they parted on the beach enjoined him to keep a journal, and promised himself to write to him. Who is this 'Scotch cur at Johnson's heels?' asked some one, amazed at the sudden intimacy. He is not a cur,' answered Goldsmith. 'You are too severe. He is only a bur. 'Tom Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he has the faculty of sticking.'

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Boswell has retorted this respectful contempt; and in him it is excessively ludicrous. It has been generally ' circulated and believed,' he says, 'that the Doctor was a mere fool in conversation; but in truth this has been 'greatly exaggerated.' Goldsmith had supped with them at the Mitre on the 1st of July, and flung a paradox at both their heads. He maintained that knowledge was not desirable on its own account, for it often was a source of unhappiness. He supped with them again at the Mitre five days later, as Boswell's guest; and again was paradoxical. He disputed very warmly with Johnson, it seems, against the sacred maxim of the British Constitution, that the king can do no wrong: affirming his belief that what was morally false could not be politically true; and as the king might, in the exercise of his regal power, command and cause the doing of what was wrong, it certainly might be said, in sense and in reason, that he could do wrong: which appeared to Boswell sensible or reasonable proof of nothing but the speaker's vanity, and eager desire to be conspicuous wherever he was. As usual, he endeavoured, 'with too much eagerness, to shine.' It is added, indeed,

that his respectful attachment to Johnson was now at its height; but no better reason is given for it, than that his own literary reputation had not yet distinguished him so much as to excite a vain desire of competition with his great master.' In short it is impossible not to perceive that Boswell is impatient of Goldsmith from the first hour of their acquaintance. He finds his person short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, and his deportment that of a scholar awkwardly affecting the easy gentleman. How such a man could be thought by Johnson one of the first men of letters of the day,

was hard to be understood; harder yet to be borne, that such a man should be a privileged man. 'Doctor 'Goldsmith being a privi'leged man, went with 'him this night' (the first supper at the Mitre) strutting away, and call'ing to me with an air of

superiority, like that of an esoteric over an exoteric dis'ciple of a sage of antiquity, I go to Miss Williams.'

To be allowed to go to Miss Williams was decisive of Johnson's favour. She was one of his pensioners, blind and old; was now living in a lodging in Bolt Court, provided by him till he had a room in a house to offer her, as in former days; was familiar with his earlier life

and its privations, was always making and drinking tea, knew intimately all his ways, and talked well; and he never went home at night, however late, supperless or after supper, without calling to have tea with Miss Williams. Why do you keep that old blind woman in your house?' asked Beauclerc. 'Why, sir,' answered Johnson,' she was a friend to my poor wife, and was in the house with her 'when she died. She has remained in it ever since, sir.'

Beauclerc's friendships with women were not of the kind to help his appreciation of such gallantry as this; though he seems to have known none, in even the circles of fashion, so distinguished, that he did not take a pride in showing them his rusty-coated philosopher-friend. The then reader of the Temple, Mr. Maxwell, has described the levees at Inner Temple Lane. He seldom called at twelve o'clock in the day, he says, without finding Johnson in bed, or declaiming over his tea to a party of morning visitors, chiefly men of letters, among whom Goldsmith, Murphy, Hawkesworth (an old friend and fellow-worker under Cave), and Langton, are named as least often absent. Sometimes learned ladies were there, too; and particularly did he remember a French lady of wit and fashion doing him the honour of a visit. It was in the summer of this year; and the lady was no other than the famous Countess de Boufflers, acknowledged leader of French society, mistress of the Prince of Conti, aspiring to be his wife, and of course, in the then universal fashion of the sçavantes, philosophes, and beaux esprits of Paris,

an Anglomane. She had even written a tragedy in English prose, on a subject from the Spectator; and was now on a round of visitings, reading her tragedy, breakfasting with Walpole, dining with the Duke of Grafton, supping at Beauclerc's, out of patience with every body's ridiculous abuse of every body that meddled in politics, and out of breath with her own social exertions. Dans ce pays-ci,' she exclaimed, 'c'est un effort perpétuel pour se divertir;' and, exhausted with it herself, did not seem to think that any one else succeeded any better. It was a few days after Horace Walpole's great breakfast at Strawberry, where he describes her with her eyes a foot deep in her head, her hands dangling and scarce able to support her knitting-bag, that Beauclerc took her to see Johnson. They sat and talked with him some time; and were retracing their way up Inner Temple Lane to the carriage, when all at once they heard a voice like thunder, and became conscious of Johnson hurrying after them. On nothing priding himself more than his politeness, he had taken it into his head, on a little reflection, that he ought to have done the honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality; and, eager to show himself a man of gallantry, was now hurrying down the staircase in violent agitation. He overtook them before they reached the Temple Gate, and brushing in between Beauclerc and the Countess, seized her hand and conducted her to her coach. His dress was a rusty brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes by way of slippers, a little shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his

shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. 'A 'considerable crowd of people gathered round,' says Beauclerc, and were not a little struck by this singular ap'pearance.' The hero of the incident would be the last person to be moved by it. The more the state of his toilet dawned upon him, the less likely would he be to notice it. There was no more remarkable trait in Johnson, and certainly none in which he more contrasted with the subject of this narrative, than that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make the least apology for them, or to seem even sensible of their existence.

It was not many months after this that he went to see Goldsmith in a new lodging he had taken on the then library stair-case of the Temple. They were a humble set of chambers enough; one Jeffs, the butler of the society, sharing them with him; and on Johnson's prying and peering about after his short-sighted fashion, flattening his face against every object he looked at, Goldsmith's uneasy sense of their deficiencies broke out. 'I shall soon 'be in better chambers, sir, than these,' he said. 'Nay, 'sir,' answered Johnson, 'never mind that. Nil te quæsiveris extra. Invaluable advice! could Goldsmith, blotting out remembrance of his childhood and youth, and looking solely and steadily on the present and the future, but have dared to act upon it.

The removal to this lodging from that of Newbery's relative in Wine-Office Court took place in an early month of 1764, and seems to connect itself with circumstances at