who can never catch butterflies on the wing; looking down upon serious duty whether in art or letters; and so, leaving nothing behind them but a pretty and not always delicate perfume.

David Garrick.

Another of the clubmen was David Garrick-not one of the original nine, but voted in a few years after. Dr. Johnson does indeed give a characteristic growl when his name is proposed-"What do we want of play-actors?" but his good nature triumphs. Little Garrick was an old scholar of his at Edial; and though he has conquered all theatric arts and won all their prizes, he is still for him, "little Garrick." A taste for splendor and dress had always belonged to him. In his boy-days he had written to his father, who was stationed at Gibraltar, "I hope, Papa, you find velvet cheap there; for some one has given me a knee-buckle, and it would go capitally with velvet breeches. Amen, and so be it!"

That love for the buckles and the velvet clung to him. When Edial school broke up, he tramped with Johnson to London-the master with the poor tragedy of Irene in his pocket, and the boy with such gewgaws and pence as he could rake together. Perhaps, also, the tragic splendor of Shakespeare's verse shimmering mistily across his visions of the future, making his finger-ends tingle and his pulse beat high.

But a legacy of ￡1,000 comes to the Garrick lad presently, which he invests in a wine business, in company with his staid brother, Peter Garrick, who looks after affairs in Lichfield, and who is terribly disturbed when he hears that David is taking to theatric studies;-has acted parts even!

And Davy writes back relenting, and sorry to grieve them at home; but keeps at his parts. And Peter writes more and more disconsolately, lamenting this great reproach, and David writes pretty letters of fence, and the wine business leaks away, and Peter is in despair; and Davy sends remittances which are certainly not legitimate business dividends, thus propping up the sinking wine venture; and before Peter is reconciled, has become the hero of the London boards, with a bank credit that would buy all their ports and clarets twice over.

And this wonderful histrionic genius, probably unparalleled on the English stage before or since his day, so gay, so brisk-so witty betimes-so capable of a song or a fandango, brought life to the club. Nor was there lack in him of literary qualities; his prologues were of the best, and he had the charming art of listening provocatively when the great doctor expounded.

Mr. Boswell.

James Boswell.

Another early member of the club, whom I think we should have liked to see making his way with a very assured step into the Turk's Head, of a Monday or a Friday, was James Boswell, Esquire.[7] It is a household name now, and will remain so for years to come by reason of the extraordinary life which he wrote, of his master and patron, Dr. Johnson. Yet it was only a year or so before the formation of the club that this jaunty Scotch gentleman, son of a laird, and of vast assurance-having been a tuft-hunter from his youth-caught his first sight of the great Doctor, in the little shop of Davies the bookseller; and the great man had given a snubbing, then and there, to the pert, but always obsequious Boswell; the future biographer, however, digested excellently well provision of that sort, and I think the Doctor had always a tenderness for those who took his flagellations without complaint. Certain it is that there grew up thereafter an intimacy between the two, which is one of the most curious things in the history of English Men of Letters. I know that hard things are said of Mr. Boswell, and that every tyro in criticism loves to have a blow at the well-fed arrogance of the man. Macaulay has specially given him a grievous black-eye; but Macaulay-particularly in those early review papers-was apt to let his exuberant and cumulative rhetoric carry him up to a climacteric which the ladder of his facts would scantly reach. To be sure Boswell was a toady; but rather from veneration of those he worshipped than desire of personal advancement; he was an arrant tuft-hunter, thereby enlarging the sphere of his observations; but he was fairly up in classical studies; had large fund of information; was sufficiently well-bred (indeed, in contrast with the Doctor, I think we may say excellently well-bred); he rarely, if ever, said malicious things, though often impertinent ones; his conundrums again and again gave a new turn to dull talk; and he had a way, which some even more stolid people possess in our time, of baiting conversation by interposing irrelevant matter, with an air of innocence that captivates; then there was the pleasant conceit of the man-full-fed, sleek, and shining out all over him-over his face, and his erect but somewhat paunchy figure; all which qualities were contributory to the humor and fulness and charm of that famous biography which we can read backward or forward-in the morning or at night-by the chapter or by the page-with our pipe or without it-with our knitting or without it-and always with an amazed and delighted sense that the dear, old, clumsy, gray-stockinged, snuff-ridden Doctor has come to life once more, and is toddling along our streets, belching out his wit and wrath, and leaning on the arm of the ever-ready and most excellent and obsequious James Boswell, Esquire.

Such a book is not to be sneered at, nor the writer of it; perhaps we think it would be easy for us or anybody to write such another, if we would only forget conventionalisms and have the courage of our impressions; but if we made trial, I daresay we should find that to forget conventionalisms is just what we can't and do not know how to do; and so our impressions get bundled into the swathings of an ambitious rhetoric which spoils our chances and vulgarizes effort. I do not say Boswell was a very high-toned man or a very capable man in most directions; but he did have the art of easy narrative to a most uncommon degree; and did clearly perceive and apprehend just those points and qualities which go to make portraiture complete and satisfying.[8] I do not believe that he stupidly blundered into doing his biographic work well; stupid blundering never did and never could accomplish work that will meet acceptance by the intelligence of the world.

Gibbon.

Edward Gibbon.

I come now to speak of a more respectable personage-one of whom you have often heard, and whose resounding periods, full of Roman History you will most surely have read; I mean Edward Gibbon[9]-not an original member of the club, but elected at an early day. His life has great interest. He was the sole survivor of seven children; his father being a Member of Parliament-very reputable, but very inefficient. There were fears that his famous son would be a cripple for life, so weakly was he, and so ill put together; but growing stronger, he went to Oxford; was there for only a short time; did not love Oxford then, or ever; inclined to theologic inquiry and became Romanist; which so angered his father that he sent him to Lausanne, Switzerland, to be re-converted under the Calvinist teachers of that region to Protestantism. This in due time came about; and it was perhaps by a sort of compensating mental retaliation for this topsy-turvy condition of his youth that he assumed and cultivated the pugnacious indifference to religion which so marked all his later years and much of his work. He had his love passages, too, there upon the beautiful borders of Lake Geneva; a certain Mademoiselle Curchod, daughter of a Protestant clergyman, lived near by; and with her the future historian read poetry, read philosophy, read the skies and the mountains, discoursed upon the conjugation of verbs, and upon conjugalities of other sorts; but this the English father disapproved as much as he had disapproved of Romanism; and by reason of this-as Gibbon tells us, in his delightful autobiography-that "sweet dream came to an end." It is true the French biographers[10] put a rather different phase upon the story, and represent that while Mademoiselle respected young Mr. Gibbon very much, she could not return his ardor. Two colors, I have observed, are very commonly given to any sudden interruption of such festivities.

Mademoiselle, however, did not pine in single blessedness; she had a career before her. She became in a few years the distinguished wife of Necker, the great finance minister of France in the days immediately preceding the Revolution, and the mother of a still more famous daughter-that Mme. de Stael who wrote Corinne.

Though Gibbon lived and died a bachelor, he always maintained friendly relations with his old flame Mme. Necker, being frequently a guest at her elegant Paris home; and she, on at least one occasion, a guest of the historian in London. It was in the year 1774-ten years after its foundation, that Gibbon was elected member of the Literary Club; he being then in his thirty-seventh year and well known for his wide learning and his conversational powers. He was recognized as an author, too, of critical acumen, and great range of language; some of his earlier treatises were written in French, which he knew as well as English; German he never knew; but the first volume of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not appear until the year 1776-a good tag for that great American date! That first volume made a prodigious surprise, and immense applause. Poor Hume[11] (whose story waits), struggling with the mortal disease which was to carry him off in that year, wrote his praises from Edinburgh. Horace Walpole, who had the vanity of professing to know everybody worth knowing, says, "I am astonished; I know the man a little; I could not believe it was in him; I must get to know him better."

Yet Gibbon was not a modest man in the ordinary sense; never, except when-very rarely-warmed into a colloquial display of his extraordinary learning, did he impress a stranger with any sense of his power. He was short and corpulent; had a waddling walk and puffy cheeks and a weak double chin; with very much in his general aspect and manner to explain the miscarriage of his love-affair, and nothing at all to explain the Decline of the Roman Empire. Withal, he was obsequious, studiously courteous; had ready smiles at command; had a mincing manner; his wig was always in order, and so was his flowered waistcoat; and he tapped his snuff-box with an easy dégagé air, that gave no warrant for anything more than an agreeable titillation of the nerves. But if an opening came for a thrust of his cumulated learning in establishing some historic point in dispute, it poured out with a gush, authority upon authority, citation on citation, as full and impetuous and unlooked for as a great spring flood.

He went over to Paris with his honors fresh upon him; was cordially received there; the Necker influence, and his familiarity with French, standing him in good stead. He affected a certain style too. "I have," he says, "two footmen in handsome liveries behind my coach, and my apartment is hung with damask." He loved such display, though only the hired luxury of a hotel. He had never a taste for the simpler enjoyments of English country life; never mounted a horse and scorned partridge shooting or angling. In a letter to a friend he says, "Never pretend to allure me by painting in odious colors the dust of London. I love the dust, and whenever I move into the Weald, it is to visit you, and not your trees."

It does not appear that he went frequently to the Turk's-Head Club. The brusquerie of Johnson would have grated on him-grated on him in more senses than one, we suspect; and the gruff Doctor would have scorned his dilettanteism as much as his scepticism. Gibbon took kindly, though, to Goldsmith; but he hated Boswell honestly, and Boswell honestly hated back.[12]

His letters were never strong or bright, nor were his occasional literary criticisms either acute or profound; all his great powers were kept in reserve for his magnum opus-the History. For the quietude he thought necessary to its completion he went again to the home of his youth at Lausanne, and there, in sight of that wondrous panorama of lake and mountain, upon a site where now stands the Hotel Gibbon,[13] and a few acacia trees under which the historian meditated, the great work was brought to completion-a great work then, and a great work now, measured by what standard we will. To say that one approaches the accuracy of Gibbon is to exhaust praise; to say that one surpasses him in reach of learning is to deal in hyperbole. Even the historian, Dr. Freeman, who, I think, did much prefer saying a critical thing to saying a pleasant thing, testified that-"He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century whom modern research has neither set aside, nor threatened to set aside." Modern high critics sneer at his large, ceremonious manner; Ruskin pronounces "his English the worst ever written by an educated Englishman"[14] (the same Ruskin who found a "mass of errors" under the sunshine of Claude). But let us remember what burden of knowledge those grandiloquent sentences of Gibbon had to carry; what reach of empire they had to cover! Here be no pigmies, predicating the outcome of little factions, no discourse about the smallness of word-meanings; but vast populations are arrayed under our eye. We cannot talk of the stars in their courses as we talk of the will-o'-wisps of politicians. Rome marching to its dissolution, with captive nations in its trail,[15] must put a lofty strain upon the page that records her downfall.

Through all, this corpulent, learned, dainty, keen-eyed, indefatigable little man, is cool-over cool; he has no enthusiasms but the enthusiasm of knowing things. No wrongs that he records seem to chafe him; his blood has no boiling-point; his love no flame; his indignation no scorching power. A great, imposing, processional array of sovereigns, armies, nations-of the wise, the vicious, the savage, the learned, the good; but not a figure in it all, however pure or innocent, which kindles his sympathies into a glow; not one so profligate as to make his anger burn; not one so lofty or so true as to give warmth to his expressions of reverence.

Yet notwithstanding, if any of my young readers are projecting the writing of a history, I strongly advise them to avoid the subject of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Oliver Goldsmith.

Oliver Goldsmith.

And now we come to another member of our club, who reaped far fewer of the substantial rewards of life.--Who, with any relish for the beatitudes of letters, has not tender reverence for the memory of Goldsmith? He was the youngest member of the club at its start, and yet the thirty-four years he then counted had been full of change and adventure: he had wandered away early from the beautiful paternal home of Lissoy in Ireland; had studied in Scotland and in Leyden; had idled in both; had been vagrant over Europe; had tried medicine, tried flute-playing, tried school-keeping, tried proof-reading for the old shopkeeper, Samuel Richardson, and had finally landed in a court not far from Johnson's, where he did work for the booksellers. Amongst this work were certain essays which attracted the old Doctor's attention by their rare literary qualities; and the old gentleman had befriended the author-all the more when he found him a man who did not befriend himself; and who, if he had only sixpence in his pocket (and he was not apt to have more), would give the half of it to a beggar. A little over-love for wine, too-when the chance of a tavern dinner came to him-was another weakness which the great Doctor knew how to pardon; and so Goldsmith became one of the original clubmen; Reynolds, with all his courtly ceremony, growing to love the man; so did Burke; but Boswell was always a little jealous of him, and Goldsmith caught at any occasion for giving a good slap to that sleek self-consequence which shone out all over Boswell-even to his knee-buckles and his silken hose. I do not suppose that Goldsmith contributed much to the weightier debates of the club, and can imagine him sulking somewhat if he found no good opening in the troubled waters in which to feather his dainty oar. Again there was an awkwardness, partly self-consciousness, partly organic tremor, which put him at bad odds in promiscuous talk; to say nothing of the irascibility which he had not learned to control, and which sometimes put a stammer to the tongue; hence, Boswell says, "poorest of talkers;" but around in his chambers, with one or two sympathetic listeners only, and perhaps a bottle of Canary flanking him, and with a topic started that chimed with the emotional nature of the man, and I am sure he would have talked out a whole chapter of a new Vicar of Wakefield.

But whatever the tongue might do, there was no doubt about the pen; we find him even undertaking discourses upon Animated Nature, and history-of Greece or of Rome. Has he then the plodding faculty, and is he a man of research? No; but he has the aptitude to seize upon the plums in the researches of others, and embody them in the amber of his language. He poaches all over the fields of history and science, and bags the bright-winged birds which the compilers have never seen, or which, if seen, they have classed with the gray and the dun of the sparrows. His poetry, when he makes it, may not have so much of polished clang and witty jingle as the verse of Pope; it may lack the great ground-swell of rhythmic cadence which belongs to Johnson; but-somewhere between the lines, and subtly pervading every pause and flow-there is a tenderness, a suave, poetic perfume, a caressing touch of both mind and heart which we cannot describe-nor forget.

Of the original club-men, Goldsmith[16] died first, in 1774, at Brick-court in the Temple; he was forty-five years old, and yielded to a quick, sharp illness at the last, into which all the worries of a much worried life seemed to crowd him. He had been plotting new works, and a new life too; a getting away (if it might be) from the smirch that hung about him in the Temple corridors, out to the Edgware farmery, where primroses and hedges grew, and where there was a scent upon the air, of that old country home of Lissoy:

"I still had hopes my latest hours to crown,

Amidst those humble bowers to lay me down;

To husband out life's taper at the close,

And keep the flame from wasting by repose.

I still had hopes, for pride attends me still,

Amidst the swains to show my book-learned skill;

Around my fire an evening group to draw

And tell of all I felt and all I saw.

And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,

Pants to the place from which at first he flew,

I still had hopes, my long vexations past,

Here to return, and die at home at last."

A stolid physician, called in consultation in those last days, and seeing his disordered state, asked, "If his mind was at ease?" Mind at ease! Surely a rasping question to put to a man whose pulse is thumping toward the hundreds, whose purse is empty, plans broken up, credit gone, debts crowding him at every point, pains racking him, and the grimy Fleet Prison close by, throwing its shadow straight across his path. No, his mind is not at ease; and the pulse does gallop faster and faster, and harder and harder to the end; when, let us hope-ease did come, and-God willing-"Rest for the weary."

The Thrales and the End.

Meantime Dr. Johnson has been withdrawing somewhat from his old regular attendance upon the club. New men have come in, of whiggish tendencies; he hears things he does not like to hear; the Americans are at last making a fight of it; he is a heavier walker than once; besides which his increased revenue has perhaps made him a little more free of the Mitre tavern than of old; then he has made the acquaintance of Mr. Thrale and of Mrs. Thrale-an every-way memorable acquaintance for him. Mr. Thrale is a wealthy brewer, one while Member of Parliament-his works standing on the ground in Southwark now held by Barclay & Perkins, some of whose dependencies cover the site of that Globe Theatre where William Shakespeare was sometime actor and shareholder. Withal, Mr. Thrale is a most generous, sound-headed, practical, kindly man, without being very acute, or cultured, or any way accomplished. Mrs. Thrale, however, has her literary qualities; can jingle a little of not inharmonious verse of her own; reads omnivorously; is apt in French or Latin; is full of esprit and liveliness, and is not without a certain charm of person. She is small indeed, but with striking features and picturesque; easily gracious at her table; witty, headstrong, arch, proud of association with the great Dr. Johnson; really having strong friendship for him; enduring his rudenesses; yielding to him in very much, but not so submissive as to take his opinion (or that of any other man) about whether she should or should not marry Signor Piozzi, when afterward she came to be a widow. In fact, she had in fine development the very womanly way-of having her own way.

The Thrales owned a delightful country place at Streatham, a pleasant drive out from the city, down through Southwark and Brixton and on the road to Croydon; and there Johnson went again and again: Mr. Thrale was so kind, and Mrs. Thrale so engaging. At last they put at his service a complete apartment, where he could, on his blue days, growl to his liking. Who can say what might have been the career of the great lexicographer if he had fallen into such downy quarters in his callow days; should we have had the Dictionary? Surely never the life of Savage, with its personal piquancy, and possibly never the Boswelliana.

Tour to the Hebrides.

But Johnson was not wholly idle; neither the luxuries of Streatham, nor the chink of his pension money, could stay the unrest of his mind: he writes dedications for other people-shoals of them; he re-edits twice over the great Dictionary; publishes The False Alarm; completes his Lives of the Poets; and in the interim-between visits to Oxford, Brighton, and Lichfield-he makes that famous trip, with Boswell, to Scotland and the Hebrides; and never, I think, was so unimportant a journey so known of men. Every smart boy in every American school, knows now what puddings he ate, and about the cudgel that he carried, and the boiled mutton that was set before him. The bare mention of these things brings back a relishy smack of the whole story of the journey. Is it for the literary quality of the book which describes it? Is it for our interest in the great, nettlesome, ponderous traveller; or is it by reason of a sneaking fondness we all have for the perennial stream of Boswell's gossip? I cannot tell, for one: I do not puzzle with the question; but I enjoy.

Last days of Johnson.

In the year 1779 his old friend Garrick died,-leaving nearly a million of dollars, which came to him by that stage following and thrift which had so worried the orthodox and respectable brother Peter of the wine-shop. The interesting Mrs. Garrick came, after a time, to a lively widowhood on the Adelphi Terrace-looking out over what is now the London Embankment, and with such friends as Miss Hannah More, and "Evelina" Burney, and the old wheezing Doctor himself, to cheer her loneliness and share her luxurious dinners. The year after, in 1780, Topham Beauclerk died; and so that other bright light in the Turks-Head Club is dashed forever.

These, things may well have put new wrinkles in the old Doctor's visage; but he still keeps good courage; works in his spasmodic way;-dines with the printer Strahan; dines at the Mitre; dines at Streatham; coquettes, in his lumbering way, with Mrs. Thrale, and goes home to the fogs and grime of Bolt Court.

Shall I quote from a letter to the last-named lady, dating in the year 1780?

"How do you think I live? On Thursday I dined with Hamilton and went thence to Mrs. Ord. On Friday at the Reynolds'-on Sunday at Dr. Burney's with the two sweets [daughters of Mrs. T.] from Kensington; on Monday with Reynolds; to-day with Mr. Langton; to-morrow with the Bishop of St. Asaph. I not only scour the town from day to day, but many visitors come to me in the morning, so that my work [Lives of the Poets] makes little progress.

"You are at all places of high resort, and bring home hearts by dozens, while I am seeking for something to say of men about whom I know nothing but their verses.... Congreve, whom I despatched at the Borough, is one of the best of the little lives: but then I had the benefit of your conversation."

This is very well for a plethoric old gentleman of seventy-one. The next year, 1781, his friend and patron Mr. Thrale died. This loss was a grievous one for Johnson. He had relished his kindliness and his large, practical sagacity: indeed I think he had relished in him the lack of that literary talk and allusion which so many of his acquaintances thought it necessary to throw out as bait for the Leviathan. But was the Doctor to enjoy still the delights of that Streatham retreat? It is certain that a year did not pass before there was much gossip, in neighboring gossiping circles, that associated the name of Johnson with the clever and wealthy widow, as a possible successor to Mr. Thrale. I do not think any such gossips of the male kind ever ventured within easy reach of the Doctor's oaken cudgel. There is no evidence that any thought of such alliance ever came into Johnson's mind; but I do think he had sometimes regaled himself with the hope of a certain kindly protectorate over the luxuries and the mistress of Streatham, which would keep all its old charms open to him, and permit of a fatherly dalliance with the family there. It appeared, however, that the clever lady had other views; and did marry three years after-very much to the disgust of her children-Signor Piozzi, a musician of very fair reputation; did live a happy enough life with him; did publish a book or two full of sparkle and many errors, and some mischievously strong cuts at people she disliked; did live thereafter to a great old age, and carried roses in her cheeks amongst the eighties; though I think these roses came from the apothecaries. She was always fond of decoration.

In 1783 the Doctor had a stroke of paralysis, from which, however, he rallied and was himself once more-dining with Dilly, with Reynolds, at the Mitre too, with Boswell; he even projects new work-suggests the formation of another club in the city, and more within reach: So tenaciously do we cling, and so hopefully do we keep plotting! Finally in June, 1784, he takes his last dinner at the old club; Reynolds and Burke and Langton and Boswell are there, with others he does not know so well; he is feeble at this sitting and ill at ease; clouds gathering over him, from which, however, there flashes out from time to time a blaze of his old wit.

Thereafter, it is mostly Bolt-court-poor blind Miss Williams gone, by this time, and also the sorry physician who had been long a pensioner on him, and whose nostrums he had taken out of charity. Of all the faces that once welcomed him there in their way, only his black man Francis left.

Langton comes to see him; and Reynolds comes bringing more cheer, though the ear trumpet is awkward for the sick man; Burke comes and shows all the melting tenderness of a woman; Boswell, too-before he goes north-bounces in and out, his conceit and assurance mollified and decently draped by the sorrow that hung over him. Little Miss Burney rushes in to the ante-room and stays there hours, hoping some shortest last interview with the great man who had said kindly things to her-never thinking that he could not relish her gossippy prattle about the court, and the royal George, now that a great, swift tide was lifting him into the presence of another king.

Death of Johnson.

The old superstitious awe and dread of death, which had belonged to him throughout life, disappeared in these latter days, and the gloom-with its teasing vampires-was rarefied into a certain celestial haze that hung over him tenderly. He did not excitedly wrestle with the awful possibilities the change might bring, nor work himself into any craze of pious exhilaration to bridge the gap; but was restful as a babe at last, and so was led away tranquilly, by his own child-like trust, over the threshold of the mysteries we must all confront.

[1] See note, Hill's Boswell, p. 304, vol. i.

[2] Blackfriars was not built until 1769, and the old Westminster in 1750.

[3] Pension granted, 1762: Rasselas published, 1759.

[4] Joshua Reynolds, b. 1723; d. 1792. His Discourses published, 1771. Life by Leslie, 1867.

[5] It is from this latter gentleman-whom I had the good fortune to meet in the course of his visit to this country-that my information in regard to the latter status of the club is derived.

[6] Edmund Burke, b. 1729; d. 1797. Editions of his works are various. Best life of him is by John Morley (1867).

[7] B. 1740; d. 1795.

[8] There is, to be sure, a great deal of what the natural reserve of most men would lead them to withhold. But if this "free-telling" does add some of the finer lights and most artistic touches to his picture, and if he perceives this to be so (and have we any right to assume the contrary?) shall we not credit it rightly to his book-making art and commend it accordingly?

That his gentlemanly reserves are not of a pronounced sort may count against the delicacy of his nature, but not necessarily against his capacity as a literary artist.

[9] Edward Gibbon, b. 1737; d. 1794. Dr. Milman's is the standard edition of his History. Bowdler's edition (1825) is noticeable for its expurgations. The work, through its translations, holds as large a place in the historic curriculum of French, Italian, and German students, as in that of English-speaking nations.

[10] Biographie Universale; Article Necker (Mme. Necker, née Susanne Curchod).

[11] Hume's first volume of English History appeared in 1754-just twenty-two years before the Decline and Fall. Hume was about twenty-six years Gibbon's senior.

[12] Boswell says in his Diary (1779): "Gibbon is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club to me."

[13] The old house has wholly disappeared; the hotel covers a portion of Gibbon's garden.

[14] Letter in the Pall Mall Gazette in relation to Sir John Lubbock's "List of Hundred Best Books." Reprinted in Critic (American) of March 20, 1886.

[15] See, for instance, account of Julian's march, and of the taking of Constantinople.

[16] Oliver Goldsmith, b. 1728; d. 1774. Fullest and best Life, that of John Forster.