Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

according to Garrick, wasn't worth as much as a thought, and Johnson was blind as a bat.

A more serious affaire, however it affected the lady, must have been that which inclined his heart towards Mrs. Careless, the sister of Edmund Hector whose name occurs early and often, and one cannot help wanting to know a little bit more of the matter. Amongst the notes which have gone to the making of this selection, these two, as they stand alone, are the saddest. (Mrs. Emmet—no portrait; Mrs. Careless-no portrait.) The references to these ladies are separated by only two pages in the third volume, and lead one to suspect that some account had reached Lichfield of Samuel's behaviour in London. They make mountains of molehills in little Cathedral towns.

There remains Mrs. Thrale, who was but twenty-five years of age when the doctor was introduced, and sufficiently pleased with herself to be rather a dangerous plaything (a portrait by Reynolds exists showing her with her daughter 'Queenie'); and finally, Frances Reynolds, his junior by twenty years. The portrait we have by Reynolds having been

painted in 1759, she would have been about thirty years old at the time. The letters she had from Johnson were shown in a weak moment to Boswell, and amongst the world's wonders is this, that he did not get hold of them. "There are letters which I have seen,' he says, 'and am sorry her too nice delicacy will not permit them to be published.'

There was nothing too nice about Boswell, nor in his ways of gaining his ends. The author of the coolest and sanest account of the man that has ever been published has presented the facts of his life in such wise that there remains not the slightest doubt in our minds that he was more than a little cracked. Some of the queerest of human beings are doing God's work in their way. There are immortals amongst the damned to whom Dante has introduced us, and others of later date; and seeing in him as we do the model and prototype of a still more contemptible creature, it seems that one cannot speak as if of his work alone, or as if he were really dead.

There are caricatures unnumbered of Boswell, and the only artist inclined to take him at all seriously seems to have been his friend Reynolds. For 'simple beauty and naught else' has any one

ever had anything that could be compared with this letter?

TO SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS.

MY DEAR SIR,-The debts which I contracted in my father's lifetime will not be cleared off by me for some years.

I therefore think it unconscientious to indulge myself in any expensive article of elegant luxury.

But in the meantime you may die, or I may die; and I should regret very much that there should not be at Auchinleck my portrait painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with whom I have the felicity of living in social intimacy.

I have a proposal to make to you. I am for certain to be called to the English bar next February. Will you now do my picture? and the price shall be paid out of the first fees which I receive as a barrister in Westminster Hall. Or if that fund should fail, it shall be paid at any rate five years hence by myself or my representatives.

If you are pleased to approve of this proposal, your signifying your concurrence underneath upon two duplicates, one of which shall be kept by each of us, will be a sufficient voucher of the obligation.-I ever am, with very sincere regards, my dear Sir, your faithful and affectionate, humble servant,

JAMES BOSWELL.

There is a way into every hole, and he got what

he wanted, of course, though he never earned money enough to pay for the portrait he had ordered on the strength of fees that never came.'

The really delicious story which Mauritius Lowe told of the wiles which Boswell employed to get from him what Johnson had written has been unearthed and retold with much of the gem-setter's art by the Literary Editor of our edition, and should be coupled with this by the reader who desires, like Bottom of Cobweb, a somewhat better acquaintance with Boswell. Mr. Keith Leask's volume, forming one of the 'Famous Scots' series, is the book of books on the subject; but one thing he said, and that perhaps inadvertently, which cannot be allowed to pass, and should have been challenged before, for even of Johnson he says, that 'he and most members of that club, apart from the record of Boswell, would be but names to the literary antiquary, and by the mass of the people entirely forgotten.' Si monumentum quæris, circumspice. There is no record of any club containing so high a percentage of members of whom this can be said to-day.

Though it may not have been easy, the forensic habit, or whatever it is, enabled Mr. Leask to

suppress the visible signs of his mirth; and the consequence is that his book of its class and kind is one of the very best.

In the space which remains are my notes on particular portraits, which would have seemed out of place in the lists.

Vol. I., to face p. 15.

Portrait of Lucy Porter.-It seems that this and that of her mother can be proved to have belonged to Johnson. The references in this work to Mr. Thomas Pennant, author of London, etc., are sufficiently numerous to have suggested the insertion of his portrait here, but the space is required by others. To a descendant of his we owe the information that they belonged in the first place to Johnson, then to his stepdaughter, and then to the said Thomas Pennant, in whose family they have remained, and what has been said of these two applies also to this portrait of Garrick.

David Garrick, p. 60.-In commemoration of the ovation at Stratford-on-Avon, which was Garrick's rather than Shakespeare's. der Gucht pinx.)

(B. Van

« ElőzőTovább »