was conversant in canine beauty and excellence, how the dogs quarrelled, and fastening on each other, alarmed all the company except Johnson, who seizing one in one hand by the cuff of the neck, the other in the other hand, said gravely, 'Come, gentlemen! where's your difficulty? put one dog out at the door, and I will shew this fierce gentleman the way out of the window :' which, lifting up the mastiff and the sash, he contrived to do very expeditiously, and much to the satisfaction of the affrighted company. We inquired as to the truth of this curious recital. 'The dogs have been somewhat magnified, I believe Sir (was the reply): they were, as I remember, two stout young pointers; but the story has gained but little '.'

One reason why Mr. Johnson's memory was so particularly exact, might be derived from his rigid attention to veracity; being always resolved to relate every fact as it stood, he looked even on the smaller parts of life with minute attention, and remembered such passages as escape cursory and common observers. 'A story (says he) is a specimen of human manners, and derives its sole value from its truth. When Foote 3 has told me something, I dismiss it from my mind like a passing shadow: when Reynolds tells me something, I consider myself as possessed of an idea the more.'

Mr. Johnson liked a frolic or a jest well enough; though he had strange serious rules about it too: and very angry was he if any body offered to be merry when he was disposed to be grave. 'You have an ill-founded notion (said he) that it is clever to turn matters off with a joke (as the phrase is); whereas nothing

I

'Topham Beauclerk told me,' writes Boswell, 'that at his house in the country, two large ferocious dogs were fighting. Dr. Johnson looked steadily at them for a little while; and then, as one would separate two little boys, who were foolishly hurting each other, he ran up to them, and cuffed their heads till he drove them asunder.' Life, v. 329.

VOL. I.

Q

2 Ib. iii. 228 and post, p. 297. 'Some indulgence, however, to lying or fiction is given in humorous stories, because it is there really agreeable and entertaining, and truth is not of any importance.' Hume's Essays, ed. 1770, iv. 138.

3 Foote,' said Johnson, 'is quite impartial, for he tells lies of everybody.' Life, ii. 434. See post, p. 265. produces

produces enmity so certain, as one person's shewing a disposition to be merry when another is inclined to be either serious or displeased.'

One may gather from this how he felt, when his Irish friend Grierson, hearing him enumerate the qualities necessary to the formation of a poet, began a comical parody upon his ornamented harangue in praise of a cook, concluding with this observation, that he who dressed a good dinner was a more excellent and a more useful member of society than he who wrote a good poem. And in this opinion (said Mr. Johnson in reply) all the dogs in the town will join you.'

Of this Mr. Grierson I have heard him relate many droll stories, much to his advantage as a wit, together with some facts more difficult to be accounted for; as avarice never was reckoned among the vices of the laughing world. But Johnson's various life, and spirit of vigilance to learn and treasure up every peculiarity of manner, sentiment, or general conduct, made his company, when he chose to relate anecdotes of people he had formerly known, exquisitely amusing and comical. It is indeed inconceivable what strange occurrences he had seen, and what surprising things he could tell when in a communicative humour2. It is by no means my business to relate memoirs of his acquaintance; but it will serve to shew the character of Johnson himself, when I inform those who never knew him, that no man told a story with so good a grace, or knew so well what would make an effect upon his auditors 3. When he raised contributions for some distressed author, or wit in want, he often made us all more than amends by diverting descriptions of the lives they were then

passing in corners unseen by any body but himself and that odd old surgeon whom he kept in his house to tend the out-pensioners', and of whom he said most truly and sublimely, that

In misery's darkest caverns known,

His useful care was ever nigh,

Where hopeless anguish pours her groan,

And lonely want retires to die 2.

I have forgotten the year, but it could scarcely I think be later than 1765 or 1766, that he was called abruptly from our house after dinner, and returning in about three hours, said, he had been with an enraged author, whose landlady pressed him for payment within doors, while the bailiffs beset him without; that he was drinking himself drunk with Madeira to drown care, and fretting over a novel which when finished was to be his whole fortune; but he could not get it done for distraction, nor could he step out of doors to offer it to sale. Mr. Johnson therefore set away the bottle, and went to the bookseller, recommending the performance, and desiring some immediate relief; which when he brought back to the writer, he called the woman of the house directly to partake of punch, and pass their time in merriment.

It was not till ten years after, I dare say, that something in Dr. Goldsmith's behaviour struck me with an idea that he was the very man, and then Johnson confessed that he was so; the novel was the charming Vicar of Wakefield 3.

1 Robert Levett. There is no reason to believe that Johnson kept him for that purpose. Levett mainly supported himself by his practice. Ante, p. 205, n. 2. As Johnson says in his lines on him :-

~The modest wants of every day The toil of every day supplied.' Life, iv. 138. 2 In Misery's darkest caverns known,

3 The 'extreme inaccuracy' of this anecdote is shown by Boswell. Ib. i. 416. Of one fact he was ignorant. Goldsmith sold the Vicar of Wakefield in 1762 (ib. i. 415, n. 1), two or three years before Johnson knew the Thrales. The price paid for it was £60. Ib. i. 416. A fine first edition in two vols. bound in red morocco, published in Salisbury in 1766' was sold in June, 1892, for £96. Daily News, July 1, 1892. An autograph letter of Goldsmith to Garrick referring to She Stoops to Conquer was sold by auction in 1885 for £34.

His ready help was ever nigh,
Where hopeless Anguish pour'd
his groan,
And lonely want retir'd to die.'
Q 2

There

There was a Mr. Boyce too, who wrote some very elegant verses printed in the Magazines of five-and-twenty years ago', of whose ingenuity and distress I have heard Dr. Johnson tell some curious anecdotes; particularly, that when he was almost perishing with hunger, and some money was produced to purchase him a dinner, he got a bit of roast beef, but could not eat it without ketchup, and laid out the last half-guinea he possessed in truffles and mushrooms, eating them in bed too, for want of clothes, or even a shirt to sit up in.

Another man for whom he often begged, made as wild use of his friend's beneficence as these, spending in punch the solitary guinea which had been brought him one morning; when resolving to add another claimant to a share of the bowl, besides a woman who always lived with him, and a footman who used to carry out petitions for charity, he borrowed a chairman's watch, and pawning it for half a crown, paid a clergyman to marry him to a fellow-lodger in the wretched house they all inhabited, and got so drunk over the guinea bowl of punch the evening of his wedding-day, that having many years lost the use of one leg, he now contrived to fall from the top of the stairs to the bottom,

' Mrs. Piozzi places the publication of Samuel Boyse's verses about 1761; he died in 1749. In the Annual Register, 1764, ii. 54, a memoir of him is given. Having once pawned his clothes 'he sat up in bed with the blanket wrapt about him, through which he had cut a hole large enough to admit his arm, and placing the paper upon his knee scribbled in the best manner he could the verses he was obliged to make.' When he got some of his clothes out of pawn, to supply the want of a shirt, 'he cut some white paper to slips, which he tied round his wrists, and in the same manner supplied his neck. In this plight he frequently appeared abroad with the additional inconvenience of the want of breeches.'

Fielding, in Tom Jones (bk. vii. ch. 1), which was published three or four months before Boyse's death, makes 'a very noble quotation' from his poem of The Deity.

Johnson told Nichols that Boyse translated well from the French, but if any one employed him, by the time one sheet of the work was done he pawned the original. If the employer redeemed it, a second sheet would be completed, and the book again be pawned, and this perpetually. He had very little learning, but wrote verse with great facility, as fast as most men write prose.' Lit. Anec. ix. 777. See also Life, iv. 408, 442, and post in John Nichols's Anecdotes.

and

and break his arm, in which condition his companions left him to call Mr. Johnson, who relating the series of his tragicomical distresses, obtained from the Literary Club' a seasonable relief 2.

Of that respectable society I have heard him speak in the highest terms, and with a magnificent panegyric on each member, when it consisted only of a dozen or fourteen friends3; but as soon as the necessity of enlarging it brought in new faces, and took off from his confidence in the company, he grew less fond of the meeting, and loudly proclaimed his carelessness who might be admitted, when it was become a mere dinner club‘.