and arrayed as to his person in a rusty brown suit, an ancient black wig, unbuttoned shirt-sleeves, and a pair of old shoes worn slipperwise. But when he began to talk, everything was 66 as correct as a second edition"; and his visitor found it impossible to argue with him, he was so sententious and so knowing." 66 From Inner Temple Lane, Johnson migrated to No. 7, Johnson's Court, where, in 1775, he received a second honorary degree, that of D.C.L., Oxford. Johnson's Court (the name of which is a mere coincidence) lies on the north side of Fleet Street to the north and west of the present Anderton's Hotel. While here, he published his Journey to the Western Islands, and his long-promised Shakespeare. "He for Subscribers baits his hook, And takes their cash-but where's the Book?" sang the inexorable Churchill, in reprobation of the great man's tardiness. At Johnson's Court, the Doctor was already surrounded by his little colony of pensioners. Levett, "Officious, innocent, sincere, Of every friendless name the friend," occupied the garret ; and blind Miss Williams the ground floor. On Easter-day, 1773, Boswell, to his delight, dined with his Mentor chez lui, on "a boiled leg of lamb and spinach, a veal pye, and a rice pudding"-a repast far superior to the Lacedemonian "black broth" which Foote, in allusion to Johnson's coloured servant, Francis Barber, had led him to anticipate. On the contrary, everything was excellent of its kind, and served in good order. Johnson's earliest letter from Johnson's Court is dated 17th October, 1765; and he left it in March 1776 for 8, Bolt Court, between Gough Square and Fleet Street. No. 8 stood upon the site of what, until very recently, was the Stationers' Company's school; and this again had been the printing office which Bensley, the printer, had erected to take the place of Johnson's former dwelling when, in 1819, it was burned down. the Doctor's time the Bolt Courthouse had a garden at the back, in which (credite posteri!), only a few weeks before his death, he gathered three bunches of grapes; and at its door were two stone seats, from In one of which, in 1783, being returned from church "in a placid frame of mind,” he discoursed to Boswell of many things from burnt bones and dried orange peel to orchards and hot-houses. This garden afterwards became the playground of the Stationers' Company's School. No. 8 Bolt Court was Johnson's last home; and on Monday, the 13th December, 1784, he died peacefully in the back room of its first floor. Not long afterwards, Isaac Disraeli, then a youth of seventeen, knocked at the door to make enquiry about a manuscript he had forwarded to Johnson, of which he had heard nothing. His summons was answered by Francis Barber, who told him that the Doctor had been dead some hours. As might be supposed, Johnson was a devout, if intermittent, church-goer. "He was not constant in his attendance on divine worship," says Hawkins; "but, from an opinion peculiar to himself, which he once intimated to me, seemed to wait for some secret impulse as a motive to it." "Whenever I miss church on a Sunday," he told Boswell at seventy, "I resolve to go another day. But I do not always do it." He was, however, a rigid Sabbatarian, carefully regulating his Sunday reading; and Boswell noticed "that he would not even look at a proof-sheet of his Life of Waller on Good Friday." Living as he did for so many years in mid-Fleet Street, he had several famous churches in his neighbourhood. He was close to St. Dunstan's and the Temple, while St. Bride's was at one end of Fleet Street and St. Clement Danes at the other. Bolt Court, Johnson's Court, and Gough Square were in the parish of St. Dunstan, which was consequently his parish church; but Boswell makes no reference to his attendance, either there or at St. Bride's. There is mention of his going to St. Paul's; and, on one occasion, to the Temple Church, where he heard Gregory Sharpe praying fervently for the blessing of Liberty, which drew from him the remark that prayer against licentiousness would be more to the point. But his favourite place of worship was St. Clement Danes, where he was well known. Here he had his seat in pew No. 18, North Gallery, next the pulpit, at that date occupied by Mr. Burrows. On 9th April 1773, he took Boswell with him. "His behaviour was, as I had imaged to myself, solemnly devout. I never shall forget the tremulous earnestness with which he pronounced the awful petition in the Litany: In the hour of death, and in the day of judgment, Good Lord, deliver us ! It was in St. Clement Danes, eleven years later, that, “after a confinement of 129 days," he returned thanks to God for his recovery from sickness.1 As may be gathered from his melancholy habit, Johnson was not averse from diversions in general. They filled the intervals between thought and vacuity, he said; and of public amusements he affirmed, more questionably, that they kept people from vice. It was, moreover, his opinion that, as no man was a hypocrite in his pleasures, his choice of them really revealed his character. The revelation vouchsafed in his own case is not, however, abundantly manifested by his biographer. From his recommending the St. George's Spa Water to Mrs. Thrale, it may perhaps be concluded that he was familiar with the old pleasure resort which once occupied the site of Bedlam, and was known as the Dog and Duck; but from the playful proposal which, much to Lady Sydney Beauclerk's disgust, he once made to his friends to take—that is, rent Cuper's, or (more vulgarly) Cupid's, Gardens, now traversed by the Waterloo Bridge Road,-it would be too much to assume he had any experimental acquaintance with that eighteenth-century Cremorne. But he certainly did frequent Mary "Fenlight in Johryony Hay. Gough Square lebone Gardens, for he went with George Steevens to see the fireworks of the famous pyrotechnist, Torré, to whose exhibition he was afterwards unkind enough to liken the poetry of Gray. It was on this occasion that the Doctor figured in the (for him) unusual character of ringleader in a riot. The evening was wet, and the damp squibs and Catharine wheels declined to go off. Johnson, resenting this as parsimony on the part of the management, proposed to threaten to smash the coloured lamps, a suggestion which 1 His pew is now distinguished by a brass plate with an inscription. This was erected in 1851 by some of the parishioners of St. Clement Danes. At the centenary of Johnson's death, December, 1884, there was a memorial service, when the pew was draped in violet, and a cast of the bust by Nollekens placed on the ledge in front. The occasion was also marked by an excellent address from the Rector, Dr. John Lindsay. a was promptly acted on by some young men standing by. Whether it was at this time also that he saw Storace's Serva Padrona piece which reminded him of the discords in his own Bolt Court domesticity is not clear; but at all events Steevens, according to Nichols, was one of his companions. Of Johnson's visits to the oldest of the three great assemblies,— "that excellent place of publick amusement, Vauxhall Gardens," as Boswell calls it, there is no direct record, although he was well known to one of the two sons of the proprietor, the anecdotical Tom Tyers, the "Tom Restless" of the Idler, who afterwards wrote so well of him in Mr. Urban's magazine. But to Ranelagh he went often, regarding it, Dr. Maxwell tells us, as "a place of innocent recreation." "When I first entered Ranelagh," he said, "it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind, such as I never experienced any where else"; and he appears to have been quite ignorant of those of its characteristics which led Richardson to describe it, in Sir Charles Grandison, as a marriage market, and Goldsmith (through Moses Primrose) to compare it to the notorious Fair of Fontarabia. At Ranelagh he must have heard Bonnel Thornton's Burlesque Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, adapted to the Antient British Musick,-to wit, the Jew's Harp, the Marrow-bone and Cleaver, the Salt box and so forth. The Doctor was especially diverted with the following: In Strains more exalted the SALT-Box shall join, And Clattering, and Battering, and Clapping combine: but the entertainment must surely have been more remarkable for humour than harmony. To the Pantheon in Oxford Street he also went occasionally, although he did not consider Wyatt's coup d'œil to be compared with that of the Ranelagh Rotunda. Probably it was duller, since Gibbon talks of its "ennui," and Fanny Burney of its "solemnity." Miss Evelina Anville found that she could not be "as gay and thoughtless" at the Pantheon as at the Chelsea garden. There was a humbler Pantheon in the Spa Fields at Clerkenwell, of which Philip de Loutherbourg made a scene for the second act of Colman's bright little farce of The Spleen. Johnson, who was in town, may have seen this piece, since it was played on the memorable night when Garrick performed Lusignan for the last time in his newly-decorated Drury Lane, and its prologue contained the first public reference to his approaching retirement from the stage. In any case the Doctor must have been a frequent visitor to Drury Lane, where, in 1749, "Declamation had roared, and Passion slept,' in his own ill-fated Irene. In 1750 he wrote a prologue for Comus, when it was produced for the benefit of Milton's grand-daughter, and it is only reasonable to suppose that he was present when that prologue was spoken by Garrick. He also wrote another prologue, which is historical, for the opening of Drury Lane in 1747. This, besides the well-known lines on Shakespeare, "Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, also includes the still-quoted couplet, "The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live." Boswell, however, makes but scanty references to the theatre; and his most interesting records show how, in his capacity as playwright, the great man enlivened his Character" (as Steele would say), and dramatised his customary subfusc costume. On the first night of 66 Irene he sported a very rich laced scarlet waistcoat; and his green room make-up included, in addition, a gold-laced hat. This last, he told Topham Beauclerk, he soon laid aside, "lest it should make him proud." But those who criticise the "Tyrian bloom, satin grain" of poor Goldsmith, will do well to remember that even Goldsmith's distinguished ally had sumptuary outbreaks. To Covent Garden there are rather more references than to Drury Lane, or, to speak precisely, those references are fuller. It was during the tedium of |