|NOT very far from 'streaming London's central roar'--or, in plain
words, about midway in Fleet Street, on the left-hand side as you go
toward Ludgate Hill--is a high and narrow archway or passage over which
is painted in dingy letters the words 'Bolt Court.' To the lover of the
'Great Cham of Literature,' the name comes freighted with memories.
More than a hundred years ago 'the ponderous mass of Johnson's form,' to
quote a poem by Mrs. Barbauld, must often have darkened that contracted
approach, when, in order to greet with tea the coming day ('veniente
die'), * and to postpone if possible that 'unseasonable hour at which
he had habituated himself to expect the oblivion of repose,' he rolled
across from the Temple to Miss Williams's rooms. Where the blind lady
lodged, no Society of Arts tablet now reveals to us; but as soon as
the pilgrim has traversed the dark and greasy entrance-way, and finds
himself in the little court itself, with its disorderly huddle of
buildings, and confusion of tip-cat playing children, he is in Johnson's
land, and only a few steps from the actual spot on which Johnson's last
hours were spent. Fronting him, in the farther angle of the enclosure,
is the Stationers' Company's School, and the Stationers' Company's
School stands upon the site of No. 8 Bolt Court, formerly Bensley's
Printing Office, ** but earlier still the last residence of Dr. Johnson,
who lived in it from 1776 to 1784.
* 'Te venienie die, te decedenle canebat.'--Georg, iv. 466.
* Bensley succeeded Allen the printer, Johnson's landlord.
During Bensley's tenancy of the house it was twice the scene
of disastrous fires, by the second of which (in June, 1819)
the Doctor's old rooms were entirely destroyed. Among other
valuables burned at Bensley's was the large wood block
engraved by Bewick's pupil, Luke Clennell, for the diploma
of the Highland Society; and the same artist's cuts after
Stothard for Rogers's 'Pleasures of Memory' of 1810 were
only saved from a like fate by being kept in a 'ponderous
iron chest.'
It was in the backroom of its first floor that, on Monday, the 13th
December in the latter year, at about seven o'clock in the evening, his
black servant Francis Barber and his friend Mrs. Desmoulins, who watched
in the sick-chamber, 'observing that the noise he made in breathing had
ceased, went to the bed, and found that he was dead.'
Standing in Bolt Court to-day, before the unimposing façade of the
school which now occupies the spot, it is not easy to reconstruct that
quiet parting-scene; nor is it easy to realize the old book-burdened
upper floors, or the lower reception chamber, where, according to Sir
John Hawkins, were given those 'not inelegant dinners' of the good
Doctor's more opulent later years. Least of all is it possible to
conceive that, somewhere in this pell-mell of bricks and mortar, was
once a garden which the famous Lexicographer took pleasure in watering;
and where, moreover, grew a vine from which, only a few months before
he died, he gathered 'three bunches of grapes.' But if Bolt Court prove
unstimulating, you have only to take a few steps to the right, and you
arrive, somewhat unexpectedly, in a little parallelogram at the back,
known as Gough Square. Here, in the north-west corner, still stands
one of the last of those sixteen residences in which Johnson lived in
London. It is at present a place of business; but the tenants make no
difficulty about your examination of it, and when you inquire for the
well-known garret you are at once invited to inspect it. The interior of
the house, of course, is much altered, but there is still a huge
chain at the front door, which dates from Johnson's day, and the old
oak-balustraded staircase remains intact. As you climb its narrow
stages, you remember that, sixty years since, Thomas Carlyle must have
made that ascent before you; * and you wonder how Johnson, with his bad
sight and his rolling gait, managed to steer up it at all.
* He visited it in 1831 (Froude's 'Carlyle,' vol. ii., eh.
x.).
The flight ends in the garret itself, upon which you emerge at present,
as in a hay-loft. But it is not in the least such a 'sky-parlour' as
Hogarth assigns to his 'Distressed Poet.' It occupies the whole width
and breadth of the building; it is sufficiently lighted by three windows
in front, and two dormers at the sides; and the pitch of the roof is by
no means low. Here you are actually in Johnson's house; and as you turn
to look at the stairway you have just quitted, it is odds if you do not
expect to see the shrivelled wig, the seared, blinking face, and the
heavy shoulders of the Doctor himself rising slowly above the aperture
with a huge volume under his arm. For it was in this very garret in
Gough Square, within sound of the hammers of that famous clock of St.
Dunstan's, to which Cowper refers in the 'Connoisseur,' * that the great
Dictionary was compiled.
* For August 19, 1750, on 'Country Congregations.' The old
clock still exists, in working order, at a villa in
Regent's.
Here laboured Shiels, the amanuensis, and his five companions,
ceaselessly transcribing the passages which had been marked for them to
copy, and probably going 'odd man or plain Newmarket' for beer as soon
as ever their employer's back was turned; here, also, at the little
fire-place in the corner, must often have sat Johnson himself, peering
closely (much as Reynolds shows him in the portrait of 1778) at the
proofs that were going to long-suffering Andrew Millar. It was in
this identical garret that Joseph Warton once visited him to pay a
subscription; here came Roubiliac and Sir Joshua; and here, when the
room had grown to be dignified by the title of the 'library,' Johnson
received Dr. Burney, who found in it 'five or six Greek folios, a deal
writing-desk, and a chair and a half.' The half-chair must have been
that mentioned by Miss Reynolds; and it is evident that long experience
or repeated misadventure had made Johnson both skilful and cautious in
manipulating it. 'A gentleman,' she says, 'who frequently visited him
whilst writing his "Idlers" [the 'Idler' was partly composed in Gough
Square in 1758] constantly found him at his desk, sitting on a chair
with three legs; and on rising from it, he remarked that Dr. Johnson
never forgot its defect, but would either hold it in his hand or place
it with great composure against some support, taking no notice of its
imperfection to his visitor.' 'It was remarkable in Dr. Johnson,' she
goes on, 'that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any
apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence.'
In Gough Square Johnson lived from 1749 to 1759. 'I have this day moved
my things,' he writes to his step-daughter, Miss Porter, on the 23rd
of March in the latter year, 'and you are now to direct to me at Staple
Inn.' These ten years were among the busiest and most productive of his
life. No pension had as yet made existence easier to him; no Boswell was
at hand to seduce him to port and the Mitre; and the Literary Club,
as yet unborn, existed only in embryo at a beefsteak shop in Ivy Lane.
Besides the 'Idler' and the Dictionary, which latter was published in
the middle of his sojourn at Gough Square, he sent forth from his garret
'Irene' and the 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' the 'Rambler,' and the
essays in Hawkesworth's 'Adventurer.' It was here that he drew up those
proposals for that belated edition of Shakespeare of which Churchill
said:=
```He for Subscribers baits his hook,
```And takes their cash--but where's the Book?=
and here, early in 1759, he wrote his 'Rasselas.' It was in Gough
Square, on the 16th of March, 1756, that he was arrested for £5 18s.,
and only released by a prompt loan from Samuel Richardson; it was
while living in Gough Scpiare that he penned that noble letter to
Chesterfield, of which Time seems to intensify rather than to attenuate
the manly dignity and the independent accent. 'Is not a Patron, my Lord,
one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water,
and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice
which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early,
had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot
enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known,
and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess
obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling
that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron which
Providence has enabled me to do for myself.'
'Till I am solitary, and cannot impart it.'
The same thought recurs in the closing words of the preface to his
_magnum opus_, which, little more than two months after the date of the
above letter, appeared in a pair of folio volumes.
'I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please
have sunk into the grave; and success and miscarriage are empty sounds.'
It needs no Boswell to tell us that the reference here is to the death,
three years before, of his wife,--that fantastic 'Tetty,' to himself so
beautiful, to his friends so unattractive, whom he loved so ardently and
so faithfully, and whose name, coupled with so many 'pious breathings,'
is so frequently to be found in his 'Prayers and Meditations.' 'This is
the day,' he wrote, thirty years afterwards, 'on which, in 1752, dear
Tetty died. I have now uttered a prayer of repentance and contrition;
perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Tetty is now praying
for me. God help me.' In her epitaph at Bromley he styles her '_formosa,
culta, ingeniosa, pia_.' In a recently discovered letter she is his
'charming Love,' his 'most amiable woman in the world,' and (even at
fifty) his 'dear Girl.' He preserved her wedding ring, says Boswell, 'as
long as he lived, with an affectionate care, in a little round wooden
box, in the inside of which he pasted a slip of paper, thus inscribed by
him in fair characters, as follows: '_Eheu! Eliz. Johnson, Nuptay Jul.
9° 1736, Mortua, eheu! Mart._ 17° 1752.' *
* This ring was exhibited at the Guelph Exhibition of 1891
by Mr. A. C. Lomax.
Her loss was not the only bereavement he suffered in Gough Square. Two
months before he left it, in 1759, his mother died at Lichfield,--'one
of the few calamities,' he had told Lucy Porter, 'on which he thought
with terror.' Confined to London by his work, he was not able to close
her eyes; but he wrote to her a last letter almost too sacred in its
wording for the profanation of type, and he consecrated an 'Idler'
to her memory. 'The last year, the last day, must come,' he says
mournfully. 'It has come, and is past. The life which made my own
life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my
prospects.' To pay his mother's modest debts, and to cover the expenses
of her funeral, he penned his sole approach to a work of fiction,--the
story of 'Rasselas.'=
```Who now reads Johnson? If he pleases still,
```'Tis most for Dormitive or Sleeping Pill,--=
one might say, in not inappropriate parody of Pope. His strong
individuality, his intellectual authority, his conversational power,
must live for ever; but his books!--who, outside the fanatics of
literature,--who reads them now? Macaulay, we are told by Lord Houghton,
once quoted 'London' at a dinner-table, but then he was talking to
Dean Milman; and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his novel of 'A Mortal
Antipathy,' refers to the Prince of Abyssinia.
Browning, says Mrs. Sutherland Orr, qualified himself for poetry in his
youth by a diligent perusal of the Dictionary; and it may perhaps be
said of him, in those words of Horace which Johnson himself applied
to Prior, that 'the vessel long retained the scent which it first
received.' But who now, among the supporters of the circulating
libraries, ever gets out the 'Rambler,' or 'Irene,' or the 'Vanity of
Human Wishes' (beloved of Scott and Byron), or 'Rasselas,'--'Rasselas,'
once more popular than the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' *--'Rasselas,'
which despite such truisms as 'What cannot be repaired is not to be
regretted,' is full of sagacious 'criticism of life'!
* Of an illustrated edition of the' Vicar' published at the
end or 1890, we are credibly informed that 8,000 copies were
sold within a twelvemonth. And where is 'Rasselas' now?
The honest answer must be, 'Very few.' Yet a day may come when the
Johnsonese of Johnson's imitators will be forgotten, and people will
turn once more to the fountain-head to find, with surprise, that it
is not so polluted with Latinisms after all, and that it abounds in
passages direct and forcible. 'Of all the writings which are models,'
says Professor Earle, 'models I mean in the highest sense of the word,
models from which the spirit of genuine true and wholesome diction is to
be imbibed (not models of mannerism of which the trick or fashion is
to be caught), I have no hesitation in saying that there is one author
unapproachably and incomparably the best, and that is Samuel Johnson.'
And this is the 'deliberate conclusion' of an expert who has given
almost a lifetime to the comparative study of English prose.