1741-1800
IN Samuel Johnson’s famous circle nearly every man stands for himself,
full of definite purpose and power. But two young men are there who
did nothing of moment, whose names chime often down the pages of all
his biographies, and to whom the world must pay honor, if only for
the friendship they took and gave. As Apollo should be set about with
his Graces “tripping neatly,” so the portentous old apparition of
Johnson seems never so complete and endearing as when attended by these
two above all things else Johnsonians. When the Turk’s Head is ajar
in Gerrard Street, in shadow-London; when the “unclubable” Hawkins
strides over the threshold, and Hogarth goes by the window with his
large nod and smile; when Chamier is there reading, Goldsmith posing
in purple silk small-clothes, Sir Joshua fingering his trumpet, Burke
and little brisk Garrick stirring “bishop”[45] in their glasses, and
the king of the hour, distinguished by his lack of ruffles, is rolling
about in his chair of state, saying something prodigiously humorous
and wise, it is still Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk who most
give the scene its human genial lustre, standing with laughter behind
him, arm in arm. They were his favorites, and it is the most adorable
thing about them both that they made out to like James Boswell, who
was jealous of them. (Perhaps they had apprehended thoroughly Newman’s
fine aphorism concerning a bore: “You may yield, or you may flee: you
cannot conquer!”) The rare glimpses we have of their brotherly lives is
through the door which opens or shuts for Johnson. Between him and them
was deep and enduring affection, and what little is known of them has
a right to be more, for his sake.
Bennet Langton, born in 1741 in the very neighborhood famous now as the
birthplace of Tennyson, was the elder son of the odd and long-descended
George Langton of Langton, and of Diana his wife, daughter of Edmund
Turnor, Esquire, of Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire. While a lad in the
fen-country, he read _The Rambler_, and conceived the purest enthusiasm
for its author. He came to London, indeed, on the ideal errand of
seeking him out, and, thanks to the kind apothecary Levett, found the
idol of his imagination at home at No. 17 Gough Square, Fleet Street.
Despite the somewhat staggering circumstances of Johnson’s attire,—for
the serious boy had rashly presupposed a stately, fastidious, and
well-mannered figure,—he paid his vows, and commended himself to
his new friend for once and all. Langton entered Trinity College,
Oxford, in 1757, at the age of sixteen.[46] The Doctor, who had
known him about three years, followed his career at the university
with interest, writing to Langton’s tutor, then “dear Tom Warton,”
just appointed to the professorship of poetry held by his father, and
afterwards poet-laureate: “I see your pupil: his mind is as exalted
as his stature,” and to Langton’s self the sweet generality: “I love,
dear sir, to think of you.” He even paid his Freshman a visit, and
swam sportively across a dangerous pool in the Isis, in the teeth of
his warning; and here also, in the Oxford which was long ago his own
“tent of a night,” he fell across a part of his destiny in the shape
of that strange bird, Mr. Topham Beauclerk, then a taking scapegrace
of eighteen. The Doctor must have shaken his head at first, and
wondered at the juxtaposition of this arrant Lord of Misrule and the
“evangelical goodness” of his admirable Langton, until mollified by
the knowledge that a species of cult for himself, and ardent perusal
of his writings, had first brought them together. It was a pleasant
thought to him, that of the two young ribboned heads high in the
quadrangle, bending for the ninth time over _The Reasons Why Advice is
Generally Ineffectual_, _The Mischief of Unbounded Raillery_, and the
jolly satire on _Screech-Owls_; or smiling over the shy Verecundulus
and the too-celebrated Misellus who were part of the author’s machinery
for adding “Christian ardor to virtue, and Christian confidence to
truth.”
Beauclerk, like Langton, was a critic and a student; he was well-bred,
urbane, and of excellent natural parts; moreover, he was a wit, one
of the very foremost of his day, when wits grew in every garden. An
only child, he was born in London in the December of 1739, and named
after that benevolent Topham of Windsor who left the manors of Clewer
Brocas and Didworth and a collection of paintings and drawings to his
father, the handsome wild Lord Sydney Beauclerk, fifth son of the
first Duke of St. Albans, and also, in his time, a gentleman commoner
of Trinity. Lord Sydney died early, in the autumn of 1744, and was
buried in Westminster Abbey with his hero-brother Aubrey, whose
epitaph, still to be read there, Thomson seems to have written. All
the pretty toys and curios passed to Topham the little boy, under the
guardianship of Lady Beauclerk, his excellent but literal mother, once
Mary Norris of Speke in Lancashire. His tutor was named Parker, and
must have been a much-enduring man. Young Beauclerk grew up, bearing
a resemblance in many ways to Charles II.; and so it befell that with
his aggravating flippancy, his sharp sense, his quiver full of gibes,
his time-wasting, money-wasting moods, foreign as Satan and his pomps
to those of his sweet-natured college companion, he was able to strike
Dr. Johnson in his own political weak spot. A flash of the liquid
Stuart eye was enough to disarm Johnson at the very moment when he was
calling up his most austere frown; it was enough to turn the vinegar
of his wrath to the honey of kindness. _Il ne nous reste qu’une chose
à faire: embrassons-nous!_ as the wheedling Prince, at a crisis,
says to Henry Esmond. Johnson, as everybody knows, was a Jacobite.
No sincerer testimony could he have given to his inexplicable liking
for a royal rogue than that he allowed Nell Gwynn’s great-grandson to
tease him and tyrannize over him during an entire lifetime. A choice
spectacle this: Mr. Topham Beauclerk, on his introduction, literally
bewitching Dr. Samuel Johnson! The stolid moralist was enraptured
with his Jack-o’-lantern antics; he rejoiced in his manners, his
taste and literary learning; admired him indiscreetly, rich clothes,
equipage, and all; followed his whims meekly, expostulated with him
almost against his traitorous impulses, and clung to him to the end in
unbroken fondness and faith.
Beauclerk had immense gayety and grace, and the full force given by
high spirits. His accurate, ever-widening knowledge of books and men,
his consummate culture, and his fearlessness, sat handsomely on one
who was regarded by contemporary old ladies as a mere “macaroni.” It
was a matter of course that he tried for no degree at college. The
mistress of Streatham Park, who was by no means his adorer, and who
remembered his chief wickedness in remembering that “he wished to be
accounted wicked,” informs us in a private jotting since published
that he was “a man of very strict veracity.” A philosopher and a
truth-teller, whatever his worldly weaknesses, was sure to be a
character within the range of Johnson’s affections. It was he who most
troubled the good Doctor, he for whom he suffered in silence, with whom
he wrangled; he whose insuperable taunting promise, never reaching any
special development, vexed and disheartened him; yet, perhaps because
of these very things, though Bennet Langton was infinitely more to his
mind, it was Absalom, once again, whom the old fatherly heart loved
best. Nor was he unrepaid. None loved him better, in return, than his
“Beau,” the very mirror of the name, who was wont to pick his way up
the grimy Fleet Street courts “with veneration,” as Boswell records.
Bennet Langton, as Mr. Forster expresses it in his noble _Life of
Goldsmith_, was “an eminent example of the high and humane class who
are content to ‘ring the bell’ to their friends.” He was a mild young
visionary, scrupulous, tolerant, and generous in the extreme; modest,
contemplative, averse to dissipation; a perfect talker and reader,
and a perfect listener; with a face sweet as a child’s, fading but
now, among his kindred, on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He left
a gracious memory behind at Oxford, where his musing bust adorns the
old monastic library of Trinity. He was six feet six inches tall,
slenderly built, and slightly stooping. “The ladies got about him in
drawing-rooms,” said Edmund Burke, “like maids about the Maypole!”
Miss Hawkins, in her _Memoirs_, names him as the person with whom
Johnson was certainly seen to the fairest advantage. His deferent
suave manner was the best foil possible to the Doctor’s extraordinary
explosions. He had supreme self-command; no one ever saw him angry;
and in most matters of life, as a genuine contrast to his beloved
friend Beauclerk, he was apt to take things a shade too seriously. We
learn from Mr. Henry Best, author of some good _Personal and Literary
Memorials_, that the advance rumors of the French Revolution found
Langton, in the fullest sense, an aristocrat; but it was not long
before he became, from conviction, a thorough Liberal, and so remained,
although he suffered a great unpopularity, owing to this change, in
his native county. He wrote, in 1760, a little book of essays entitled
_Rustics_, which never got beyond the passivity of manuscript. The
year before, under the date of July 28th, Langton contributed to the
pages of _The Idler_ the paper numbered 67 and entitled _A Scholar’s
Journal_. It is a pleasant study of procrastination and of shifting
plans, a gentle bit of humor to be ranked as autobiographic. There is
an indorsement of Montrose in its heroic advice to “risk the certainty
of little for the chance of much.” But Langton’s graceful academic
pen was not destined to a public career. Perseverance of any sort was
not native to him. He fulfilled beautifully, adds the vivacious Miss
Hawkins, “the pious injunction of Sir Thomas Browne, ‘to sit quietly
in the soft showers of Providence,’ and might, without injustice,
be characterized as utterly unfit for every species of activity.”
Yet at the call of duty, so well was the natural man dominated by
his unclouded will, he girded himself to any exertion. Wine-drinking
was habitual with him, and he felt its need to sharpen and rouse
his intellect; “but the idea of Bennet Langton being what is called
‘overtaken,’” wrote the same associate whom we have been quoting, “is
too preposterous to be dwelt on.” She furnishes one illustration of
Langton’s Greek serenity. Talking to a company, of a chilly forenoon,
in his own house, he paused to remark that if the fire lacked attention
it might go out: a brief, casual, murmurous interruption. He resumed
his discourse, breaking off presently, and pleading abstractedly with
eye in air: “Pray ring for coals!” All sat looking at the fire, and
so little solicitous about the impending catastrophe that presently
Langton was off again on the stream of his softened eloquence. In a few
minutes came another lull. “Did anybody answer that bell?” A general
negative. “Did anybody ring that bell?” A sly shaking of heads. And
once more the inspired monody soared among the clouds, at last dropping
meditatively to the hearthstone: “Dear, dear, the fire is out!”
Langton was the centre of a group, wherever he happened to be, talking
delightfully, and twirling the oblong gold-mounted snuff-box, which
promptly appeared as sociabilities began: a conspicuous figure, with
his height, his courteous smile, his mild beauty, and his habit of
crossing his arms over his breast, or locking his hands together on
his knee. He was a great rider, and could run like a hound. He had a
queerness of constitution which seemed to leave him at his lowest ebb
every afternoon about two of the clock, forgetful, weary, confused,
and without an idea in his head; but after a little food, he was
himself again. At dinner-parties he usually rose fasting, “such was the
perpetual flow of his conversation, and such the incessant claim made
upon him.” A morning call from Mr. Langton was a thing to suggest the
eternal years; yet we are told that satiety dwelt not where he was;
like Cowley, “he never oppressed any man’s parts, or put any man out
of countenance.” He had much the same sense of humor as Beauclerk had,
and his speech was quite as full of good sense and direct observation,
if not as cutting. He indicted a fault of Edmund Burke’s in one extreme
stroke: “Burke whisks the end of his tail in the face of an arguer!”
Johnson, the arch-whisker of tails, was not to be brought to book; but
Burke’s greatness was of a texture to bear and enjoy the thrust. It is
curious that Langton was markedly fond of _Hudibras_; such a relish
indicates, perhaps, the turn his own wit might have taken, had it not
been held in by too much second thought.
Johnson was wont to announce that he valued Langton for his piety,
his ancient descent, his amiable behavior, and his mastery of Greek.
“Who in this town knows anything of Clenardus, sir, but you and I?”
he would say. In the midst of his talk Langton would fall into the
“vowelled undertone” of the tongue he loved, correcting himself with a
little wave of the hands, and the apologetic phrase: “And so it goes
on.” “Steeped to the lips in Greek” he was indeed, bursting out with
a joyous salute to the moon of Hellas, upon a friend’s doorstep, or
making grotesque Hellene puns, for his own delight,[47] upon the blank
leaves of a pocket-book. Every one familiar with Johnsoniana will
recall the charming and spirited retort written by Dr. Barnard, then
Dean of Derry, later, Bishop of Killaloe, which closes:
“If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,
Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em
In terms select and terse;
Jones teach me modesty and Greek;
Smith, how to think; Burke, how to speak;
And Beauclerk, to converse!”
In all deference to the illustrious Sir William Jones, it may be
claimed that “modesty and Greek” were the very arts in which Langton
was a past-master. But he was an amateur, and a private scholar, and
his name was a dissyllable; else the Dean might have tossed at his feet
as pretty a compliment as that given in the last line to his colleague.
It must have gratified Johnson that Langton refused, at Reynolds’s
dinner-table, “like a sturdy scholar,” to sign the famous Round Robin
(not signed, either, by Beauclerk) which besought him to “disgrace the
walls of Westminster with an English inscription.” And as if to keep
Langton firmly of his own mind on the subject, it was to him the Doctor
confided the Greek quatrain, sad and proud, which he had dedicated to
Goldsmith’s[48] memory.
For Bennet Langton Johnson had no criticism but praise. He presented
him with pride to Young and to Richardson, described him handsomely to
Hannah More, and proceeded to draw his character for Miss Reynolds, ere
she had met him, with such “energy and fond delight” as she avowed she
never could forget. What fine ringing metal was Johnson’s commendation!
“He is one of those to whom Nature has not spread her volumes,
nor uttered her voices, in vain.” “Earth does not bear a worthier
gentleman.” “I know not who will go to Heaven if Langton does not.” And
in the sweetest and completest approval ever put by one mortal upon
another: “_Sit anima mea cum Langtono!_” Yet even with this “angel of a
man” the Doctor had one serious and ludicrous quarrel.
It was the fatal outcome of his uneven moods that he must needs be
disenchanted at times even with his best beadsmen: there came days
when he would deny Beauclerk’s good-humor to be anything but “acid,”
Langton’s anything but “muddy.” He considered it the sole grave
fault of the latter that he was too ready to introduce a religious
discussion into a mixed assembly, where he knew scarcely any two of
the company would be of the same mind. On Boswell’s suggestion that
this may have been done for the sake of instructing himself, Johnson
replied angrily that a man had no more right to take that means of
gaining information than he had to pit two persons against each other
in a duel for the sake of learning the art of self-defence. Some
indiscretion of this sort on Langton’s part seems to have alienated
the friends for the first and last time. It was during their transient
bitterness that the Doctor made the historic apology, across the table,
to Oliver Goldsmith; an incident which, however beautiful in itself,
was a hard back-handed hit at Langton, standing by. Croker’s conjecture
may be true that the business which threatened to break a fealty of
some sixteen years’ standing arose rather from Langton’s settling his
estate by will upon his sisters, whose tutor he had been. On hearing
of it, the Great Cham grumbled and fumed, politely applying to the
Misses Langton the title of “three dowdies!”[49] and shouting, in a
feudal warmth, that “an ancient estate, sir! an ancient estate should
always go to males.” In fact, the Doctor behaved very badly, very
sardonically, and was pleased to lay hold of a post by Temple Bar one
night, and roar aloud over a piece of possible folly up in Lincolnshire
which concerned him not in the least. But in due time the breach,
whatever its cause, was healed. The Doctor, in writing of it, uses
one of his balancing sentences: “Langton is a worthy fellow, without
malice, though not without resentment.” The two could not keep apart
very long, despite all the unreason in the world. “Johnson’s quarrels,”
Mr. Forster tells us, “were lovers’ quarrels.” Another memorable
passage-at-arms, rich in comedy, happened in the course of one of
Johnson’s sicknesses, when, in the cloistral silence of his chamber,
he solemnly implored Bennet Langton, always the companion who comforted
his sunless hours, to tell him wherein his life had been faulty. His
shy and sagacious monitor wrote down, as accusation enough, various
Scriptural texts recommending tolerance, humility, long-suffering,
and other meek ingredients which were not predominant in the sinner’s
social composition. The penitent earnestly thanked Langton on taking
the paper from his hand, but presently turned his short-sighted eyes
upon him from the pillow, and emerging from what his own verbology
would call a “frigorific torpor,” he exclaimed in a loud, wrathful,
suspicious tone: “What’s your drift, sir?” “And when I questioned him,”
so Johnson afterwards told his blustering tale—“when I questioned him
as to what occasion I had given him for such animadversion, all that
he could say amounted to this: that I sometimes contradicted people in
conversation! Now, what harm does it do any man to be contradicted?” To
this same paternal young Langton the rebel submitted his Latin verses;
the _Poemata_, in the shape in which we possess them, were rigorously
edited by him. And Johnson leaned upon him in more intimate ways, as he
could never lean upon Beauclerk. To the scrupulous nature instinctively
right he made comfortable confidences: “Men of harder minds than ours
will do many things from which you and I would shrink; yet, sir, they
will, perhaps, do more good in life than we.”
As to the Honorable Topham Beauclerk, more volatile than Langton, he
had as steady a “sunshine of cheerfulness” for his heritage. We find
him complaining to a friend in the July of 1773: “Every hour adds to
my misanthropy; and I have had a pretty considerable share of it for
some years past.” This incursion of low spirits was not normal with
him. Johnson, bewailing his own morbid habits of mind, once said: “Some
men, and very thinking men, too, have not these vexing thoughts. Sir
Joshua Reynolds is the same all the year round; Beauclerk, when not ill
and in pain, is the same.” Boswell attests that Beauclerk took more
liberties with Johnson than durst any man alive, and that Johnson was
more disposed to envy Beauclerk’s talents than those of any one he had
ever known. Born into the freedom of London, Beauclerk was familiar
with Fox, Selwyn, and Walpole, and with the St. James men who did not
ache to consort with Johnson; and he was quite their match in ease and
astuteness. He walked the modish world, where Langton could not and
would not follow; he alternated the Ship Tavern and the gaming-table
with the court levees; Davies’s shop with the golden insipidities of
the drawing-room; _la comédie_, _la danse_, _l’amour même_, with the
intellectual tie-wigs of Soho. It shows something of his spirit that
whereas no member of the Club save himself was a frequenter of White’s
and Betty’s,[50] or a chosen guest at Strawberry Hill, yet there was no
person of fashion whom he was not proud to make known to Doctor Johnson
whenever he judged the candidate for so genuine an honor worthy of it.
Some of these encounters must have been queer and memorable!
Beauclerk’s unresting sarcasm often flattened out Boswell and irritated
the Doctor, though Bennet Langton, in his abandonments of enthusiastic
optimism, was never more than grazed. It is not to be denied that this
spoiled child of the Club liked to worry Goldsmith, the maladroit great
man who might have quoted often on such occasions the sad gibe of
Hamlet:
“I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance
Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night,
Stick fiery off indeed.”
What a pity that Goldsmith’s _Retaliation_ was never finished, so as
to include his portrait of Beau! He was “a pestilent wit,” as Anthony
à Wood calls Marvell. Johnson, shy creature! deplored Beauclerk’s
“predominance over his company.” The tyranny, however, was gracefully
and decorously exercised, if we are to believe the unique eulogy that
“no man was ever freer, when he was about to say a good thing, from a
look which expressed that it was coming; nor, when he had said it, from
a look which expressed that it had come.” Few human beings have had
a finer sense of fun than Topham Beauclerk. He had an infallible eye
for the values of blunders, and an incongruity came home to him like
a blessing from above. Life with him was a night-watch for diverting
objects and ideas. When he was not studying, he was disporting himself,
like the wits of the Restoration; and he was equal to all emergencies,
as they succeeded one another. Every specimen preserved of his talk
is perfect of its kind, and makes us long for a full index. Pointed
his speech was, always, and reminds one indeed of a foil, but without
the button; a dangerous little weapon, somewhat unfair, but carried
with such consummate flourish that those whom it pricks could almost
cheer it. “O Lord! how I did hate that horrid Beauclerk!” Mrs. Piozzi
scribbled once on the margin of Wraxall’s _Memoirs_, in an exquisite
feminine vindication of poor Beau’s accomplished tongue.
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]
In the winter of 1785, Langton came from the country, and took lodgings
in Fleet Street, in order to sit beside Johnson as he lay dying, and
hold his hand. Nor was he alone in his pious offices: the Hooles, Mr.
Sestre, and several others were there, to keep constant vigil. Miss
Burney met Langton in the passage December 11th, two days before the
end: “He could not,” she wrote in her journal, “look at me, nor I at
him.” But through the foggy and restless nights when Johnson tried
to cheer himself, like More and Master William Lilly, by translating
into Latin some epigrams from the _Anthologia_, the true Grecian
beside him must have been his chief comfort. One can picture the old
eyes turning to him for sympathy, perhaps with that same murmured
“Lanky!” on awaking, which Boswell laughed to hear from him one merry
Hebridean morning, twelve years before. The last summons did not come
in Langton’s presence. Hurrying over to Bolt Court at eight of the
fatal evening, he was told that all was over three-quarters of an hour
ago. That large soul had gone away, as Leigh Hunt so beautifully said
of Coleridge, “to an infinitude hardly wider than his thoughts.” Then
Langton, who was wont to shape his words with grace and ease, went
up-stairs, and tried to pen a letter to Boswell, which is more touching
than tears: “I am now sitting in the room where his venerable remains
exhibit a spectacle, the interesting solemnity of which, difficult as
it would be in any sort to find terms to express, so to you, my dear
sir, whose sensations will paint it so strongly, it would be of all men
the most superfluous to”—and there, hopelessly choked and confused, it
broke off.
Langton bore Johnson’s pall; and he succeeded him as Professor of
Ancient Literature in the Royal Academy, as Gibbon had replaced
Goldsmith in the chair of Ancient History. He survived many years,
the delight of his company to the last. He, like others, was given
in his later years to detailing anecdotes of his great friend, with
an approximation to that friend’s manner. One lady critic, at least,
thought that these explosive imitations did not become “his own serious
and respectable character.” On December 18, 1801, in Anspach Place,
Southampton, a venerable nook “between the walls and the sea,” when
Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge were yet in their unheralded prime,
when Charles Lamb was twenty-six, Byron a dreaming boy on the Cotswold
hills, and Keats and Shelley little fair-eyed children, gentle Bennet
Langton, known to none of these, and somewhat forgotten as a loiterer
from the march of a glorious yesterday, slipped out of life. “I am
persuaded,” wrote one who knew him well, “that all his inactivity, all
the repugnance he showed to putting on the harness of this world’s
toil, arose from the spirituality of his frame of mind . . . I believe
his mind was in Heaven, wheresoever he corporeally existed.” He was
laid under the chancel of ancient St. Michael’s at Southampton, with
Johnson’s fond benison, “Be my soul with Langton’s!” inscribed on the
marble tablet above him.[57] The Rev. John Wooll of Midhurst, Joseph
Warton’s editor, was one of the few present at the funeral ceremony,
and he leaves us to infer that it had a rather neglectful privacy,
not, indeed, out of keeping with the “godly, righteous, and sober
life” it closed. Langton’s will, drawn up in the June of 1800, and
preserved in Somerset House, devised to the sole executrix, his “dear
wife,” who outlived him by nearly twenty years, his real and personal
estate, his books, his wines, his prints, his horses, and, as a gift
particularly pretty, his right of navigation in the river Wey. George
Langton was separately provided for, but there were some £8000 for the
eight younger children. The document is crowded with technical details,
and very long; and the manifest inference, on the whole, is that the
dear squire’s affairs were in a prodigious tangle. There is no wish
expressed concerning his burial, and, what is more curious, there
are no Christian formulas for the committal of the _animula vagula
blandula_: a lack perhaps not to be wondered at in Beauclerk’s concise
testament, but somewhat notable in the case of a person who certainly
had a soul.
So went Beauclerk first of the three, Langton last, with the good ghost
still between them, as he in his homespun, they in their flowered
velvet, had walked many a year together on this earth. The old
companionship had undergone some sorry changes ere it fell utterly to
dust and ashes. Its happy prime had been in the Oxford “Longs,” when
the Doctor humored his lads, and tented under their roofs, plucking
flowers at one house, and romping with dogs at the other; or in 1764,
at the starting of the immortal Club, when the two of its founders, who
had no valid or pretended claim to celebrity, perched on the sills like
useful genii, with a mission to overrule sluggish melancholy, and renew
the sparkle in abstracted eyes. How supereminently they did what they
chose to do, and what vagaries they roused out of Johnson’s profound
hypochondria! Did not Topham Beauclerk’s mother once have to reprove
that august author for a suggestion to seize some pleasure-grounds
which they were passing in a carriage? “Putting such things into young
people’s heads!” said she. Where could the innocent Beauclerk’s elbow
have been at that moment, contrary to the canons of polite society,
but in the innocent Langton’s ribs? The gray reprobate, so censured,
explained to Boswell: “Lady Beauclerk has no notion of a joke, sir! She
came late into life, and has a mighty unpliable understanding.” Who
can forget the Doctor’s visit to Beauclerk at Windsor, when, falling
into the clutches of that gamesome and ungodly youth, he was beguiled
from church-going of a fine Sunday morning, and strolled about outside,
talking and laughing during sermon-time, and finally spread himself at
length on a mossy tomb, only to be told, with a giggle and a pleased
rub of the hands, that he was as bad as Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice?
Or the other visit in the north, when, after ceremoniously relieving
his pockets of keys, knife, pencil, and purse, Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,
deliberately rolled down a hill, and landed, betumbled out of all
recognition, at the bottom? Langton had tried to dissuade him, for the
incline was very steep, and the candidate scarcely of the requisite
suppleness. “Oh, but I haven’t had a roll for such a long time!”
pleaded his unanswerable big guest.
Best of all, we have the history of that memorable morning when
Beauclerk and Langton, having supped together at a city tavern, roused
Johnson at three o’clock at his Inner Temple Lane Chambers, and brought
him to the door, fearful but aggressive, in his shirt and his little
dark wig, and his slippers down at the heels, armed with a poker.
“What! and is it YOU? Faith, I’ll have a frisk with you, ye young
dogs!” We have visions of the Covent Garden inn, and the great brimming
bowl, with Lord Lansdowne’s drinking-song for grace; the hucksters and
fruiterers staring at the strange central figure, always sure to gather
a mob, even during the moment he would stand by a lady’s coach-door
in Fleet Street; the merry boat going its way by oar to Billingsgate,
its mad crew bantering the watermen on the river; and two of the
roisterers (equally wild, despite a little chronological disparity
of thirty years or so) scolding the other for hastening off, on an
afternoon appointment, “to dine with wretched unidea’d girls!” What
golden vagabondism! “I heard of your frolic t’other night; you’ll be in
_The Chronicle_! . . . I shall have my old friend to bail out of the
round-house!” said Garrick. “As for Garrick, sirs,” tittered the pious
Johnson aside to his accomplices, “he dare not do such a thing. His
wife would not let him!” All this mirth and whim sweetened the Doctor’s
heavy life. He had other intimates, other disciples. But these were Gay
Heart and Gentle Heart, who drove his own blue-devils away with their
idolatrous devotion, and whose bearing towards him stands ever as the
best possible corroboration of his great and warm nature. With him
and for him, they so fill the air of the time that to whomsoever has
but thought of them that hour, London must seem lonely without their
idyllic figures.
—“Our day is gone:
Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.”
There are gods as good for the after-years; but Odin is down, and his
pair of unreturning birds have flown west and east.