CHAPTER VI

“When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.”

It was on Reynolds’s suggestion that he and Johnson founded, in 1763, what later became celebrated as the Literary Club. They held their first meetings at the Turk’s Head (where Hogarth and Thornhill had previously established their Art Club), and among the original members were Burke, Langton, Beauclerk, Goldsmith, and Sir John Hawkins. The latter, an arrant snob, objected to Goldsmith’s election on the ground that he was “a mere literary drudge,” but his protest carried no weight with the rest. Five years later, when, under the patronage of the king, Reynolds inaugurated the Royal Academy, Johnson was appointed its first Professor of Ancient Literature, and Goldsmith its first Professor of History, Reynolds himself being its first President—in which office, on his death in 1792, he was succeeded by Benjamin West. West was an American, and had won a considerable reputation in his own country before he came over and settled down in England. He was introduced to Johnson and Reynolds, and was for some time a neighbour of Sir Joshua’s, in Castle Street, Leicester Square. But he is more closely associated with the house that still stands at 14 Newman Street, Oxford Street, in which he lived and worked for forty-five years, and in which he died.

A far greater contemporary painter, who moved on the fringes of Sir Joshua’s circle, was Gainsborough. That he did not come familiarly into the circle, andsometimes make one of the memorable company that gathered round Reynolds’s dinner-table, was owing to some lack of geniality in himself, that kept him from responding to Sir Joshua’s friendly advances. He came from Bath to London in 1774, when he was forty-seven years of age, took a studio at Schonberg House, Pall Mall, and it was not long before celebrities and leaders of fashion were flocking to it to sit for their portraits, and he was recognised as a successful rival of Reynolds. Reynolds was so far from feeling jealousy or resentment that he promptly paid his popular rival a visit; but Gainsborough did not trouble himself to return the call. No doubt it was to some extent owing to Reynolds, too, that in the year of his appearance in London he was elected to the council of management of the Royal Academy; but he ignored the honour, did not attend any meetings, and sent nothing to the exhibition. Reynolds was frankly outspoken in his admiration of Gainsborough’s work, and was even anxious to have his own portrait painted by him. After some delay appointments were fixed, and Sir Joshua duly went to Schonberg House, and the painting was commenced. But after the first sitting he was taken ill; and when, on his recovery, he wrote to tell Gainsborough that he was ready to come again, he received no reply, and the portrait had to remain an unfinished sketch.

His coldness to Reynolds is inexplicable, for he was a kindly-disposed man, and sociable. He kept almost open house in Pall Mall, and such jovial spirits as the Sheridans, Colman, and Garrick were among the constant guests at his table.

GAINSBOROUGH’S HOUSE. PALL MALL.

The year after Gainsborough’s coming to London, Sheridan’sRivalswas produced at the Covent Garden Theatre, to be followed two years after byThe School for Scandal. Before he was out of his twenties Sheridan had finished his career as a dramatist, turned to politics, and was one of the most brilliant of Parliamentary orators, still remaining principal proprietor of Drury Lane Theatre. All his life he was living beyond his income, borrowing, getting into debt, and dodging duns and bailiffs with the gayest imperturbability. Everybody liked him, and was susceptible to his charm. Wherever the wits foregathered, he was the best drinker, the best talker, and the wittiest among them. Byron writes of him in hisDiary: “What a wreck that man is! and all from bad pilotage; for no one had ever better gales, though now and then a little too squally. Poor dear Sherry! I shall never forget the day he and Rogers and Moore and I passed together; when he talked and we listened, without one yawn, from six till one in the morning.” In a letter to Moore, Byron records a dinner at which Sheridan, Colman, and a large party were present, and at the finish, when they were all the worse for drink, “Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. We deposited him safe at home, where his man, evidently used to the business, waited to receive him in the hall.”

This was in October 1815, and 14 Savile Row is the house at which Sheridan was thus deposited byhis noble friend. He was then an old man of sixty-four, and a year later he died there, five thousand pounds in debt, and only saved, by the emphatic intervention of the doctor who was attending him, from being arrested by bailiffs as he lay dying, and carried off to a sponging-house in his blankets.

The year that brought Gainsborough to London (1774) was also the year of Goldsmith’s death; and I want to get back to Goldsmith for a little, in this chapter, and to say something of Richardson. For it is curiously interesting to note how the lives of all these famous men, though there was little enough in common between some of them, met at certain points and established certain connecting links between them; so that it is possible, as Leigh Hunt has said somewhere, to trace a sort of genealogy of such acquaintanceships, such notable meetings and touchings of “beamy hands,” coming down in an unbroken line from Shakespeare to our own day.

Thus, Hogarth first met Johnson in Richardson’s parlour at Salisbury Court; and, in 1757, Goldsmith was employed by Richardson, and worked on his printing premises, in the same court, as reader and corrector to the press; and these, and most of the other immortals named in this chapter—including Sheridan, though he was then so young a man that he outlived them all, and counts among the friends of Lord Byron—have a common link in Dr. Johnson, who was so great a Londoner that he must needs have a chapter presently to himself, or one that he shall share with none but the inevitable Boswell.

Whilst Goldsmith was working as one of hisemployees, Richardson was not only a prosperous printer, he was already the most popular novelist of his day.Pamela,Clarissa Harlowe, andSir Charles Grandisonhad carried his fame throughout the kingdom and beyond it, and were drawing rapturous admiration and tears of sentiment from countless admirers in France as well as in England; and, as befitted a man of his means and eminence, he had supplemented his house off Fleet Street with a country residence at Parson’s Green, where he died in 1761. Down to 1754, however, his country house was The Grange, at North End, Fulham, then a pretty, old-world spot,—“the pleasantest village within ten miles of London.” And it was here that all his novels were written; for he took The Grange in 1738, andPamelaappeared in 1740, andSir Charles Grandisonin 1753. Here, too, he used to give large literary parties, to which Johnson occasionally went with Boswell. But whatever other authors were there, you may safely depend that Fielding was never among the guests; for with all his high morality Richardson was intolerably self-complacent and vain, and never forgave Fielding for burlesquing Pamela as “Shamela,” and parodying her impossible virtues inJoseph Andrews.

SHERIDAN’S HOUSE. SAVILE ROW.

Boswell gives two good anecdotes illustrative of Richardson’s fretful vanity and the limits of his conversational powers. “Richardson had little conversation,” he says Johnson once remarked to him, “except about his own works, of which Sir Joshua Reynolds said he was always willing to talk, and glad to have them introduced. Johnson, when he carried Mr. Langton to see him, professed that he couldbring him out in conversation, and used this illusive expression: ‘Sir, I can make himrear.’ But he failed; for in that interview Richardson said little else than that there lay in the room a translation of hisClarissainto German.” And in a footnote to this Boswell adds: “A literary lady has favoured me with a characteristic anecdote of Richardson. One day at his country house at North End, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, willing to please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a very flattering circumstance—that he had seen hisClarissalying on the king’s brother’s table. Richardson, observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected not to attend to it. But by-and-by, when there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, ‘I think, sir, you were saying something about—’ pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman, provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisitely sly air of indifference remarked, ‘A mere trifle, sir, not worth repeating.’ The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day. Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much.”

PUMP COURT. TEMPLE.

While Fielding was roystering in the wild haunts of Bohemian London, gambling at his club, reeling home to his chambers in Pump Court, and writing his novels in odds and ends of soberer time, Richardson was methodically composing his books at Fulham, getting up early of summer mornings, working at hismanuscript in the little summer-house that he had built in his garden, then reading over breakfast to the worshipping members of his family the results of his morning’s labour. Wherever he went, groups of adoring ladies were sure to gather about him, to chatter fervently of their delight in his interminable stories; and he snuffed up their incense with a solemn and self-satisfied joy, for he took himself as seriously as he was taken by them, and never felt that he was ridiculous, even when he looked it. Not infrequently he would sit in his drawing-room at The Grange, or in the summer-house, surrounded by a rapt audience of feminine believers, who wept as he read aloud to them of the sufferings and heroic virtue of Pamela, or the persecutions of the gentle Clarissa. Youcannot think of it without imagining there, in one of the rooms, the comfortable, obese, touchy, rather pompous, double-chinned little gentleman, in his fair wig and dark coat, an ink-horn set in the arm of his chair with a quill sticking out of it, one hand thrust into the front of his waistcoat, the book or manuscript in his hand, reading gravely and deliberately his long, minute dissections of character, his elaborate descriptions of events and incidents, his formal dialogues, pleased when his stilted sentiment or simple sentimentality brought tears to the eyes of his listeners, and not ashamed to shed one or two with them.

He drew a word-portrait of himself for Lady Bradshaigh, which is fairly well known but is worth repeating, and, judging by the portraits we have of him, is a fairly true one. He paints himself as “short, rather plump, about five feet five inches, fair wig, one hand generally in his bosom, the other a cane in it, which he leans upon under the skirts of his coat that it may imperceptibly serve him as a support when attacked by sudden tremors or dizziness, which too frequently attack him, but, thank God! not so often as formerly; looking directly forthright, as passers-by would imagine, but observing all that stirs on either hand of him without moving his short neck; hardly ever turning back; of a light-brown complexion, teeth not yet failing him; smooth faced, and ruddy cheeked; at some times looking to be about sixty-five, at other times much younger; a regular, even pace, stealing away the ground rather than seeming to rid it; a grey eye, too often overclouded by mistiness from the head; by chance lively—verylively it will be, if he have hope of seeing a lady whom he loves and honours.”

RICHARDSON’S HOUSE. NORTH END FULHAM.

Richardson’s summer-house is long since gone from the garden, and long ago now The Grange was divided in two, and in the half that has been stucco-frontedBurne-Jones went to live in 1867, dying there in 1898.

Five years after Goldsmith had given up proofreading for Richardson, you find him still drudging amid the squalor of Grub Street, still living from hand to mouth, writing reviews and prefaces, revising and preparing new editions of dull books on dull subjects, for a sum of twenty-one pounds compiling a two-volumeHistory of Englandin the form of a series of letters, and generally subduing his heart and mind to the doing of the wretched hack-work to which the impecunious literary man in all ages has usually been condemned.

His new taskmaster was Mr. Newbery the publisher, and he was living, in those days of 1762, in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street; but the publisher was not altogether ungenerous, and made arrangements that enabled his poor hack to leave town at intervals and work in the fresh air and rural environment of Islington. Newbery had chambers of his own there in Canonbury Tower, and Goldsmith used to put up at a cottage near by that was kept by an elderly Mrs. Fleming, a friend or relative of Newbery’s, his bills for board and lodging being periodically settled by his employer, who deducted the amount of them from whatever fell due to Goldsmith from time to time for work done. Fortunately Mrs. Fleming’s accounts have been preserved, and we get an idea of Goldsmith’s wardrobe from her washing-lists, and learn from the items she carefully details that she now and then lent him small sums in cash—tenpence one day, and one and twopence another; that occasionally, when he had a friend to dinner,though she duly noted it, she ostentatiously made no charge; but when four gentlemen came to take tea with him, she debited him with eighteenpence.

GOLDSMITH’S HOUSE. CANONBURY.

Probably one of those friends who had a free dinner was Hogarth, for he travelled out to Islington occasionally on a visit to Goldsmith; and there is a painting of his which is known as “Goldsmith’s Hostess,” and is believed to be none other than Mrs. Fleming’s portrait.

You remember Boswell’s story of howThe Vicar of Wakefieldsaved Goldsmith from imprisonment for debt. “I received one morning a letter from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress,” Johnson told him, “and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork in the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merit. I told the landlady I should soon return; and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.” Everything points to Mrs. Fleming as that harsh landlady, and the lodging in her cottage at Islington as the scene of that famousinterlude. The presumption is that Goldsmith had incurred a much heavier liability to her than was covered by what was accruing to him for his services to Newbery, as a result of his giving time to the writing ofThe Vicar of Wakefieldthat should have been devoted to his usual drudgery; and the cautious Newbery declined to make further advances, and advised his relative, the landlady, to adopt summary methods for the recovery of her debt. Goldsmith never lodged with Mrs. Fleming after that date; but later, when Newbery took a lease of Canonbury Tower, he was from time to time a guest there, and occupied a room in the turret. During one of these visits he wroteThe Traveller; and in later years Charles Lamb often walked across from his Islington home to the Tower to watch the sunset from the summit, and to be entertained by the tenant of it in the panelled chamber where Goldsmith’s poem was written.

It was with the publication ofThe Travellerthat Goldsmith began to emerge from Grub Street. Its success was considerable enough to lead to the publisher’s looking out the manuscript ofThe Vicar of Wakefield, and issuing that also; and in 1768, having made five hundred pounds by the production and publishing ofThe Good-natured Man, he removed from an attic in the Staircase, Inner Temple, and purchased a lease of three rooms on the second floor of 2 Brick Court, Temple. Blackstone, the lawyer, then working on hisCommentaries, had chambers immediately below him, and complained angrily of the distracting noises—the singing, dancing, and playing blind-man’s-buff—that went on over his head when Goldsmith was entertaining his friends.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

Pale, round-faced, plain-featured, with a bulging forehead and an ugly, long upper lip, there was more of kindness and geniality than of dignity or intellect in Goldsmith’s appearance. “His person was short,” says Boswell, who was jealous of his friendship with Johnson, and never realised how great he was, “his countenance was coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman. Those who were in any way distinguished excited envy in him to so ridiculous an excess that the instances of it are hardly credible.” But Boswell misjudged him because, conceited and petty himself, he easily read those qualities into the behaviour of the other, and so misunderstood him. Goldsmith may have had some harmless vanity in the matter of dress, when he could afford to indulge it; but as for vanity of his achievements, that speaking of poetry as

“My shame in crowds, my solitary pride,”

is the spontaneous confession of a naturally shy and diffident spirit. When a man has been buffeted as he had been, has had to slave so hard and wait so long for his reward as he had slaved and waited, he accepts the fame that comes to him merely as wages well earned, and is not likely to grow swollen-headed concerning it. And for his envious character—here is what Boswell gives as a specimen of it. Johnson had come from an unexpected interview with the king, and a party of friends at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house in Leicester Square were gathered about him pressing for a full account of what had taken place. During all the time that Johnson was employed in this narration, remarks Boswell, “Dr. Goldsmith remainedunmoved upon a sofa at some distance, affecting not to join in the least in the eager curiosity of the company. He assigned as a reason for his gloom and seeming inattention that he apprehended Johnson had relinquished his purpose of furnishing him with a prologue to his play, with the hopes of which he had been flattered; but it was strongly suspected that he was fretting with chagrin and envy at the singular honour Dr. Johnson had lately enjoyed. At length, the frankness and simplicity of his natural character prevailed. He sprung from the sofa, advanced to Johnson, and in a kind of flutter from imagining himself in the situation which he had just been hearing described, exclaimed, ‘Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I should have done; for I should have bowed and stammered through the whole of it.’” Naturally this talk with the king would not seem such a breathlessly overwhelming honour to such a man as Goldsmith as to such a snob as Boswell. It was in keeping with Goldsmith’s nature that he should sit quietly listening and imagining the whole thing as he heard about it, instead of fussing round open-mouthed to pester the narrator with trivial questions; but Boswell was incapable of realising this.

2 BRICK COURT. THE TEMPLE.

When Boswell, in his toadying spirit, was saying that in any conversation Johnson was entitled to the honour of unquestionable superiority, and Goldsmith, with a truer conception of the art and pleasure of social intercourse, replied, “Sir, you are for making a monarchy of what should be a republic,” Boswell took it as another proof of Goldsmith’s envy, and of his “incessant desire of being conspicuous in company.” He goes on to say: “He was still more mortified when, talking in a company with fluent vivacity and, as he flattered himself, to the admiration of all who were present, a German who sat next to him, and perceived Johnson rolling himself as if about to speak, suddenly stopped him, saying, ‘Stay, stay! Toctor Shonson is going to say something!’ This was no doubt very provoking, especially to one so irritable as Goldsmith, who frequently mentioned it with strong expressions of indignation.” A vain manwould not have mentioned it frequently, but a man with Goldsmith’s sense of fun would be tickled by it, and rejoice to tell it as a joke against himself, simulating indignation to heighten the jest. When he heard that jape at Sir Joshua’s table of taking peas to Hammersmith because that was the way to Turn’am Green, and afterwards retelling it muddled the phrase and made nonsense of it, Boswell offers it as further evidence that he was a blundering fool. But it is more likely that he blundered on purpose, merely to raise a laugh, that being his queer, freakish fashion of humour. But the Laird of Auchinleck and some of the others were too staid and heavy to follow his nimble wits in their grotesque and airy dancings.

STAIRS UP TO SECOND FLOOR. 2 BRICK COURT.

Why, even the egregious Boswell has to admit that “Goldsmith, however, was often very fortunate in his witty contests, even when he entered the lists with Johnson himself.” And once, when Johnson observed, “It is amazing how little Goldsmith knows; he seldom comes where he is not more ignorant than any one else,” Reynolds put in quietly, “Yet there is no man whose company is more liked”; and the Doctor promptly admitted that, saying, “When people find a man of the most distinguished abilities as a writer their inferior while he is with them, it must be highly gratifying to them.” But that did not fully explain why he was liked, of course; and what Johnson added as to “what Goldsmith comically says of himself” shows that Goldie knew his own weaknesses, and was amused by them. Lamb would have understood him and laughed with him, for he loved to frivol and play the fool in the same vein. When he was dead, Johnson said he was “a very greatman”; and don’t you think there is some touch of remorse in that later remark of his, that the partiality of Goldsmith’s friends was always against him, and “it was with difficulty we could give him a hearing”?

GOLDSMITH’S GRAVE.

When he lay dead in his chambers at 2 Brick Court, as Forster relates, the staircase was filled with mourners the reverse of domestic—“women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for; outcasts of that great, solitary, wicked city, to whom he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable. And he had domestic mourners, too. His coffin was reopened at the request of Miss Horneck and her sister (such was the regard he was known to have for them), that alock might be cut from his hair. It was in Mrs. Gwyn’s possession when she died, after nearly seventy years.” When Burke was told that Goldsmith was dead, he burst into tears; and when the news reached Reynolds in his Leicester Square painting-room, he laid his brush aside—a thing he had not been known to do even in times of great family distress—left his study, and entered it no more that day. A vain and envious fool is not mourned in that fashion.

“I have been many a time in the chambers in the Temple which were his,” writes Thackeray, “and passed up the staircase which Johnson and Burke and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind Goldsmith—the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous of all men was dead within the black oak door.”

No. 2 Brick Court would be memorable enough if it held no other memory; but in 1839 Mackworth Praed died in the same house, and for a short time in 1855 Thackeray too had chambers in it.

HOMES AND HAUNTS OF JOHNSON AND BOSWELL

If we were not quite such a business people, and had not so fully satisfied ourselves that the making of money is the chief end of existence, we should put up a statue to Dr. Johnson in Fleet Street, even if we had to knock down a house or two to find room for it. The statue by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald that has been erected in St. Clement Danes Churchyard, in the Strand, is better than nothing, but it is too insignificant in appearance, and stands in the wrong place. Johnson is still so far removed from death that he is more alive to-day than when he was living, and Fleet Street, and the courts and alleys opening out of Fleet Street, are his proper kingdom. Other great spirits haunt the same ground, but he overshadows them all.

At one time or another during the later forty-seven years of his life Johnson had sixteen different addresses in London, and six of them were in Fleet Street byways. On his first visit to town, in 1737, he had lodgings at Exeter Street, Strand, and made some short stay at Greenwich, whence he wrote to Cave, the publisher, offering to contribute to hisGentleman’s Magazine. Next year he and his wife finally removed from Lichfield, and lodged first in Woodstock Street, Hanover Square, and then in CastleStreet, Cavendish Square. Presently he flitted to the Strand; to Bow Street; to Holborn; to Fetter Lane; to Holborn again; then to Gough Square, at the top of Wine Office Court, where he lived for ten years; then to Staple Inn; to Gray’s Inn; to No. 1 Inner Temple Lane; to No. 7 Johnson’s Court (so named before his time, as Boswell Court was before Boswell’s); and thence to Bolt Court, where, in 1784, he died.

Of all these homes of Johnson’s, only two are now surviving—that in Staple Inn, which cannot be identified (we know only that it was one of the houses in the square); and that in Gough Square, which, next to the Bolt Court house, was the most interesting of his sixteen residences—and one is grateful that, mainly owing to the good offices of Mr. Cecil Harmsworth, it has been saved from demolition, and is now opened as a Johnson museum.

Johnson was still a bookseller’s hack and a comparatively unknown man when, in 1747, at the age of thirty-eight, he started work on hisDictionary. He was then living in Holborn; but next year he moved into Gough Square, and it was here that most of this colossal work was done. And to-day, when you visit that house, you find that all the teeming life of the last hundred and sixty years has drained out of it completely, and nothing remains in the old rooms but memories of Johnson and his friends. He works there for ever now in the study that used to be his, poring short-sightedly over books and papers; and in the queer, sloping-ceilinged garret above are his six assistants, copying, hunting out references for theDictionary, and busy with all the mechanical part ofthe undertaking. You have only to stand there and think of it, and, if you have read Boswell and Hawkins, the life of the household as it was in those ten years long past refashions itself around you in the magic, old-world atmosphere of the place.

ENTRANCE TO STAPLE INN.

Five publishers joined in commissioning Johnson to compile theDictionary, and arranged to pay him a sum of £1575, out of which he had to engage his assistants. “For the mechanical part,” writes Boswell, “he employed six amanuenses; and let it be remembered by the natives of North Britain, to whom he is supposed to have been so hostile, that five of them were of that country. There were two Messieurs Macbean; Mr. Shiels; Mr. Stewart, son of Mr. George Stewart, bookseller at Edinburgh; and a Mr. Maitland. The sixth of these humble assistants was Mr. Peyton, who, I believe, taught French, and published some elementary tracts.” That upper room in Gough Square was fitted up like a counting-house, and each of the six workers in it was allotted his separate task. Boswell goes on to describe Johnson’s method: “The words, partly taken from other dictionaries and partly supplied by himself, having been first written down with spaces left between them, he delivered in writing their etymologies, definitions, and various significations. The authorities were copied from the books themselves, in which he had marked the passages with a black-lead pencil, the traces of which could easily be effaced. I have seen several of them in which that trouble had not been taken, so that they were just as when used by the copyists. It is remarkable that he was so attentive in the choice of the passages in which words were authorised that one may read pageafter page of hisDictionarywith improvement and pleasure; and it should not pass unobserved that he has quoted no author whose writings had a tendency to hurt sound religion and morality.... He is now to be considered as ‘tugging at his oar,’ as engaged in a steady, continued course of occupation, sufficient to employ all his time for some years, and which was the best preventive of that constitutional melancholy which was ever lurking about him, ready to trouble his quiet.”

In after years, with his natural, large kindness of disposition, Johnson retained a sympathetic interest in those six assistants of his. The elder of the two Macbeans fell at length into great poverty, and Johnson helped him by writing a preface to hisSystem of Ancient Geography, and afterwards influenced Lord Thurlow in getting him admitted as a Poor Brother of the Charterhouse. He had Shiel, who was dying of consumption, to help him with hisLives of the Poets; and when Peyton died almost destitute, it was Johnson who paid his funeral expenses.

Whilst he was “tugging at his oar” and making steady headway with theDictionary, Johnson sought recreation in founding one of his many literary clubs—an informal little club that met of evenings in Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, and numbered among its members Hawkesworth, who succeeded Johnson as compiler of Parliamentary debates for theGentleman’s Magazine, and later edited and wrote most of a bi-weekly,The Adventurer; Dr. Bathurst, who with Johnson and Warton contributed to thatAdventurer; and Hawkins, who in due course became one of Johnson’s executors and biographers. He hadpublished his satire,London, eleven years before this; but it was whilst he was living in Gough Square, with theDictionaryin full progress, that he wrote and published his only other great satire,The Vanity of Human Wishes, with its references to the hope deferred, the hardships of his own life, and the obscurity and poverty from which he was but now gradually beginning to emerge:—

“When first the college rolls receive his name,The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame;Resistless burns the fever of renown,Caught from the strong contagion of the gown:O’er Bodley’s dome his future labours spread,And Bacon’s mansion trembles o’er his head.Are these thy views? proceed, illustrious youth,And virtue guard thee to the throne of truth!Yet should thy soul indulge the generous heat,Till captive science yields her last retreat;Should reason guide thee with her brightest rayAnd pour on misty doubt resistless day;Should no false kindness lure to loose delight,Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright;Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain,And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain;Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart,Nor claim the triumph of a lettered heart;Should no disease thy torpid veins invadeNor melancholy’s phantom haunt thy shade;Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee:Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,And pause awhile from learning to be wise:There mark what ills the scholar’s life assail,Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.See nations slowly wise, and meanly just,To buried merit raise the tardy bust.If dreams yet flatter, yet again attend,Hear Lydiat’s life, and Galileo’s end.”

Had the Gough Square house been memorable only as the birthplace of theDictionary, it would have been enough to have given it immortality; for, as Carlyle says (and Carlyle once went reverently over these rooms, and wrote a record of his visit), “Had Johnson left nothing but hisDictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight, and successful method, it may be called the best of all dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great, solid, square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete; you judge that a true builder did it.” But, still while theDictionarywas going on, shortly after the publication ofThe Vanity of Human Wishes, which yielded him £15, Garrick produced his tragedy ofIreneat Drury Lane. It was a failure on the stage; the audience shrieked “Murder! murder!” when the bowstring was placed round the heroine’s neck; but Johnson, feeling that a dramatic author should be more gaily dressed than it was his wont to appear, sat in a box on the first night in a scarlet waistcoat, with rich gold lace, and a gold-laced hat, and accepted his failure with unruffled calmness; and Dodsley paid him £100 for the right to publish the play as a book.

Still while he was in the thick of theDictionary, he set himself, in 1750, to startThe Rambler, and you may take it that he was sitting in his Gough Square study one night when he wrote that prayer before publishing his first number:—

“Almighty God, the giver of all good things, without whose help all labour is ineffectual, andwithout whose grace all wisdom is folly; grant, I beseech Thee, that in this undertaking Thy Holy Spirit may not be withheld from me, but that I may promote Thy glory, and the salvation of myself and others. Grant this, O Lord, for the sake of Thy Son Jesus Christ. Amen.”

SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS

His first number was printed on the 20th March 1750, and he issued it every Saturday and Tuesday afterwards for two years. “This,” as Boswell has it, “is a strong confirmation of the truth of a remark of his, that ‘a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it’; for, notwithstanding his constitutional indolence, his depression of spirits, and his labour in carrying on hisDictionary, he answered the stated calls of the press twice a week, from the stores of his mind, during all that time; having received no assistance, except four billets in No. 10, by Miss Mulso, now Mrs. Chapone; No. 30, by Miss Catherine Talbot; No. 97, by Mr. Samuel Richardson; and Nos. 44 and 100, by Mrs. Elizabeth Carter.” He was so pressed for time that he wrote a good many of the essays in such haste that he had no opportunity even to read them through again before they were printed. One thing that particularly gratified Johnson in connection with theRamblerwas that his wife said to him, after she had read a few numbers, “I thought very well of you before, but I did not imagine you could have written anything equal to this.”

Gough Square is hallowed, too, with sadder memories of Johnson’s wife, for she died here in March 1752; and to the end of his days he never forgot her or ceased to sorrow for her. She was a plain-featuredwoman some years older than himself, but he always spoke of her with a wonderful tenderness and love, and as of one who had been beautiful to look upon. How deeply he felt her loss is evident not merely from some of his sayings, but from his letters, and from thosePrayers and Meditations, in which he set down his most intimate thoughts and feelings. After his death, this written prayer was found among his papers, dated in the month after her passing:—

“April 26th, 1752, being after 12 at night of the 25th.“O Lord! Governor of heaven and earth, in whose hands are embodied and departed spirits, if Thou hast ordained the souls of the dead to minister to the living, and appointed my departed wife to have care of me, grant that I may enjoy the good effects of her attention and ministration, whether exercised by appearance, impulses, dreams, or in any other manner agreeable to Thy government. Forgive my presumption, enlighten my ignorance, and however meaner agents are employed, grant me the blessed influences of Thy Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

“April 26th, 1752, being after 12 at night of the 25th.

“O Lord! Governor of heaven and earth, in whose hands are embodied and departed spirits, if Thou hast ordained the souls of the dead to minister to the living, and appointed my departed wife to have care of me, grant that I may enjoy the good effects of her attention and ministration, whether exercised by appearance, impulses, dreams, or in any other manner agreeable to Thy government. Forgive my presumption, enlighten my ignorance, and however meaner agents are employed, grant me the blessed influences of Thy Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

DR. JOHNSON’S HOUSE. GOUGH SQUARE.

You may stand in the Square to-night, after twelve at night, when all the windows of all the other houses are dark, as they were in that night of 1752, and look up at the window in which the solitary light burned then, whilst, within, the grief-stricken Johnson sat alone in his study writing down that humble, mournful aspiration, and as you look the same light kindles there and glimmers desolately again for all who have eyes to see it. Nor was this the only record of hissorrow that was written in that room, for you find these notes in his journal a year later:—

“March 28, 1753.I kept this day as the anniversary of my Tetty’s death, with prayers and tears in the morning. In the evening I prayed for her conditionally, if it were lawful.”

“April 23, 1753.I know not whether I do not too much indulge the vain longings of affection; but I hope they intenerate my heart, and that when I die like my Tetty, this affection will be acknowledged in a happy interview, and that in the meantime I am incited by it to piety. I will, however, not deviate too much from common and received methods of devotion.”

Boswell tells us that he preserved her wedding-ring reverently as long as he lived, keeping it in “a little round wooden box, in the inside of which he pasted a slip of paper, thus inscribed by him in fair characters, as follows:—

‘Eheu!Eliz. Johnson,Nupta Jul. 9º, 1736,Mortua, eheu!Mart. 17º, 1752.’”

Some thought of her, indeed, rises again and again thereafter in thosePrayers and Meditationsof his, and so makes this house peculiarly reminiscent of her. Before Mrs. Johnson’s death, Mrs. Anna Williams had become a constant visitor at the house here. She was a poetess in a small way, daughter of a Welsh physician, and was in London having both her eyes treated for cataract. After his wife’s death, Johnson gave Mrs. Williams accommodation in Gough Squarewhilst her eyes were operated upon; and, the operation failing and complete blindness following it, with his usual big-hearted humanity he allowed her an apartment in this and each of his subsequent homes; and you remember Boswell’s complaint of how his fastidious susceptibilities were outraged by the way in which she felt round the edges of the cups to see if they were full, when she presided over the tea-table. In the same spirit, Johnson gave house-room here also, and elsewhere, to that simplest and most kindly of medical practitioners, Dr. Robert Levett, on whose death, several years later, he wrote the best of his shorter poems.

You get a good idea of his general manner of life in Gough Square from the note that Boswell obtained from Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant, who wrote that on his wife’s death Johnson was “in great affliction. Mrs. Williams was then living in his house, which was in Gough Square. He was busy with theDictionary. Mr. Shiels and some others of the gentlemen who had formerly written for him used to come about the house. He had then little for himself, but frequently sent money to Mr. Shiels when in distress. The friends who visited him at that time were chiefly Dr. Bathurst, and Mr. Diamond, an apothecary in Cork Street, Burlington Gardens, with whom he and Mrs. Williams generally dined every Sunday. There were also Mr. Cave; Dr. Hawkesworth; Mr. Rydal, merchant on Tower Hill; Mrs. Masters, the poetess, who lived with Mr. Cave; Mrs. Carter; and sometimes Mrs. Macaulay; also Mrs. Gardiner, wife of a tallow-chandler on Snow Hill, not in the learned way, but a worthy good woman; Mr. (now SirJoshua) Reynolds; Mr. Miller; Mr. Dodsley; Mr. Bouquet; Mr. Payne, of Paternoster Row, bookseller; Mr. Strachan the printer; the Earl of Orrery; Lord Southwell; Mr. Garrick.”

JAMES BOSWELL

It was shortly after the conclusion ofThe Ramblerthat Johnson first made the acquaintance of Bennet Langton. He had taken lodgings in a house that was frequently visited by Dr. Levett; and, with Johnson’s permission, Levett one day brought Langton to Gough Square, and, says Boswell:—

“Mr. Langton was exceedingly surprised when the sage first appeared. He had not received the smallest intimation of his figure, dress, or manner. From perusing his writings, he fancied he should see a decent, well-dressed—in short, a remarkably decorous philosopher. Instead of which, down from his bed-chamber, about noon, came, as newly risen, a huge uncouth figure, with a little dark wig which scarcely covered his head, and his clothes hanging loose about him. But his conversation was so rich, so animated, and so forcible, and his religious and political notions so congenial with those in which Langton had been educated, that he conceived for him that veneration and attachment which he ever preserved.”

In 1753 Johnson “relieved the drudgery of hisDictionary” by writing essays for Hawkesworth’sAdventurer, and in this and the next two years did a lot of reviewing and varied hack-work for the magazines and miscellanies of his time; and in February 1775 he wrote that nobly scathing and touching letter to Lord Chesterfield, that is too well known to need reprinting, but must needs be reprinted here, because it was written from Gough Square, and would makeany house from which it was written an honoured and sacred place to all who value the dignity of literature and glory in the emancipation of the literary man from the condescending benevolence of the private patron:—

Back to Index Next