LETTER TO BOSWELL.

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CHAPTER XXXV.

AN ODD FAMILY-CONVERSATIONS-A DRAMATIC EVENING.

"DEAR SIR,

(1777-1778.

"TO JAMES BOSWELL, ESQ.

"London, Nov. 26, 1777.

"You will wonder, or you have wondered, why no letter has come from me.

"I hope you found, at your return, my dear enemy and all her little people quite well, and had no reason to repent of your journey. I think on it with great gratitude.

"I was not well when you left me at the Doctor's, and I grew worse; yet I stayed on, and at Lichfield was very ill. Travelling, however, did not make me worse; and when I came to London, I complied with a summons to go to Brighthelmstone, where I saw Beauclerk, and stayed three days.

"Our CLUB has recommenced last Friday, but I was not there. Langton has another wench. Mrs. Thrale is in hopes of a young brewer. They got by their trade last year a very large sum, and their expenses are proportionate.

"Mrs. Williams's health is very bad. And I have had for some time a very difficult and laborious respiration; but I am better by purges, abstinence, and other methods. I am yet, however, much behindhand in my health and rest.

"Dr. Blair's sermons are now universally commended; but let him think that I had the honour of first finding and first praising his excellences. I did not stay to add my voice to that of the public.

“My dear Friend, let me thank you once more for your visit:

you did me great honour, and, I hope, met with nothing that displeased you. I stayed long at Ashbourne, not much pleased, yet awkward at departing. I then went to Lichfield, where I found my friend at Stowhill very dangerously diseased. Such is life. Let us try to pass it well, whatever it be, for there is surely something beyond it.

"Well, now, I hope all is well. Write as soon as you can to, dear Sir,

"This is the time of the year in which all express their good wishes to their friends, and I send mine to you and your family. May your lives be long, happy, and good. I have been much out of order, but, I hope, do not grow worse.

"All our friends are as they were; little has happened to them of either good or bad. Mrs. Thrale ran a great black hair-dressing pin into her eye; but by great evacuation she kept it from inflaming, and it is almost well. Miss Reynolds has been out of order, but is better. Mrs. Williams is in a very poor state of health.

"If I should write on, I should, perhaps, write only complaints, and therefore I will content myself with telling you that I love to think on you, and to hear from you; and that I am, dear Sir, "Yours faithfully,

"SAM. JOHNSON."

66 BOSWELL TO DR. JOHNSON.

Edinburgh, March 12, 1778.

"MY DEAR SIR,

"The alarm of your late illness distressed me but a few hours, for on the evening of the day that it reached me I found it contradicted in the London Chronicle,' which I could depend upon as authentic concerning you, Mr. Strahan being the printer

AN ADDITION TO THE DOCTOR'S FAMILY. 331

of it. I did not see the paper in which the approaching extinction of a bright luminary' was announced. Sir William Forbes told me of it; and he says he saw me so uneasy that he did not give me the report in such strong terms as he read it. He afterwards sent me a letter from Mr. Langton to him, which relieved me much. I am, however, not quite easy, as I have not heard from you; and now I shall not have that comfort before I see you, for I set out for London to-morrow before the post comes in. I hope to be with you on Wednesday morning; and I ever am, with the highest veneration, my dear Sir, your most obliged, faithful, and affectionate humble servant,

"JAMES BOSWELL.”

When Boswell reached our Author's house, he found the room usually assigned to him during his London visits now occupied by a Mrs. Desmoulins, her daughter, and another lady, a Miss Carmichael, three more pensioners of our dear and venerable friend. Mrs. Desmoulins received from the Doctor half-a-guinea a week-a twelfth part of his whole pension! But Johnson had given away his last half-guinea before now; and his heart did not grow narrower as his days neared their close. So the Doctor's existence is not all talk, then, as such a fine bit of incident proves. The spoken part of his life is, indeed, loud and boisterous enough at times; but from beneath it all there ever and anon looks out, quietly and beautifully, the sweet face of some grand good deed.

What a curious breakfast-party that must have been that assembled of a morning, or, rather, of a mid-day, at No. 7, Bolt Court, Fleet Street, in that year 1778! Old Mr. Levett, always docile and reverential, managing the tea-kettle; old Mrs. Williams, blind, frail, and peevish, feeling round the cups to see that they are full; the three fresh arrivals, scarcely yet quite at home in their new quarters; and the high-souled, noble-hearted Doctor, sitting lord and master of the whole odd group, himself the oddest of them all. Nor must we forget negro Frank, and Hodge the cat, the latter of whom is at this very moment, perhaps, delightedly scrambling up the Doctor's breast, while the sage, smiling and half-whistling,

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A QUAINT GROUP.

rubs down his back, and pulls him tenderly by the tail, and, on the observation being made by an impartial beholder that Hodge is a fine cat, adding, "Why, yes, Sir; but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;" and then, by way of atonement to Hodge for this ungenerous estimate, winding up soothingly with, "but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.”

One can hardly look too long at such a quaintly beautiful scene. Would not life lose half its zest to most of us, if all the odd people in the world were to be mercilessly lashed out of it with refinement's whip of small cords-very small cords indeed? It is to be hoped that, even when Society shall have realized its Ideal, some queer little corner will still be reserved for those perversely angular men and women who cannot get squeezed into the orthodox holes shaped with mathematical precision.

We have repeatedly referred to Johnson's strict veracity and scrupulous regard to accuracy in relating even the smallest events. "Accustom your children," said he to Mrs. Thrale, about this time, "constantly to this; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end."-BOSWELL: "It may come to the door and when once an account is at all varied in one circumstance, it may by degrees be varied so as to be totally different from what really happened."-MRS. THRALE: "Nay, this is too much. If Mr. Johnson should forbid me to drink tea, I would comply, as I should feel the restraint only twice a day; but little variations in narrative must happen a thousand times a day, it one is not perpetually watching."-JOHNSON: "Well, Madam, and you ought to be perpetually watching. It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying that there is so much falsehood in the world."

One other morning he talked to Boswell very seriously of a certain female friend's "laxity of narration and inattention to truth.” "I am as much vexed," said he, "at the ease with which she hears it mentioned to her, as at the thing itself. I told her, 'Madam, you are contented to hear every day said to you, what the highest

A NOBLE JUDGMENT.

333

of mankind have died for rather than bear.' You know, Sir, the highest of mankind have died rather than bear to be told they have uttered a falsehood. Do talk to her of it: I am weary."

So convinced was our Author of most people's want of desire, or want of ability, to carry a story without hurting it, that he would often, without any ceremony, stop a gentleman in the midst of some wonderful narrative with a stern" It is not so. Do not tell this again." But about our hero himself there was an air of veracity; and one could not be half an hour in his company without feeling its bracing influence. His friends, especially, inhaled it freely, and grew stronger with every draught; so much so, that Sir Joshua Reynolds once remarked that "all who were of Johnson's school were distinguished for a love of truth and accuracy, which they would not have possessed in the same degree if they had not been acquainted with him." A finer judgment never was passed upon a mortal man.

Monday, March 30th: MR. THRALE'S,

JOHNSON: "Thomas à Kempis must be a good book, as the world has opened its arms to receive it. It is said to have been printed, in one language or other, as many times as there have been months since it first came out. I always was struck with this sentence in it: 'Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.'

JOHNSON: "A man loves to review his own mind. That is the use of a diary or journal.”—Lord TrimlesTOWN: True,' Sir. As the ladies love to see themselves in a glass, so a man likes to see himself in his journal."-BOSWELL: "A very pretty allusion."--JOHNSON: "Yes, indeed."-BOSWELL: "And as a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal."

Friday, April 3rd.

F. "I have been looking at this famous antique marble dog of Mr. Jennings, valued at a thousand guineas, said to be