The Johnson Club

“ POSSIBLY.” wrote the Young Men’s Philosophical Society of New York to Lord Macaulay, “ possibly our fame has not pinioned the Atlantic. ’ Neither, I fear, has the Atlantic been pinioned by the fame of the Johnson Club of London. though from time to time we have had the pleasure of welcoming in our haunts in Fleet Street more than one American guest. We are, in strict, accordance with the great lexicographer’s definition, “ an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions ; ” the conditions being that we shall do honor to the immortal memory of Dr. Samuel Johnson by supping together four times a year, and by swallowing as much beefsteak pudding, punch, and tobacco smoke as the strength of each man’s constitution admits. A few of the weaker brethren.— among whom, unhappily, I am included, — whose bodily infirmity cannot respond to the cheerful Johnsonian cry, “ Who ’s for poons?” do their best to play their part by occasionally readingessays on Johnsonian subjects, and by seasoning their talk with anecdotes and sayings of the great doctor. We are tolerated by the jovial crew, for they see that we mean well, and are as “ clubable ” as nature allows. Our favorite haunt is the Old Cheshire Cheese, the only tavern in Fleet Street left unchanged by what Johnson called that “ fury of innovation ” which, beginning with Tyburn and its gallows-tree, has gradually transformed London. The Mitre, “ where he loved to sit up late; ” where he made Boswell’s head ache, not with the port wine, but with the sense he put into it; where, at their first supper, “ he called to him with warmth, ‘ Give me your hand ; I have taken a liking to you ; ’ ” where, nearly a hundred years later, Hawthorne, in memory of the two men, dined “ in the low, sombre coffee-room,” — the Mitre has been rebuilt. The Cock, most ancient of taverns, has followed its “ plump head-waiter ” along the road of mortality, although, fortunately, its fittings and furniture are still preserved in the house which, under the same name, has risen on the other side of the street. The Old Cheshire Cheese stands as it stood in the days when Goldsmith used to pass its side door on his way up the dark entry to his lodgings in ine Office Court. The jolly host, who owns the freehold, can show title-deeds going back almost to the time of the Great Fire of London. There, in the ground-floor room, we meet, our “ Prior ” sitting on a bench above which is set in the wall a brass tablet bearing the following inscription: —

THE FAVOURITE SEAT OF

DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON.

Born 18th Sept. 1709. Died 13 Dec. 1784.

In him a noble understandingand a masterly intellect were united with great independence of character and unfailing goodness of heart, which won the admiration of his own age. and remain as recommendations to the reverence of posterity.

“No. Sir! there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness has been produced ¹ as by a good tavern.” JOHNSON.

That Johnson frequented the Cheshire Cheese there is no contemporary evidence. The place is never mentioned by Boswell. That there was not a decent tavern in Fleet Street in which Johnson had not often dined might be safely inferred from all that we know of his life and from the nature of things. Happily, I have come across a tradition strong enough to support this metaphysical argument, and to clear away the last doubts of the Johnsonian pilgrim. Nearly thirty years ago an old man published a book under the title of The Law: What I have Seen, What I have Heard and What I have Known. He dedicated it “To the Lawyers and Gentlemen with whom I have dined for more than half a century at the Old Cheshire Cheese, Wine Office Court, Fleet Street.” In the preface he says : “ During the fiftythree years I have frequented the Cheshire Cheese there have been only three landlords. When I first visited it, I used to meet several old gentlemen who remembered Dr. Johnson nightly at the Cheshire Cheese; and they have told me, what is not generally known, that the doctor, whilst living in the Temple, always went to the Mitre or the Essex Head ; but when he removed to Gough Square or Bolt Court he was a constant visitor at the Cheshire Cheese, because nothing but a hurricane would have induced him to cross Fleet Street.” In this there is some loose talk, for Johnson removed to the Temple after he left Gough Square. Moreover, we know that he would at any time willingly cross the street to dine with Boswell at the Mitre. Besides, it was pure gallantry, and no hurricane, which one evening made him give his arm to assist across the street a gentlewoman who was somewhat in liquor ; “ upon which.” he adds, “ she offered me a shilling, supposing me to be the watchman.” Nevertheless, there is not the least reason to doubt the general accuracy of the tradition. Fifty-three years take us back from 1868 to 1815, and 1815 was removed by only thirtyone years from the date of Johnson’s death. I have heard a member of our Club relate that, when he was a student of law, there used to be pointed out to him in the Cheshire Cheese an old gentleman, who day after day was always to be found there, prolonging his dinner by an unbroken succession of glasses of gin and water. It was as a kind of awful warning of the depths to which a lawyer might sink that this toper was shown, and it was added in a whisper that he was the son of Jay of Bath. Jay of Bath is well-nigh forgotten now, but during the first half of the present century his fame as a preacher stood exceedingly high. It was Cyrus Jay, his son, who for fifty-three years frequenting this ancient tavern preserved and handed down this curious tradition of Johnson. The landlord has told me how, in his childhood, he used to hear in the distance the gruff voice of the old gentleman as he came along Fleet Street, and how sometimes he was sent by his mother to see Mr. Jay safe home to his chambers in Serjeants’ Inn, hard by. For most of his long life, port, that medium liquor, neither like claret for boys nor like brandy for heroes, but the drink for men. had been his favorite beverage. A failing income brought him down at last to gin and water. He used to comfort himself by the reflection that he could get twice as drunk for half the money. He dined in the tavern to the very end. One evening he was led to his lodgings by the little boy, and in four-and-twenty hours he was dead. He was the last frequenter of the Old Cheshire Cheese who knew the men who had known Johnson. Mine host remembers a still older guest, Dr. Pooley by name, a barrister, who died about 1856, at the age of eighty. Night after night for many a long year he had dined at half past seven to the minute on “ a follower,” the end chop of the loin. He too used to tell of the men of his younger days who boasted that they had often spent an evening there with Dr. Samuel Johnson.

In this same room, with its floor as “nicely sanded” as when Goldsmith knew it, our Club gathers from time to time ; here, undisturbed in our thoughts by a single modern innovation except the gas, we sup on one of those beefsteak puddings for which the Cheshire Cheese has been famous from time immemorial. So vast is it in all its glorious rotundity that it has to be wheeled in on a table ; it disdains a successor in the same line, and itself alone satisfies forty hungry guests. “ A magnificent hot apple-pie stuck with bay leaves,” our second course, recalls the supper with which Johnson “ celebrated the birth of the first literary child of Mrs. Lennox, the novelist, when at five in the morning his face still shone with meridian splendor, though his drink had been only lemonade.” The talk is of the liveliest; from time to time toasts are drunk and responded to. Sometimes, indeed, we suffer from a guest who, having nothing to say, naturally takes a long time to say it; but when he has at last sat down, some touch of humor soon comes to clear the dull air. We still recall with delight the speech of a young giant, a famous Australian cricketer, whose batting and bowling had overpowered many an English eleven. As he stood up in the low room to reply to his health, his head rising through the clouds of tobacco smoke seemed almost to touch the ceiling, “Till this evening.” he remarked, “ I never heard Dr. Johnson s name. (Here there was a cry of “ shame. ) “Yes,” he continued, “and I will venture to assure that gentleman who cries out ‘ shame ’ that, day after day, he might ride for hundreds and hundreds of miles through that country from which I come without meeting with a single man who had ever heard the doctor’s name. Nevertheless, after all that has been said in praise of his greatness this evening, I am ready to allow that were I not B—— the cricketer, I would willingly be Dr. Johnson.” Amid what shouts of applause, what rattlings of glasses, what beatings of the table, did he not resume his seat! Every one felt that it was a fit occasion for refilling glasses, and the punch-bowl had soon to be replenished.

Though Fleet Street, “ the most cheerful scene in the world ” in Boswell’s opinion, Johnson’s “ favourite street,” is our chosen haunt, nevertheless from time to time we make Johnsonian pilgrimages. At Lichfield, where still stands, scarcely changed, the old house in which our hero was born, we have set up our punchbowl more than once, and thrice we have set it up in Oxford. By the Master and Fellows of his old college, that “ nest of singing birds,” as he fondly called it, we have been hospitably entertained, and we in turn have entertained them. Full of Johnsonian veneration, we have visited the old common-room of University College, which one day witnessed his drinking three bottles of port at a sitting without being the worse for it, and we have thought that there were indeed giants in those days. In this same room I have read the entry in one of the college books in which Shelley’s expulsion is recorded.

In the wonderful weather which in England last autumn seemed to turn the year back from the end of September to the middle of June, we took a longer pilgrimage, going as far as Ashbourne, a little market - town charmingly situated at the entrance of one of the most lovely dales in Derbyshire. It was late in the afternoon of Friday, September 27, that the train set me down in the outskirts of the town. One hundred and nineteen years earlier, Johnson and Boswell had entered Ashbourne in great state in “ the large roomy postchaise, drawn by four stout plump horses, and driven by two steady jolly postilions,” belonging to the Rev. Dr. John Taylor, a divine of the Church of England, “ whose talk was of bullocks, and whose size and figure and countenance and manner were that of a hearty English ’squire, with the parson super-induced.” It was in a small one-horse omnibus that I made my entry, in company with a jovial farmer, who, as we drove by the bank, told me that he passed many a thousand pounds every year through that place. This, I felt, was all in keeping, for did not Johnson himself, one day, in the Oxford coach, talk without reserve of the state of his affairs, and say, “ I have about the world, I think, above a thousand pounds, which I intend shall afford Frank [his negro servant] an annuity of seventy pounds a year ”? I alighted at the Green Man and Black’s Head Royal Hotel, an oldfashioned rambling inn, which looks as if it had known no change since the day when Boswell hired there his postchaise on his way home. The elderly landlady who welcomed me reminded me of her predecessor, “ a mighty civil gentlewoman, who, courtseying very low, presented him with an engraving of the sign of her house, bearing the following address in her own handwriting : —

“ ‘ M. KILLINGLEY’S duty waits upon Mr. Boswell, is exceedingly obliged to him for this favour ; whenever he comes this way, hopes for a continuance of the same. Would Mr. Boswell name the house to his extensive acquaintance, it would be a singular favour conferr’d on one who has it not in her power to make any other return but her most grateful thanks, and sincerest prayers for his happiness in time, and in a blessed eternity.

‘ Tuesday morn.’ ”

The Green Man and Black’s Head Royal Hotel — a strange combination of titles, by the way — I will gladly name to all my acquaintance who are satisfied with an old-fashioned inn, a good bed, plain but good fare, civil attendance, and furniture and fittings which have much more of the eighteenth than of the nineteenth century about them. One article alone is of uncertain quality. We were warned not to drink the Ashbourne water, for it is drawn from shallow wells. A son of temperance must have it boiled, or must use only mineral waters ; for men of a more jovial disposition there is a good cellar. A member of our Club, when he was cautioned about the water, replied, “Water! I never drink water anywhere.” Some of us, however, are weaker brethren.

Pleasant though this inn was soon to prove, yet on my arrival I felt somewhat lonely. Darkness was rapidly setting in, and there was not a single Johnsonian to welcome me. I was in too clubable a mood to dine alone; so I put off dinner till the arrival of the next train, and strolled out to explore the town. The bell ringing for evening service led me to the fine old church, the great glory of Ashbourne : “ one of the largest and most luminous that I have seen in any town of the same size,” wrote Boswell; “ the finest mere parish church in the kingdom,” George Eliot called it. The spire — “ the Pride of the Peak ” — rises to a height of two hundred and twelve feet, and has stood the storms of five hundred years. The chancel and transept are older by a whole century. In a side chapel, surrounded by his forefathers and descendants, is the tomb of Sir Edmund Cokayne, who fell in that battle where Falstaff boasted that he and Percy “ rose both at an instant, and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock.”Among these rough knights is the recumbent effigy of a little girl, the only child in a family well known to Johnson, — the Boothbys of Ashbourne Hall. He might have stroked her hair and given her an old man’s blessing in his last visit to the little town. She had been the one link which held together her father and mother. From her little grave they went back to their ancient hall, and there parted, never to meet again. Let into one of the pillars in the transept is the original dedication plate, bearing date MCCXLI. In the register was long to be seen the following entry in the handwriting of Charles I.: “August 1645, Wednesday, Ashburne in the Peak, Mr. Cokaine’s 1 night.” It now probably adorns some cabinet of autographs, for several years ago it was cut out and stolen, most likely by one of that unscrupulous race of collectors. Just one hundred years after the king’s visit, his great-grandson, the young Pretender, with his Highland rabble, swept by under the shadow of the old church. In Ashbourne Hall, at the other end of the town, were long preserved the inscriptions set over the rooms to mark where each officer was quartered. The following original document, which I found pasted inside a History of Lichfield in the Bodleian Library, shows what terror the clansmen must have spread in these quiet dales : —

LEEK, 3 Decemb. 1745.

TO THE HEADBORROW OF ENDOX,

You are required imediatly to bring to Leek Twenty Able Horses with proper Carts under pain of Military Execution for the Service of the Prince of Wales.

JAMES URQUHART.

Leek is ten miles from Ashbourne, and Endon is still nearer. The post-horses and carriages of the Green Man were no doubt impressed. M. Killingley, that “ mighty civil gentlewoman,” had Boswell thought of questioning her, could probably have told strange stories of these wild invaders. What short work would they have made of Dr. Taylor’s roomy post-chaise and four stout plump horses ! Had the young Pretender sueceeded in what Johnson called his “ noble attempt,” the fittings of this squireparson’s pew in Ashbourne church would have been far less gorgeous. As “ a Hanoverian, a vile Whig,” he had good preferment. As one of the prebendaries of Westminster Abbey, he had shared in the divisions of the trappings used at the coronation of George III. The cushion on which the crown rested had fallen to his lot, as well as some velvet hangings. ’With these he decked the roomy pew in which Boswell sat that Sunday when “ he felt great satisfaction in considering that he was supported in his fondness for solemn worship by the general concurrence and munificence of mankind.”

As, guided by the sound of the bell, I drew near the church, I saw that two or three of the great windows were lighted up, though the mass of the building was in darkness. Following some devout women along the dark churchyard path, I reached an open door, and entered upon a scene of mingled light and gloom,— gloom at the ends of the transept, nave, and chancel, while in the middle of the church, above the pulpit, reading-desk, and seats for the choir, gas-jets were burning. On all sides, flowers and fruits, lately gathered for the harvest thanksgiving, gave a fresh grace to the ancient pile, though some large pumpkins and cucumbers, as they sprawled under one of the windows, contrasted oddly with the light-springing arch and the Gothic tracery. I was pleased to learn, next day, that chance had led me to a seat just behind the pew in which Johnson, with that “ tremulous earnestness ” which Boswell had noticed in St. ClementDanes on many a Sunday, “ pronounced the awful petition in the Liturgy — ‘ In the hour of death and in the day of judgment, good Lord deliver us.’” The organ began to play, and a surpliced choir, followed by four priests, streamed in. We were but a small congregation: six ordinary worshipers, a woman to be “ churched,” and a little company of babies, parents, and godparents for a christening. The intoning of the priests was clear, and so was their reading; the chanting was good, and little Elsie Ann and John Herbert stood the triple sprinkling of the water without uttering a cry. I fell into a train of thought on the wonderful power which, in such a spot as this, the beautiful creation of a church has on the minds of men. What fardistant ages, what far-distant lands, were meeting together that September evening in this ancient building; what thoughts of the past, what fears and hopes for the future! The beauty of the venerable pile; the mingled light and darkness; the tombs of the dead; the roll of the organ; the chanting of the choristers; the touching words of the sweet, psalmist of Israel, once more telling a strange people how, long ages ago, “ the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion ; ” the perfect melody of the Book of Common Prayer; the young mother kneeling in thankfulness for her deliverance from “ the great danger of childbirth; ” the babes who “ hereafter shall not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified,”—in all this the long generations of men seemed to have combined to make, as it were, a wondrous poem, a drama of man’s life of consummate workmanship. This beautiful poem, this noble drama, priests all over England, I thought, with their apish tricks, with their servile imitation of Rome, with that “fooling” which Cromwell long ago bid cease, are bringing into contempt, as if the rising tide of science were not sweeping round the foundations of their church, and washing away so much that once seemed founded on a rock. Happily, at Ashbourne such fantastic tricks as these were not played before high heaven.

From these reflections I was diverted, on my return to the Green Man, by the arrival of some of my companions ; with them I spent the rest of the evening in cheerful converse. Next morning we woke up to the brightest sunshine. Our hotel, I found, stood halfway down the main street, which is so short and straight that at either end can be seen the green trees where the town ends and the country begins. While waiting for breakfast I strolled towards Ashbourne Hall, where a striking contrast suddenly recalled to me Cambridge in far-distant New England. Few things delighted me more in that pleasant town than the way in which the beauties of green lawns and bright flower-beds “are free alike to all.” There, no stone walls, no wooden fences, no hedges shut in the rights of the few’ and shut out the enjoyment of the many. All the householders seemed possessed with Cowper’s thought that

At Ashbourne, on the contrary, the grounds of the Hall were inclosed by a stone wall too high for even a tall man to look over. This in itself would not have caught my attention, for such inclosures are common enough everywhere. In one place, however, it had been raised for a considerable distance to the height of nearly twenty feet by a superstructure of two ponderous wooden fences piled one on the other. This vast work, so a lad told me, had been set up as a screen against a pair of harmless cottages which had lately been built on the other side of the road. As they were already hidden from the Hall by a fine grove of trees, the fence seemed merely meant to rob the humble inmates of a pleasant prospect.

After breakfast we visited the main object of our pilgrimage, the Mansion (for so the house is called), where Johnson so often stayed with his old schoolfellow, and where Boswell, in a visit that lasted only ten days, added so much to his “ Johnsonian store.” Here he saw his hero in a happy mood. “He seemed,” he writes, “ to be more uniformly social, cheerful and alert than I had almost ever seen him.” There was an air of neglect about the place when we visited it, for it was uninhabited, which suited ill with the comfort, and even state, in which Dr. Taylor lived; “ his house, garden, pleasure-grounds, table, in short everything good, and no scantiness appearing.” There was nothing to recall the wealthy pluralist, and those postilions who, being at the same time jolly and steady, harmonized so well with the two characters which were united in this squire-parson. The street, front was shabby and ugly. Even in its neglect the old house might still have had a certain picturesque air, had not Taylor hidden the gables behind a pediment with a large round window beneath it. It was this addition which troubled Johnson in his last visit to Ashbourne, a few months before his death ; for the builders were at work all the time he was there. “ That a man,” he wrote, “worn with disease, in his seventy second or third year, should condemn part of his remaining life to pass among ruins and rubbish, and that no inconsiderable part, appears to me very strange.” We wandered about the old house, trying to recall the past. Beyond the bare walls there was not much on which Johnson’s eyes had lighted. In two old mirrors he might have seen reflected that countenance which Boswell described as “ the cast of an ancient statue ; ” but who can think of him as ever making use of a looking-glass? We looked in vain for the crystal lustre which “he somewhat sternly said he would not have lighted on his birth-day.” The return of that day gave no pleasure to him, “ filling him.” he said, “ with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.” Indifferent as he was to the fine arts, his eye might nevertheless have rested on the sculpture of a marble mantelpiece, telling, as it did, of the rapidly growing commerce of England. Britannia is represented leaning on a lion, while a figure scantily clothed in a flowing scarf stretches out one hand towards her, and the other towards some bales of goods. In the background is a ship. Round the dining-room hovered recollections of those dinners which Johnson described to Mrs. Thrale. “Venison,” he wrote, “ no forester that lived under the green-wood tree ever had more frequently upon his table. We fry, and roast, and bake, and devour in every form.”

The present worthy vicar of Ashbourne, a sound Johnsonian as well befits a member of Johnson’s own college, long ago gathered the few traditions of the doctor and his host which, when he entered upon his cure, were still floating about the neighborhood. Taylor, it was said, wealthy man though he was, had a great reluctance to settle his accounts. The agent of a neighboring country gentleman who had often supplied the divine with that venison which he loved, not getting his bill settled, so timed a call that he entered the house just as a savory haunch of venison was set before him and Johnson. It was in vain that the servant told the man his master could not see him. He pushed past into the dining-room, and demanded immediate payment. Taylor, in whom the superinduced parson at once disappeared in the angry squire, in a passion ordered him to leave the room. The agent, still pressing for payment, went close up to the table, and under cover of it got a corner of the cloth firmly twisted round his hand. Finding the storm of abuse rise higher and higher, with one pull he dragged table-cloth, haunch of venison, dishes, plates and glasses, with a great crash on to the floor. We may picture to ourselves the astonishment of that “ upper servant, Mr. Peters, of whom Boswell took particular notice, a decent grave man, in purple clothes and a large white wig, like the butler or major-domo of a Bishop.” Johnson’s sympathies, however much he might have felt the loss of his dinner, would not, I think, have been with the rich man who would not pay his debts. Of Taylor’s talk for the rest of that day, and of the threats which he breathed forth, we can form some notion from a letter in which, on another occasion, Johnson laughed at the strange English of this pillar of the Church. “ Taylor,” he wrote, “ has let out another pound of blood, and is come to town, brisk and vigorous, fierce and fell, to drive on his lawsuit. Nothing in all life now can be more profligater than what he is; and if in case, that so be, that they persist for to resist him, he is resolved not to spare no money, nor no time.”

Another tradition of this divine has been gathered by the vicar. We know from Boswell that “ he had a considerable political interest in the county of Derby.” His friendship, therefore, was worth cultivating by the great Whig landowner, the Duke of Devonshire, who one day accompanied him in his roomy post-chaise to Ashbourne. Wishing to impress the lord of Chatsworth with the extent of his domain, Taylor privately ordered his postilions to drive twice round his paddock. It was perhaps in this paddock that was reared that famous bull which furnished Johnson with many a humorous touch in his letters to Mrs. Thrale. “ I have seen the great bull,” he wrote, “ and very great he is. I have seen likewise his heir apparent, who promises to inherit all the bulk and all the virtues of his sire. I have seen the man who offered an hundred guineas for the young bull, while he was yet little better than a calf.” A year later he wrote : “ There has been a man here today to take a farm. After some talk he went to see the bull, and said that he had seen a bigger. Do you think he is likely to get the farm ? ” Fifteen mont hs later he returned to the subject: “ Our bulls and cows are all well; but we yet hate the man that had seen a bigger bull.”

The garden, the pleasure-grounds, and the lawn all wore an air of great neglect as we wandered through them. It was not easy to reconcile what we saw with Johnson’s description of the place: “ Dr. Taylor’s is a very pleasant house, with a lawn and a lake, and twenty deer and live fawns upon the lawn.”

The lake — it was never anything but a small pool — has long been filled up ; the lawn has lost all its smoothness. The waterfall, which Taylor had made by building a dyke across the little stream at the bottom of his garden, has disappeared. It should have been preserved in memory of that day when Johnson sat by it, listening to its roaring — for it was swollen by the autumn rain — and reading Erasmus’s Militis Christiani Enchiridion; The Hansome Weapon of a Chrysten Knyght, as it was entitled in an early English translation. Another morning, “ when the sun shone bright,” writes Boswell, “ we walked out together, and ‘ pored ’ upon the cascade for some time with placid indolence.” The lines in Gray’s Elegy were no doubt in his mind :

Johnson presently shook off his indolence, and, taking a long pole, pushed down “ several parcels ’ of rubbish which obstructed the fall; while his friend “stood quietly by, wondering to see the sage thus curiously employed. He worked till he was quite out of breath ; and having found a large dead cat so heavy that he could not move it after several efforts, ‘ Come,’ said he, throwing down the pole, ‘ you shall take it now ; ’ which,” continues Boswell, “ I accordingly did, and being a fresh man soon made the cat tumble over the cascade.”

One severe autumn night the two friends stood in calm conference in the garden, looking up to the heavens, while Boswell directed the discourse to the subject of a future state. “ My friend,” he adds, “ was in a placid and most benignant frame. ‘ Sir, (said he,) I do not imagine that all things will be made clear to us immediately after death, but that the ways of Providence will be explained to us very gradually.’ ” Another day they stepped across the road to the grammar school, of which Johnson had once had hopes of becoming master or usher. These hopes tradition has magnified into fruition. The very room which he occupied as second master is, I was told, still to be seen. Here ” in the garden very prettily formed upon a bank, rising gradually behind the house,” they “ sat basking in the sun,” while they discussed “ a common subject of complaint, the very small salaries which many curates have.” Was the instance of Parson Adams introduced, who, “ though he was provided with a handsome income of twenty-three pounds a year, could not make any great figure with it, because he lived in a dear country, and was a little encumbered with a wife and six children ”? Goldsmith’s “ village preacher ” might have been instanced, too, a man who was “ passing rich with forty pounds a year.” The Wealth of Nations, which had appeared a year earlier, would have afforded an apt illustration : for Adam Smith states that “ forty pounds a year is reckoned at present very good pay for a curate, and there are many curacies under twenty pounds a year.” It is a pity that Dr. Taylor was not also there, basking in the sun with the others, for he could have thrown the light of a pluralist on the subject. He too, poor man, had his cares. In spite of the good things which already he enjoyed, “ livings and preferments, wrote Johnson, “ as if he were in want with twenty children, run in his head. ” Without his help, his friend, however, “ explained the system of the English hierarchy exceedingly well,” pointing out that curates were “ in the nursery for the church, being candidates for the higher ecclesiastical offices, according to their merit and good behaviour.” Boswell s comment still holds good, — “ This is an excellent theory.” Dr. Taylor had no children to whom to leave hits wealth. He had meant to make Johnson hid heir, it was said, but Johnson died first. Towards the close of his life, when his end was thought to be near, he overheard some of his relations talking of the use they should make of his property when he was gone. They were at the old game of dividing the bear’s skin while the bear was still alive. The old man at once made a fresh will. On the day of his funeral they returned from the churchyard hard by to the Mansion to hear it read. One of the company, the fire burning low, ordered a servant lad to bring some coals. As the boy was leaving the room the lawyer said to him, “ My lad, you had better stay and hear the will.” When he heard that the whole of the large property was bequeathed to William Bent, he cried out, “ Why, that’s me ! ” and fell down in a swoon. A proviso was added that he should change his name, taking any he pleased but that of Taylor. He chose Webster. It was suspected that he was the doctor’s illegitimate son ; but the vicar of Ashbourne has shown that the Bents were distantly related to Taylor.

One day Johnson and Boswell drove from Ashbourne to Ilam, where in a recess in a rock, shaded by overhanging trees, with a clear stream flowing at his feet, Congreve, it is said, wrote his Old Bachelor. There are, however, “ more places than one in groves and gardens ” which claim this honor. The play might just as well have been written in the greenroom of a theatre, for any touch it shows of nature. Artificial indeed was the age in which the poet in such a spot did not

Boswell describes Ilam as “ a romantic scene ; ’ “ the fit abode of pastoral virtue ” Johnson calls it. At present it is the abode of the Right Honorable R. W. Hanbury, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who with great courtesy invited our Club to lunch. At Ilam we spent two or three hours with much satisfaction, everything combining to make the visit pleasant, — beautiful scenery, delightful weather, a hospitable host and hostess, and old memories. I was willing to believe the tradition that here is to be found the original of the Happy Valley of Rasselas, but “an obstinate rationality prevented me.” Johnson, we know, did not see Dovedale till long after he wrote that tale, and Ilam lies close to Dovedale. A lovelier spot I have rarely seen. Nature here had already done great things, but her work is set off by the sloping lawns, the gardens, and the avenues. A short distance below the Hall, in the midst of the park, stands the ancient village church. Its font is older than the Norman Conquest. What is the age of the three Runic crosses in the churchyard no man knows. Round the old building lie the dead of many generations. There is no fence, no inclosure, to part life from death. The lawn without a break slopes gently down to that quiet spot “ Where heaves the turf in many a moulderingheap.”

Why in that peaceful scene should the dead be secluded ? Our host, with honest indignation, told us of a bishop who had requested him to have the churchyard railed off from the park, as if God’s house and God’s acre were wronged by that unbroken sweep of beauty. There are men who think that exclusion is the main part of religion.

Johnson contrasted Ilam with Hawkestone, the seat of Sir Rowland Hill, in a passage which, artificially as it is expressed, is nevertheless true to nature. “ Ilam,” he writes, “ has grandeur tempered with softness; the walker congratulates his own arrival at the place, and is grieved to think that he must ever leave it. As he looks up to the rocks, his thoughts are elevated ; as he turns his eyes on the vallies, he is composed and soothed. He that mounts the precipices at Hawkestone wonders how he comes thither, and doubts how he shall return. His walk is an adventure, and his departure an escape. He has not the tranquillity, but the horror, of solitude ; a kind of turbulent pleasure, between fright and admiration.”

Who that has wandered alone among the mountains has not at times felt this turbulent pleasure, this horror of solitude? Grieved as we were to leave Ilam, the thought cheered us that on our way back we should see Dovedale. As Johnson walked up it one hot summer day, “ the water,” he recorded, “ murmured pleasantly among the stones. It is,” he added, “ a place that deserves a visit ; but it did not answer my expectation. I expected a larger river where I found only a clear quick brook. I believe I had imaged a valley enclosed by rocks, and terminated by a broad expanse of water.” Nevertheless he maintains that “ he that has seen Dovedale has no need to visit the Highlands.”

By our long Johnsonian day we had, we felt, earned our Johnsonian supper. The landlady did her best. To the meal which she provided no one could have justly applied Johnson’s words: “This was a good dinner enough, to be sure ; but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.” By a happy chance we found established in Ashbourne as a physician the greatgrandson of Dr. John Boswell, the uncle of the author of the Life of Johnson. On his death, his nephew, writing of him, said : “ He was a very good scholar, knew a great many things, had an elegant taste, and was very affectionate ; but he had no conduct. His money was all gone. He had a strange kind of religion ; but I flatter myself he will be ere long, if he is not already, in Heaven.” His descendant, Dr. Alexander Boswell, we were glad to welcome as our guest. Not only did his surname admirably harmonize with our festive gathering, but his Christian name recalled Boswell’s father, the old Scotch judge, who, when Johnson, in their famous altercation in the library at Auchinleck, asked what good Cromwell had ever done to his country, replied, “ God, doctor ! he gart kings ken that they had a lith in their neck,” — he taught kings they had a joint, in their neck. The vicar also came, who is, as I have said, a member of Johnson’s own college, as indeed I am myself. With his traditions of our hero and his friend Dr. Taylor, he played his part well. Our “ Prior,” who took the chair, the witty author of Obiter Dicta, a few weeks earlier had been lecturing on Johnson to the vacation students in Oxford. “ The booksellers of London (publishers we should now call them), for whom Johnson uniformly professed much regard,” and with whom in his long life he had so many dealings, were well represented by a member of our Club. I had brought with me copies of some unpublished autograph letters of Johnson in the fine collection of my friend Mr. R. B. Adam, of Buffalo. These I read aloud. There was, therefore, a fuller Johnsonian and Boswellian flavor in the company than might have been looked for in this out-of-the-way country town. Two members of Parliament also honored us as our guests. One of them, in a speech, complimented me on my literary labors. He meant it kindly, though perhaps he would have been more in harmony with the Club had he belonged to what Reynolds described as Dr. Johnson’s school, —a school distinguished above everything for its accuracy. My honorable friend’s compliment was based on the supposition that it was not Boswell, but the works of Johnson, that I had edited. I was consoled by reflecting how slow the great moralist’s fame was in reaching the ears of his fellow-collegian, old Oliver Edwards. The Rambler had been published nearly thirty years when this worthy, meeting the doctor one day, said, “ I am told you have written a very pretty book called The Rambler.” “ I was unwilling,” Johnson told Boswell, “ that he should leave the world in total darkness, and sent him a set.” I regret the total darkness in which my own guest seems likely to leave the world, but I do not propose to dissipate it by sending him the six volumes of my edition of Boswell.

The evening at last came to an end, as to an end the pleasantest evenings at last will come. With Johnson we may exclaim, “Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel ; ” but before long midnight would be rung out by the chimes, and to bed we must go. As the company broke up, I thought of that dinner at Mrs. Garrick’s, when Boswell whispered to his neighbor, “ I believe this is as much as can be made of life.” “We were all in fine spirits,” he adds. It lingered in his memory “ as one of the happiest days that he had enjoyed in the whole course of his life.”

I did not leave this part of the country without visiting Uttoxeter, that old Staffordshire town where Johnson did strange penance one market-day. To a young clergyman, to whom, shortly before his death, “ he used to talk with great freedom, he mentioned that he could not in general accuse himself of having been an undutiful son. ‘ Once, indeed,’ said he, ‘I was disobedient: I refused to attend my father to Uttoxeter market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and the remembrance of it was painful. A few years ago I desired to atone for this fault. I went to Uttoxeter in very bad weather, and stood for a considerable time bare-headed in the rain, on the spot where my father’s stall used to stand. In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory.’ ”

A traveler, who visited Lichfield a few years after Johnson’s death, was told that on this day of expiation the old man was missed by his friends, “ The servants said that he had set off at a very early hour; whither they knew not. Just before supper he returned. He informed his hostess of his breach of filial duty, which had happened just fifty years before on that very day. ‘ To do away the sin of this disobedience I this day went,’ he said, ‘ in a chaise to Uttoxeter, and going into the market at time of high business uncovered my head, and stood with it bare an hour before the stall which my father had formerly used, exposed to the sneers of the standers-by and the inclemency of the weather.’ ”

The image of old Samuel Johnson so patient in his penance always rises before my mind when I read those lines in Dante where the poet tells how a proud man, casting all shame aside, was saved from hell that day that, in the midst of all his glory, he took his stand in the open place of Siena to beg for money to ransom his friend : —

How finely does Carlyle bring back this scene, so sad and strange ! “ Who,” he writes, “ does not figure to himself this spectacle, amid the ‘ rainy weather and the sneers,’ or wonder, ‘ of the bystanders ’ ? The memory of old Michael Johnson, rising from the far distance; sad-beckoning in the ‘ moonlight of memory ; ’ how he had toiled faithfully hither and thither ; patiently among the lowest of the low; been buffeted and beaten down, yet ever risen again, ever tried it anew. And oh, when the wearied old man, as Bookseller, or Hawker, or Tinker, or whatsoever it was that Fate had reduced him to, begged help of thee for one day, how savage, diabolic, was that mean Vanity which answered No ! He sleeps now; after life’s fitful fever he sleeps well: but thou, O Merciless, how now wilt thou still the sting of that remembrance ? The picture of Samuel Johnson standing bareheaded in the market there is one of the grandest and saddest we can paint. Repentance ! Repentance ! he proclaims, as with passionate sobs ; but only to the ear of Heaven, if Heaven will give him audience : the earthly ear and heart that should have heard it are now closed, unresponsive forever.”

As I stood in the market-place, I almost wished I had never seen it. There is many a spot, beautiful and holy ground in our memories, which is better left unvisited.

“ We have a vision of our own ;

Ah! why should we undo it ”

There was little here to bring back the scene which the old man looked upon. There was not a house left standing of all those which looked down on him in his sorrow and his patience. From the ancient tower hard by the chimes rang out to him the quarters of that long, sad hour as sweetly as they ring them out now, but little else told me of those old days so long gone by. While my imagination was depressed by these modern surroundings, my indignation was roused by a ridiculous statue in which some sculptor, richly endowed with that affectation which Johnson abhorred, has represented him in the penitential mood of a penny theatre, his head, covered with flowing locks, held awry, and his hands clasped under his chin. Behind him t wo old women are kneeling, while in front another old woman, resting her head on her crutch, is gazing at him as sympathetically and reverentially as stone-work allows. Close to her on one side is a girl looking at nothing in particular, and on the other side are two little children kneeling, with their clasped hands raised to him. That it is high market is shown by three dead geese with their long necks and heads hanging down over a stall, and by a live duck, with its mouth open for food or quacking, in a basket. Over this absurd statue is inscribed the date of 1759, though why 1759 of all years no mortal can tell. It is much too late for the act of disobedience, and much too early for the penance.

As I strolled back to the railway station, I examined somewhat hopefully the windows of a shop over which was inscribed “ Branch of the Roorn of Antiquities.” It was not open, for it was still early. Here at last, I thought, might be seen something which would bring back the days of Johnson and the old time before him. A patient search discovered little beyond a few volumes of the Graphic, and an announcement that tea and coffee were provided at one penny a cup, and that high-class tobaccos were on sale. At the station I asked an elderly porter what was the right way of pronouncing Uttoxeter. I felt sure that all the letters were no more sounded in it than in Gloucester or Worcester. “ The Bishop of Shrewsbury,” he replied, “when he preached here, called it Uxeter.” “But how do the people of the place call it?” “ I don’t take much notice of how they calls it,” he rejoined. “ I come from Cheadle.” As I did not come from Cheadle, a place apparently given over to blissful ignorance, I continued my inquiries, and found that the bishop’s pronunciation and the common people’s agree. There are some, however, I was told, who call the town Utchiter.

The train soon bore me away southwards. As it swept past Lichfield, the birthplace of my hero, old memories came crowding in: but the graceful spires were soon lost to view, and the Johnson Club holiday was at an end.

George Birkbeck Hill .