and ill-assorted its assemblage of visitors. There had Sterne, Foote, Walpole, and Wilkes, been thrown together at the same dinner-table. There had Hume, with his broad Scotch accent, his unintelligible French, his imbecile fat face, and his corpulent body, been the object of enthusiasm without example, and played the Sultan in pantomimic tableaux to the prettiest women of the time. There had the author of the Heloise and the Contrat Social, half crazed with the passionate admiration which had welcomed his Emile, and flattered out of the rest of his wits by the persecution that followed it, stalked about with all Paris at his heels, in a caftan and Armenian robes, and so enchanted the Scotch philosopher, to whom he seemed a sort of better Socrates, that he had offered him a home in England. There was the young painter student, Barry, writing modest letters on his way to Rome, where William and Edmund Burke had subscribed out of their limited means to send him. There was the young lion-hunting Boswell, more pompous and conceited than ever; as little laden with law from Utrecht, where he has studied since we saw him last, as with heroism from Corsica, where he has visited Pascal Paoli, or with wit from Ferney, where he has been to see Voltaire; pushing his way into every salon, inflicting himself on every celebrity, and ridiculed by all. There, finally, was Horace Walpole, twinged with the gout and smarting from political slight, revenging himself with laughter at every body around him and beyond him: now with aspiring Geoffrin and the philosophers, now with

blind Du Deffand and the wits, ('women who violated all 'the duties of life and gave very pretty suppers'); lumping up in the same contempt, Wilkes and Foote, Boswell and Sterne; proclaiming as impostors in their various ways, alike the jesuits, the methodists, the philosophers, the politicians, the encyclopedists, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the Humes, the Lyttletons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history Mr Pitt; and counting a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and believes the stars but so many farthing candles created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, wiser, more rational, and honester than any of them. Such was the winter society of Paris; let Joseph Warton describe what he saw of Literature in London. 'I dined with Johnson,' he writes to his brother, 'who seemed cold and indifferent, ' and scarce said anything to me. Perhaps he has heard 'what I said of his Shakespeare. Of all solemn cox'combs, Goldsmith is the first; yet sensible; but affects 'to use Johnson's hard words in conversation. We had a

Mr. Dyer, who is a scholar and a gentleman. Garrick 'is entirely off from Johnson, and cannot, he says, forgive 'him his insinuating that he withheld all his old ' editions.'

What Garrick could with greater difficulty forgive (the Preface to Shakespeare is referred to) was the absence of any mention of his acting. He had not withheld his old plays; he had been careful, through others, to let

Johnson understand (too notoriously careless of books, as he was, to be safely trusted with rare editions) that the books were at his service, and that in his absence abroad the keys of his library had, with that view solely, been entrusted to a servant : but this implied an overture from Johnson, who thought it Garrick's duty, on the contrary, to make overtures to him; who knew that the other course involved acknowledgments he was not prepared to make; and who laughed at nothing so much, on Davy's subsequent loan of all his plays to George Steevens, as when he read this year, in the first publication of that acute young Mephistophelean critic, that Mr. Garrick's zeal would 'not permit him to withhold anything that might ever so ' remotely tend to show the perfections of that author who 'only could have enabled him to display his own.' Johnson could not hit off a compliment of such satirical nicety; he must have praised honestly, if at all, and it went against his grain to do it. He let out the reason to Boswell

eight years afterward.

Garrick has been liberally paid,

sir, for anything he has done for Shakespeare. If I should 'praise him, I should much more praise the nation who 'paid him.' With better reason he used to laugh at his managerial preference of the players' text (which it is little to the credit of the stage that the latest of the great actors should have been the first to depart from), and couple it with a doubt if he had ever examined one of the original plays from the first scene to the last. Nor did Garrick take all this quietly. The king had commanded

his reappearance in Benedict at the close of the year; and, though he did not think it safe to resume any part of which Powell was in possession, except Lusignan, Lothario, and Leon, his popularity had again shone forth unabated. It brought back his sense of power; and with it a disposition to use it, even against Johnson. The latter had not hesitated, notwithstanding their doubtful relations, to seek to secure an honest prejudice' in favour of his book, by formally asking the popular actor's 'suffrage' for it on its appearance; yet the suffrage of the popular actor was certainly exerted against it. That Johnson had not a taste for the finest productions of genius, Garrick was soon afterward very busy to explain. With Iago's ingenious mischief, with Hal's gay compliance in Falstaff's vices, such a critic might be at home; but from Lear in the storm, and from Macbeth on the blasted heath, he must be content to be far away. He could, there, but mount the high horse, and bluster about imperial tragedy. The tone was caught by the actor's friends; is perceptible throughout his correspondence; is in the letters of Warburton, and in such as I have quoted of the Wartons; and gradually, to even Johnson's disturbance, passed from society into the press, and became a stock theme with the newspapers. Garrick went too far, however, when he suffered the libeller Kenrick, not many months after his published attack on Johnson, to exhibit upon his theatre a play called Falstaff's Wedding; and to make another attempt, the following season, with a piece called the

Widowed Wife. The first was damned, and till Shakespeare's fat Jack is forgotten, is not likely to be heard of again; the second passed into oblivion more slowly: but Garrick was brought, by both, into personal relations with the writer which he lived to have reason to deplore. Meanwhile, and for some little time to come, what Joseph Warton had written was but too true. Garrick and Johnson were entirely off; and in a certain gloom of spirits and disquietude of health which were just now stealing over the latter, even his interest in the stage appeared to have passed away.

'I think, Mr. Johnson,' said Goldsmith, as they sat talking together one evening in February, 'you don't go 'near the theatres now. You give yourself no more con'cern about a new play, than if you had never had anything 'to do with the stage.' Johnson avoided the question, and his friend shifted the subject. He spoke of the public claim and expectation that the author of Irene should give them 'something in some other way;' on which Johnson began to talk of making verses, and said (very truly) that the great difficulty was to know when you had made good ones. He remarked that he had once written, in one day, a hundred lines of the Vanity of Human Wishes; and turning quickly to Goldsmith, added, Doctor, I am not quite idle; I made one line t'other

day; but I made no more.' 'Let us hear it,' said the other, laughing; 'we'll put a bad one to it.' 'No, 'sir,' replied Johnson, 'I have forgot it.'