Part 10

He was no disguiser of his own likes and dislikes. Politics he avoided as much as possible; but he affected less concern in public matters than he really felt. “Consecrate that time to your friends,” he writes with mock severity to the ideal Irishman, Lord Charlemont, “which you spend in endeavoring to promote the interests of a half-million of scoundrels.” For his private business he had least zeal of all; and cites “my own confounded affairs” as the cause of his going into Lancashire. Beauclerk had great tact, boldness, and independence; his natural scorn of an oppressor was his modern and democratic quality. His idleness (for he was as idle by habit as Langton was by nature) he recognized, and lightly deprecated. Fastidious in everything, he made “one hour of conversation at Elmsley’s”[51] his standard of enjoyment, and his imagined extreme of annoyance was “to be clapped on the back by Tom Davies.” What he chose to call his leisure (again the ancestral Stuart trait!) he dedicated to the natural sciences in his beloved laboratory. “I see Mr. Beauclerk often, both in town and country,” wrote Goldsmith to Bennet Langton; “he is now going directly forward to become a second Boyle, deep in chemistry and physics.” When there was some fanciful talk of setting up the Club as a college, “to draw a wonderful concourse of students,” Beauclerk, by unanimous vote, was elected to the professorship of Natural Philosophy.

Johnson’s influence on him, potent though it was, seems to have been negative enough. It kept him from a few questionable things, and preserved in him an outward decorum towards customs and established institutions; but it failed to incite him to make of his manifold talents the “illustrious figure” which Langton’s eyes discerned in a vain anticipation. Beauclerk and the great High Churchman went about much together, and had amusing experiences. On such occasions, as in all their familiar intercourse, the disciple had the true salt of the Doctor’s talk, which, as Hazlitt remarks, was often something quite unlike “the cumbrous cargo of words” he kept for professional use. In the late winter of 1765 the two visited Cambridge, Beauclerk having a mind to call upon a friend at Trinity.

These, as we know, had their many differences, “like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man-o’-war”; the one smooth, sharp, and civil, the other indignantly dealing with the butt-end of personality. Boswell gives a long account of a charming dispute concerning the murderer of Miss Reay, and the evidence of his having carried two pistols. Beauclerk was right; but Johnson, with quite as solid a sense of virtue, was angry; and he was soothed at the end only by an adroit and affectionate reply. “Sir,” the Doctor began, sternly, at another time, after listening to some mischievous waggery, “you never open your mouth but with the intention to give pain, and you often give me pain, not from the power of what you say, but from seeing your intention.” And again, he said to him whom he had compared to Alexander, marching in triumph into Babylon: “You have, sir! a love of folly, and a scorn of fools; everything you do attests the one, and everything you say the other.”[52] Beauclerk could also lecture his mentor. It was his steadfast counsel that the Doctor should devote himself to poetry, and draw in his horns of dogma and didactics.

He had, ever ready, some quaint simile or odd application from the classics; in the habit of “talking from books,” as the Doctor called it, he was, however, distanced by Langton. Referring to that friend’s habit of sitting or standing against the fireplace, with one long leg twisted about the other, “as if fearing to occupy too much space,” Beauclerk likened him, for all the world, to the stork in Raphael’s cartoon of The Miraculous Draught.[53] One of Beauclerk’s happiest hits, and certainly his boldest, was made while Johnson was being congratulated upon his pension. “How much now it was to be hoped,” whispered the young blood, in reference to Falstaff’s celebrated vow, “that he would purge and live cleanly, as a gentleman should do!” Johnson seems to have taken the hint in good-humor, and actually to have profited by it.

Very soon after leaving Oxford, Beauclerk became engaged to a Miss Draycott, whose family were well known to that affable blue-stocking, Mrs. Montagu; but some coldness on his part, some sensitiveness on hers, broke off the match. His fortune-hunting parent is said to have been disappointed, as the lady owned several lead-mines in her own right. That same year, with Bennet Langton for companion part of the way, Beauclerk, whose health, never robust, now began to give him anxiety, set out on a Continental tour. Baretti, whom he had met at home, received him most kindly at Milan, thanks to Johnson’s urgent and friendly letter. By his subsequent knowledge of Italian popular customs, he was able to testify in Baretti’s favor, when the latter was under arrest for killing his man in the Haymarket, and in concert with Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Johnson, to help him, in a very interesting case, towards his acquittal. It was reported to Selwyn that the handsome gambling Inglese was robbed at Venice of £10,000! an incident which, perhaps, shortened his peregrinations. If the report were accurate, it would prove that he could have been in no immediate need of pecuniary rescue from his leaden sweetheart. It was Dr. Johnson’s opinion, coinciding with the opinion of Roger Ascham on the same general subject, that travel adds very little to one’s mental forces, and that Beauclerk might have learned more in the Academe of “Fleet Street, sir!”

Topham Beauclerk married Lady Diana Spencer, the eldest daughter of the second Duke of Marlborough, as soon as she obtained a divorce from her first husband. This was Frederick, Lord Bolingbroke, nephew and heir of the great owner of that title; a very trying gentleman, who was the restless “Bully” of Selwyn’s correspondence; he survived until 1787. The ceremony took place March 12, 1768, in St. George’s, Hanover Square, “by license of the Archbishop of Canterbury,” both conspirators being then residents of the parish. Lady Diana Spencer was born in the spring of 1734, and was therefore in her thirty-fifth year, while Beauclerk was but twenty-nine.[54] Johnson was disturbed, and felt offended at first with the whole affair; but he never withdrew from the agreeable society of Beauclerk’s wife. It is nothing wonderful that the courtship and honey-moon was signalized by the forfeit of Beauclerk’s place in the exacting Club, “for continued inattendance,” and not regained for a considerable period. “They are in town, at Topham’s house, and give dinners,” one of George Selwyn’s gossiping friends wrote, after the wedding. “Lord Ancram dined there yesterday, and called her nothing but Lady Bolingbroke the whole time!” Let us hope that “Milady Bully” triumphed over her awkward guest, and looked, as Earl March once described her under other difficulties, “handsomer than ever I saw her, and not the least abashed;” or as deliberately easy as when she entertained with her gay talk the nervous Boswell who awaited the news of his election or rejection from the Club. She was a blond goddess, exceedingly fair to see. In her middle age she fell under the observant glance of delightful Fanny Burney, who did not fail to allow her “pleasing remains of beauty.”

The _divorcée_ was fond of and faithful to her new lord, and no drawback upon his æsthetic pride, inasmuch as she was an artist of no mean merit. Horace Walpole built a room for the reception of some of her drawings, which he called his Beauclerk Closet, “not to be shown to all the profane that come to see the house,” and he always praised them extravagantly. It is surer critical testimony in her favor that her name figures yet in encyclopædias, and that Sir Joshua, the honest and unbought judge, much admired her work, which Bartolozzi was kept busy engraving. It was her series of illustrations to Bürger’s wild ballad of _Leonora_ (with the dolly knight, the wooden monks, the genteel heroine, and the vigorous spectres) which, long after, helped to fire the young imagination of Shelley. It is to be feared that her invaluable portrait of Samuel Johnson is not, or never was, extant. “Johnson was confined for some days in the Isle of Skye,” writes her rogue of a spouse, “and we hear that he was obliged to swim over to the mainland, taking hold of a cow’s tail. . . . Lady Di has promised to make a drawing of it.” Sir Joshua’s pretty “Una” is the little Elizabeth, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, elder daughter of Lady Di and Topham Beauclerk, painted the year her father died.

The family lived in princely style, both at their “summer quarters” at Muswell Hill, and on Great Russell Street, where the library, set in a great garden, reached, as Walpole mischievously gauged it, “half-way to Highgate.” Lady Di, an admirable hostess, proved herself one of those odd and rare women who take to their husbands’ old friends. Selwyn she cordially liked, and her warmest welcome attended Langton, whom she would rally for his remissness, when he failed to come to them at Richmond. He could reach them so easily! she said; all he need do was to lay himself at length, his feet in London and his head with them, _eodem die_. This Richmond home remained her residence during her widowhood. Walpole mentions a Thames boat-race in 1791, when he sat in a tent “just before Lady Di’s windows,” and gazed upon “a scene that only Richmond, on earth, can exhibit.” In the church of the same leafy town her body rests.

Beauclerk died at his Great Russell Street house on March 11, 1780. He had been failing steadily under visitations of his old trouble since 1777, when he lay sick unto death at Bath, and when his wife nursed him tenderly into what seemed to Walpole a miraculous recovery. He was but forty-one years old, and, for all his genius, left no more trace behind than that Persian prince who suddenly disappeared in the shape of a butterfly, and whom old Burton calls a “light phantastick fellow.” His air of boyish promise, quite unconsciously worn, hoodwinked his friends into prophecies of his fame. He did not give events a chance to put immortality on his “bright, unbowed, insubmissive head.” Yet he was bitterly mourned. “I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save him,” cried Johnson, who had loved him for over twenty years; and again, to Lord Althorp: “This is a loss, sir, that perhaps the whole nation could not repair.” Boswell mentions the Doctor’s April stroll, at this time, while he was writing his _Lives of the Poets_; and tells us how, returning from a call on the widow of the companion of his youth, David Garrick, he leaned over the rails of the Adelphi Terrace, watching the dark river, and thinking of “two such friends as cannot be supplied.” “Poor dear Beauclerk!” Johnson wrote, when his violent grief had somewhat subsided, “_nec, ut soles, dabis joca!_ His wit and his folly, his acuteness and his maliciousness, his merriment and his reasoning, are alike over. Such another will not often be found among mankind.” Beyond this well-known and characteristic summing-up, the Doctor made no discoverable mention, in his correspondence, of his bereavement, certainly not to the highly-prejudiced Mrs. Thrale, to whom he wrote often and gayly in the year of Beauclerk’s death. Nor shall we know how the catastrophe affected Bennet Langton; for all the most interesting papers relating to him were destroyed when the old Hall at Langton-by-Spilsby was burned in 1855. On this subject, as on others as intimate, he stands, perforce, silent.

Readers may recall a passage in Miss Burney’s _Diary_ which gives countenance to an accusation not borne out by any other testimony, that Beauclerk and his wife had not lived happily together. Dining at Sir Joshua’s at Richmond, in 1782, Edmund Burke, sitting next the author of _Evelina_, took occasion, on catching sight of Lady Di’s “pretty white house” through the trees, to rejoice in the fact that she was well-housed, moneyed, and a widow. He added that he had never enjoyed the good-fortune of another so keenly as in this blessed instance. Then, turning to his new acquaintance, as the least likely to be informed of the matter, he spoke in his own “strong and marked expressions” of the singular ill-treatment Beauclerk had shown his wife, and the “necessary relief” it must have been to her when he was called away. The statement does not seem to have been gainsaid by any of the company; nor was Burke liable to a slanderous error. So severe a comment on Beauclerk, resting, even as it does, wholly on Miss Burney’s veracity, ought, in fairness, to be incorporated into any sketch of the man. On the other side, it is pleasant to discover that Beauclerk, in his will, made five days before the end, bequeathed all he possessed to his wife, and reverted to her the estates of his children, should they die under age. There was but one bequest beyond these, and that was to Thomas Clarke, the faithful valet. The executors named were Lady Di and her brother, Lord Charles Spencer, who had also been groomsman at the marriage, which, despite Burke and its own evil beginnings, it is hard to think of as ill-starred. The joint guardians of Charles George Beauclerk, the only son, were to be Bennet Langton and a Mr. Loyrester, whom Dr. Johnson speaks of as “Leicester, Beauclerk’s relation, and a man of good character;” but the guardianship, provisional in case of Lady Di’s decease, never came into force, as she survived, in fullest harmony with her three children, up to August 1, 1808, having entered her seventy-fifth year. Various private legacies came to Langton, by his old comrade’s dying wish, the most precious among them, perhaps, being the fine Reynolds portrait of Johnson, which had been painted at Beauclerk’s cost. Under it was inscribed:

“_Ingenium ingens Inculto latet hoc sub corpore._”

Langton thoughtfully effaced the lines. “It was kind of you to take it off,” said the burly Doctor, with a sigh; and then (for how could he but recall the contrast of temperament in the two, as well as the affectionate context of Horace?), “not unkind in him to have put it on.” The collection of thirty thousand glorious books “_pernobilis Angli T. Beauclerk_” was sold at auction. The advertisement alone is royal reading. There is much amiable witness to the circumstance that Beauclerk was not only an admirer but a buyer of his friends’ works. From some kind busybody who attended the twenty-ninth day of the sale, and pencilled his observations upon the margins of the catalogue now in the British Museum, we learn that Goldsmith’s _History of the Earth and Animated Nature_ (nothing less!), which was issued, with cuts, in the year he died, was knocked down to the vulgar for two and threepence. The shelves, naturally, were stocked with Johnsons. Things dear to the bibliophile were there: innumerable first editions, black-letter, mediæval manuscript, Elzevirs, priceless English and Italian classics, gathered with real feeling and pride; but the most vivid personal interest belonged to the unpretending Lot 3444, otherwise known to fame as _The Rambler_, printed at Edinburgh in 1751; for that was the young Beauclerk’s own copy, carried with him to Oxford, and with a fragrance, as of a last century garden, of the first hearty friendship of boys. One cannot help wishing that a sentimental fate left it in Langton’s own hands.

Lady Beauclerk, Topham’s mother, had died in 1766; and he asked to be buried beside her, or at her feet, in the old chapel of Garston, near Liverpool: “an instance of tenderness,” said Johnson, “which I should hardly have expected.” There, in the place of his choice, he rests, without an epitaph.

After this the Doctor consoled himself more than ever with Bennet Langton, and with the atmosphere of love and reverence which surrounded him in Langton’s house. He had been of old the most desired of all guests at the family seat in Lincolnshire. “Langton, sir!” as he liked to announce, “had a grant of warren from Henry II.; and Cardinal Stephen Langton, of King John’s reign, was of this family.” Peregrine Langton, Bennet’s uncle, was a man of simple and benevolent habits, who brought economy to a science, without niggardliness, and whom Johnson declared to be one of those he clung to at once, both by instinct and reason; Bennet’s father, learned, good, and unaffected, the prototype of his learned, good, and unaffected son, was, however, a more diverting character. He had sincerest esteem for Johnson, but looked askance on him for his liberal views, and suspected him, indeed, of being a Papist in secret! He once offered the Doctor a living of some value in the neighborhood, with the suggestion that he should qualify himself for Orders: a chance gravely refused. Of this exemplary but rather archaic squire, Johnson, a dissector of everything he loved, said: “Sir! he is so exuberant a talker in public meetings that the gentlemen of his county are afraid of him. No business can be done for his declamation.” In his behalf, too, Johnson produced one of his most astounding words; for having understood that both Mr. and Mrs. Langton were averse to having their portraits taken, he observed aloud that “a superstitious reluctance to sit for one’s picture is among the anfractuosities of the human mind.”

Bennet Langton married, on the 24th of May, 1770, Mary Lloyd, daughter of the Countess of Haddington, and widow of John, the eighth Earl of Rothes, the stern soldier in laced waistcoat and breastplate beneath, painted by Sir Joshua. It was a common saying at the time that everybody was welcome to a Countess Dowager of Rothes; for it did so happen that three ladies bearing that title were all remarried within a few years. Lady Rothes, although a native of Suffolk, had acquired from long residence in Scotland the accent of that country, which Dr. Johnson bore with magnanimously, on the consideration that it was not indigenous. She had a handsome presence, full of easy dignity, and a naturalness marked enough in the heyday of Georgian affectation. With a vivacity very different from Lady Di Beauclerk’s, she kept herself the spring and centre of Langton’s tranquil domestic circle: a more womanly woman historiographers cannot find. His own charm of character, after his marriage, slipped more and more into the underground channels of home-life, and so coursed on beneficently in silence. Their children were no fewer than nine,[55] “not a plain face nor faulty person among them:” the goddess daughters six feet in height, and the three sons so like their Maypole father that they were able once to amuse the Parisians by raising their arms to let a crowd pass. Langton was wont to repeat with some glee certain jests about his height, and Dr. Johnson’s nickname of “Lanky” he took ever with excellent grace; and when Garrick had leaped upon a chair to shake hands with him, in old days, he had knelt, at parting, to shake hands with Garrick. But the King’s awkward digs at his “long legs” he found terribly distasteful, nor was he thereby disposed to agree with the Doctor’s enthusiastic proclamation, after the famous interview of 1767, that George III. was “as fine a gentleman as Charles II.”

It was his cherished plan to educate his boys and girls at home, and to give them a thorough acquaintance with the learned languages. No social engagements were to stand in the way of this prime exigency. He was in great haste to turn his young brood into Masters and Mistresses of Arts. Johnson complained to Miss Burney, as they were both taking tea at Mrs. Thrale’s, that nothing would serve Langton but to stand them up before company, and get them to repeat a fable or the Hebrew alphabet, supplying every other word himself, and blushing with pride at the vicarious learning of his infants. But another of the tedious royal jokes, “How does Education go on?” actually lessened his devotion to his self-set task, and worried him like the water-drop in the story, which fell forever on a criminal’s head until it had drilled his brain. Again, both he and his wife, even after they had moved into the retirement of Great George Street, Westminster, in pursuance of their design, were far too agreeable and too accessible to be spared the incursions of society. In a word, Minerva found her seat shaken, and her altar-fires not very well tended, and therefore withdrew. Langton impressed one axiom on his young scholars which they never forgot: “Next best to knowing is to be sensible that you do not know.” An entirely superfluous waif of a baby was once left at the doors of this same many-childrened house, to be fed, clothed, and petted by Mr. Bennet Langton and Lady Rothes, without protest. Dr. Johnson, who made friends with all children, was especially attached to their third girl, his god-daughter, whom he called “pretty Mrs. Jane,” and “my own little Jenny.” The very last year of his life her “most humble servant” sent her a loving letter, extant yet, and written purposely in a large round hand as clear as print.

“Langton’s children are very pretty,” Johnson wrote to Boswell in 1777, “and his lady loses her Scotch.” But again, during the same year, condescendingly: “I dined lately with poor dear Langton. I do not think he goes on well. His table is rather coarse, and he has his children too much about him.” Boswell takes occasion, in reproducing this censure, to reprehend the custom of introducing the children after dinner: a parental indulgence to which he, at least, was not addicted. The Doctor gave him a mild nudge on the subject in remarking later: “I left Langton in London. He has been down with the militia, and is again quiet at home, talking to his little people, as I suppose you do sometimes.” While Langton was in camp on Warley Common, in command of the Lincolnshire troops, Johnson spent with him five delightful days, admiring his tall captain’s blossoming energies, and poking about curiously among the tents. Langton had fallen, little by little, into a confirmed extravagance, so that the moral of Uncle Peregrine’s sagacious living bade fair to be lost upon him. Boswell had a quarrel with Johnson on the subject of Langton’s expenditure, during the course of which, according to his own report, the Laird of Auchinleck suffered a “horrible shock” by being told that the best way to drive Langton out of his costly house would be to put him (Boswell) into it. The Doctor was truly concerned, nevertheless, about his engaging spendthrift; up to the very end, he would implore him to keep account-books, even if he had to omit his Aristophanes. “He complains of the ill effects of habit,” grumbled the great moralizer, “and he rests content upon a confessed indolence. He told his father himself that he had ‘no turn for economy!’ but a thief might as well plead that he had no turn for honesty.” Such were the hard hits sacred to those Dr. Johnson most esteemed. It transpires from his will that, by way of discouragement, he had lent Langton £750.[56]