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

the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument or even to meaning. He has reported numerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of these observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling." Nevertheless, of this man the same critic remarks: "Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of the dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. has no second." This extraordinary personage was the son of a Scotch laird and lord of sessions, and had devoted some time to the study of law. In 1762 he became acquainted with Johnson, and from that time till the death of the great man his devotion was constant and deep. Every night he wrote in a note-book the sayings and acts of Johnson, often consulting his friends that he might be exact in every particular. From the data thus obtained. he wrote the life of the philosopher after his death; and Boswell's "Life of Johnson" was the first biography ever written in the English language that gave an insight into a man's personal character and domestic conduct. This work shows that its author must have possessed great powers of observation and attention, and would seem to indicate a larger amount of intellectual merit on the part of the writer than has generally been awarded him.

He

The Literary Club.-This club was founded in 1764 by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Samuel Johnson, and at first consisted of nine members. In 1773 the number of mem

bers was increased to twenty; in 1777 to twenty-six; in 1778 to thirty; in 1780 to thirty-five; and in that year it was resolved that it should never exceed forty. The nine original members were Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, Nugent, Langton, Beauclerk, Goldsmith, Chamier, and Hawkins. Of those elected during Johnson's lifetime, the most celebrated were Percy, author of the "Reliques," 1765; Garrick, 1773; Boswell, 1773; Charles Fox, 1774; Edward Gibbon, 1774; Adam Smith, 1775; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, 1777; Malone, 1782; Sir William Hamilton, 1784; and Charles Burney, Mus. D., 1784. It held its meetings at Turk's Head, in Gerard Street, till 1783, when they removed to Prince's, in Sackville Street, whence they again moved to Thomas's, in Dover Street. In speaking of the Literary Club, Macaulay says: "The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk-maker and the pastry-cook. Nor shall we think this strange when we consider what great and various talents and acquirements met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the representative of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of political eloquence and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest linguist. Garrick brought to the meetings his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his consummate knowledge of stage-effect. Among the most constant attendants were two high-born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound together by friendship, but of widely different characters and habits: Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity of his life; and Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his knowledge of the gay world, his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over such a society was not easy; yet even over such a society Johnson predominated. Burke might, indeed, have disputed the supremacy to which others were

under the necessity of submitting. But Burke, though not generally a very patient listener, was content to take the second part when Johnson was present; and the club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is to this day popularly designated as Johnson's Club."

FAMOUS PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF DR. JOHNSON.

Great Conversational Powers.-The influence exercised by his conversation directly upon those with whom he lived, and directly on the whole literary world, was altogether without a parallel. His colloquial talents were indeed of the highest order. He had strong sense, quick discernment, wit, humor, immense knowledge of literature and of life, and an infinite store of curious anecdotes. respected style, he spoke far better than he wrote. Every sentence which dropped from his lips was as correct in structure as the most nicely-balanced period of the Rambler. But in his talk there were no pompous triads, and little more than a fair proportion of words in osity and ation. All was simplicity, ease, and vigor. He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences with a power of voice and a justness and energy of emphasis of which the effect was rather increased than diminished by the rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gaspings and puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally ended. Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit down to his desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in language so exact and so forcible that it might have been printed without the alteration of a word, was to him no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on anybody who would start a subject-on a fellow-passenger in a stage-coach, or on the person who sat at the same table with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant as when he was surrounded by a few friends whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he