and Holborn (adjoining both to Bolt Court and Johnson's Court); and, on the second day of search, the very house there wherein the "English Dictionary" was composed. It is the first or corner house on the right-hand as you enter through the arched way from the north-west. The actual occupant - an elderly, well-washed, decent-looking man-invited us to enter, and courteously undertook to be cicerone, though in his memory lay nothing but the foolishest jumble and hallucination. It is a stout, oldfashioned, oak-balustraded house. "I have spent many a pound and penny on it since then," said the worthy landlord; "here, you see this bedroom was the Doctor's study; that was the garden" (a plot of delved ground somewhat larger than a bedquilt) "where he walked for exercise; these three garret bedrooms" (where his three copyists sat and wrote) "were the places he kept his pupils in!"THOMAS CARLYLE. JOHNSON'S FRIENDS. Friendship, peculiar boon of heav'n, To men and angels only giv'n, To all the lower world denied. JOHNSON: Friendship (An Ode). No man set a higher value upon friendship than John son. "A man," he said to Reynolds, "ought to keep his friendship in constant repair," or he would find himself left alone as he grew older. "I look upon a day as lost," he said later in life, "in which I do not make a new acquaintance." Making new acquaintances did not involve dropping the old. The list of his friends is a long one, and includes, as it were, successive layers superposed upon each other from the earliest period of his life. LESLIE STEPHEN. David Garrick (1716-1779). - When Johnson came to London, in 1737, he was accompanied by one of his pupils -David Garrick-who was to study law. The death of Garrick's father soon after led to the abandonment of that profession, and he engaged for a short time in the wine trade. But an intense love for the stage drew him to the theatre, and he at length resolved to become an actor. His first appearance in London, in 1741, as Richard III. was immediately followed by an unbounded success, such as no actor on the English stage has ever attained. Το this celebrated man Dr. Johnson was connected by the ties of old acquaintance, mutual trials and services, and mutual respect for talents of very different natures. On the other hand, the ridiculous mimic and the dignified philosopher were widely separated by difference of disposition and profession. Johnson looked down upon players, regarding them with contempt, and when Boswell once proposed that a great actor might deserve some respect, he replied, "What, sir! a fellow who claps a hump upon his back and a lump on his leg, and cries, 'I am Richard III.?` Nay, sir, a ballad-singer is a higher man, for he does two things-he repeats and he sings; there is both recitation and music in his performance; the player only recites." Their mutual interest in Shakespeare, instead of uniting them, as might be expected, led to an ill-feeling between the two. Garrick had made a collection of old plays, which would have been very useful to Johnson in his work of editing Shakespeare; but instead of sending the plays to his house, he invited Johnson to come to his library to consult them. Johnson regarded this as an act of discourtesy, and not only made no mention of Garrick in the preface of his "Shakespeare," but indirectly alluded to his friend's chariness of his books. In 1769 Johnson took care not to be present at the famous Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford, which had been carried into effect by Garrick, though his connection with Shakespeare and Garrick must have rendered the literary festival of peculiar interest to him. Reynolds said that Johnson always looked upon Garrick as his property, and would never allow an opinion concerning him to pass without his modification. Still he would defend his old pupil from any imputation against his character, and after his death he remarked, in the "Lives of the Poets," that the loss of the great actor "had eclipsed the gayety of nations and diminished the public stock of harmless pleasures." Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). -Johnson was a frequent visitor at the house of the great novelist as early as 1739, and from him he often received pecuniary aid during his years of poverty. His praise was lavishly bestowed on Richardson, and in comparing him with his rival, Fielding, against whom he seems to have been prejudiced, he said "that there was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate." [For Richardson, see "Characteristics of the Age."] Topham Beauclerk. -The acquaintance with this fashionable and dissolute wit began about 1752, through Johnson's friend Bennet Langton. Beauclerk, by his noble birth and reputed resemblance to Charles II., rather fascinated Johnson, who soon overlooked his infidelity and gayety. Garrick, on hearing of their intimacy, is said to have exclaimed, "What a coalition! I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house." Johnson enjoyed his friend's brilliant conversation, and once said of him, "No man ever was so free, when he was going to say a good thing, from a look that expressed that it was coming; or, when he had said it, from a look that expressed that it had come." After Beauclerk's death, in 1780, Johnson wrote to Boswell, "Such another will not often be found among mankind." Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792).-Johnson first met the great portrait-painter about 1752, and was much impressed with his agreeable conversation and companionship. They were intimate friends till Johnson's death. Just before his death Johnson made three requests of his old friend, which were readily granted: "To forgive him thirty pounds which he had borrowed of him; to read the Bible; and never to use his pencil on a Sunday." Edmund Burke. Though a "bottomless Whig," Burke entertained great admiration and respect for Johnson, which feeling was reciprocated. Johnson particularly enjoyed his fine conversation, and once said, "Burke is the only man whose common conversation corresponds with the general fame which he has in the world. Take up whatever topic you please, he is ready to meet you." Again he remarked of him, "That you could not stand five minutes with that man beneath a shed while it rained but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen." Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). -Johnson was Goldsmith's guide, philosopher, and friend during his years of obscurity. He helped him pay his debts, criticised his writings, and aided in their publication. It was Johnson who took "The Vicar of Wakefield" to the bookseller, and thus obtained money for Goldsmith to pay his landlady with. Goldsmith's contemporaries accused him of affecting Johnson's style and manner of conversation, and claimed that he was filled with envy at his wonderful colloquial powers. The Thrales.- In 1765 Johnson became acquainted with the family of a rich brewer named Thrale, whose wife was a woman of great intellectual accomplishments and wit. In their country-seat at Streatham a room was set apart for Johnson, who was always welcome. Mrs. Thrale became famous through her friendship with Johnson, who addressed poems to her, and bestowed attentions which were agreeable to receive from the foremost literary man of the time. In 1781 Mr. Thrale died, and Mrs. Thrale soon after began to receive the attentions of an Italian musician named Piozzi. Knowing that her children, friends, and especially Johnson, would disapprove of her marriage to one so inferior in rank and station, she hesitated for some time, but at length became his wife in 1784. Johnson heard of the marriage about six months before his death, and wrote to her: "Madam, if I interpret your letter rightly, you are ignominiously married. If it is yet undone, let us once more talk together. If you have abandoned your children and your religion [Piozzi was a Catholic], God forgive your wickedness." Mrs. Piozzi soon afterwards sailed for Italy with her husband. There she shone as a wit, and on her return to England a few years later published her anecdotes of Johnson. She lived to a good old age, and celebrated her eightieth birthday by a ball. She died in 1821, and for many years before her death was an object of interest as having been a friend of Dr. Johnson. ... James Boswell (1740-1795). -Nothing can surpass Macaulay's portrait of Boswell: "He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson describes him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the 'Dunciad' was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. Everything which another would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind. What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked; how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing; how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayer-book and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him; how he went to see men hanged, and came away maudlin; how he added £500 to the fortune of one of his babies, because he was not scared at Johnson's ugly face;... how his father, and the very wife of his bosom, laughed and fretted at his fooleries-all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriacal whimseys, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind.... Of all |