the jovial midnight watches (Johnson's present habit, as he tells us himself, was to leave his chambers at four in the afternoon, and seldom to return till two in the morning), to tempt him to the Mitre. They supped at that tavern for the first time on the 25th of June; but Boswell, who tells us what passed, has failed to tell us at what dish it was of their 'good supper,' or at what glass of the two bottles of port' they disposed of, that Johnson suddenly roared across the table, 'Give me your hand;

I

‹ have taken a liking to you.' They talked of Goldsmith. He was a somewhat uneasy subject to Boswell, who could not comprehend how he had managed to become so great a favourite with so great a man. For he had published absolutely nothing with his name (Boswell himself had just published Newmarket, a Tale'); you never heard of him yet, but as 'one Dr. Goldsmith'; and all who knew him seemed to know that he had passed a very loose, odd, scrambling kind of life. Sir,' said Johnson, 'Goldsmith ' is one of the first men we now have as an author, and he 'is a very worthy man too. He has been loose in his 'principles, but he is coming right.'

A first supper so successful would of course be soon repeated, but few could have guessed how often. They supped again at the Mitre on the 1st of July; they were together in Inner Temple Lane on the 5th; they supped a third time at the Mitre on the 6th; they met once more on the 9th; the Mitre again received them on the 14th; on the 19th they were talking again; they supped

PP

at Boswell's chambers on the 20th; they passed the 21st together, and supped at the Turk's Head in the Strand; they were discussing the weather and other themes on the 26th; they had another supper at the Turk's Head on the 28th, and were walking from it, arm in arm down the Strand, when Johnson gently put aside the enticing solicitations of wretchedness with No, no, my Girl, it won't do; they sculled down to Greenwich, read verses on the river, and closed the day once more with supper at the Turk's Head, on the 30th; on the 31st they again saw each other; they took tea together, after a morning in Boswell's rooms, on the 2nd of August; on the 3rd they had their last supper at the Turk's Head (Johnson encouraged the house because the mistress of it was a good civil woman, and had not much business) before Boswell's reluctant departure for Utrecht, where the old judge laird was sending him to study the law; and so many of Johnson's sympathies had thus early been awakened by the untiring social enjoyment, the eagerness for talk, the unbounded reverence for himself, exhibited by Boswell, strengthened doubtless by his youth and idleness (of themselves enough, to him, to make any man acceptable), by his condition in life, by a sort of romance in the Lairdship of Auchinleck which he was one day to inherit, and not a little, it may be, by even his jabbering conceits and inexpressible absurdities, that on the 5th of August, the sage took a place beside him in the Harwich coach, accompanied him to the port he was to sail from, and as

C

1 To 1767.]

they parted on the beach enjoined him to keep a journal, and promised himself to write to him. Who is this "Scotch cur at Johnson's heels?' asked some one, amazed at the sudden intimacy. 'He is not a cur,' answered Goldsmith. You are too severe. He is only a bur. Tom Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he has 'the faculty of sticking.'

Boswell has retorted this respectful contempt; and in him it is excessively ludicrous. 'It has been generally 'circulated and believed,' he says, 'that the Doctor was a mere fool in conversation; but in truth this has been 'greatly exaggerated.' Goldsmith had supped with them at the Mitre on the 1st of July, and flung a paradox at both their heads. He maintained that knowledge was not desirable on its own account, for it often was a source of unhappiness. He supped with them again at the Mitre five days later, as Boswell's guest; and again was paradoxical. He disputed very warmly with Johnson, it seems, against the sacred maxim of the British Constitution, that the king can do no wrong: affirming his belief that what was morally false could not be politically true; and as the king might, in the exercise of his regal power, command and cause the doing of what was wrong, it certainly might be said, in sense and in reason, that he could do wrong: which appeared to Boswell sensible or reasonable proof of nothing but the speaker's vanity, and eager desire to be conspicuous wherever he was. As usual, he endeavoured, ' with too much eagerness, to shine.' It is added, indeed,

that his respectful attachment to Johnson was now at its height; but no better reason is given for it, than that his own literary reputation had not yet distinguished him so much as to excite a vain desire of competition with his 'great master.' In short it is impossible not to perceive that Boswell is impatient of Goldsmith from the first hour of their acquaintance. He finds his person short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, and his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman. How such a man could be thought by Johnson one of the first men of letters of the day,

was hard to be understood; harder yet to be borne, that such a man should be a privileged man. 'Doctor 'Goldsmith being a privi'leged man, went with 'him this night' (the first supper at the Mitre) 'strutting away, and call'ing 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.'

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 him till he had a room in a house to offer her, as in 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 blind woman in your house?' asked Beauclerc. Why, sir,' answered Johnson,' she was a friend to my poor 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 sçavantes, philosophes, and beaux esprits of Paris,