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Westminster to assist in bringing in Fox as member, and she has smiled the votes out of the butchers and bakers of that admirable locality, before they were aware of the object of her witchery. She has a banquet at her house in Lower Grosvenor-street, in commemoration of the joyful return, and George, Prince of Wales is one of her guests, and amidst loud acclamations and prodigious gaiety, His Royal Highness rises to propose a toast. He is only twenty-two years of age, and the flush upon his cheek has youth for the cause of it as well as wine, and every one looks upon his fine features rapturously. "True blue!" he gives out that being the colour of his own party and of the successful member and there is a hurrah! "True blue!" he gives out again, with his glass still higher in the air; and then, with the homage of the lowest bow to his near and lovely hostess, "True blue, and Mrs. Crewe!" Before the rattle of the glasses and the sound of the hot hurrahs have died away, the lady rises to her feet, and, with hand upreared, has a pretty imitation. True blue, and all of you!" is her cry, and never did toast receive more honours, or wax-lights tremble with a more hilarious cry.

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A large grey-eyebrowed man demands now a greeting. He wears a wide wig, a long big-buttoned coat, knee-breeches, ruffles, and buckled shoes. He walked out with Boswell to show Johnson some of the beauties of Edinburgh, on the third day of the southerner's arrival there, and he is a Scotch minister, and a sound historian, and his name is William Robertson, D. D. "Robertson was in a mighty romantic humour!" Johnson complained of him, when he had met him at Allan Ramsay's; "but," he exulted, "I downed him!" "Oh, oh!" he had cried, before ever being introduced," Robertson and I shall do very well together, I warrant." And so they did, spite of the downing; and here they are promenading in Auld Reekie, and pointing with the famous thick oak-stick, as they stand under the shadow of coroneted old St. Giles. Do you ever see Robertson?" Johnson asked of Boswell, after this. "Does the dog talk of me? Sir, I love Robertson, and I won't talk of his book!" because he did not think so well of it as he would wish, and he did not like to blame. There is a sharp volley of musket-shot silencing the buzz of pleasant chatter, and we see a fine man fall. He bleeds; the gold-lace and frills that deck him are staining staining with a trickle of his hot blood; and he is dead; and his own comrades were ordered to kill him, by the coun

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try he has served. He is John Byng, admiral; and he was told to drive the French from the island of Minorca, and he failed to do it; and failure is a crime when King and Lords and Commons are on tiptoe for successes, and it has been decreed that he is to die. Voltaire (from the France that is not beaten- and with a shrug that hides his pity), sneers when he hears of the execution. C'est pour encourager les autres!" he says." And, as things are going, les autres need it! This poor dead autre is of a family of fifteen, eleven of whom are sons; and there must be many wet eyes and wrung hearts now his bronzed face lies pale and lifeless, and it is hidden by the earth of a dishonoured grave. • England expects every man to do his duty!" is rung out by a clear voice courageously; but this John Byng was unable to do what was expected of him, and so is useless, and is swept away, and we turn to another admiral who can do as he is desired, and from whom the brave words come.

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We see a spare form now; a weary, anxious look; a small-topped head; a mouth that struts up tightly, and forms with itself and chin the smallest part by far of a long thin face that, to be symmetrical, should be divided nearly into three. This man has no right arm, and his breast is covered with gold and jewelled stars. There is no need to call out his name, and announce him as Horatio Nelson. Every one here, and elsewhere, knows him; and every one knows, also, who it is that is so closely at his side. Emma Hart, Lady Hamilton-nursemaid, artists' model, beauty, ambassador's wife-spite of the black wrong it is to many, is near him now, as he and she longed for her to be for ever, and we see the neck she hung on, and the furrowed cheek she has so often kissed. She is so lovely, it is impossible to wonder that Nelson chose her. She is simply and irresistibly delicious. Her face laughs out beauty and love and joy altogether; her bright hair lies about it in soft loose waves; she has sweet child-like features; ripe lips, a thorough challenge for kissing; clear-arched brows, long eye-lashes, and cheeks the very tint of a sun-touched peach. She is posée now, it is true; that may make her look more winning. She has assumed one of those attitudes in which she exhibits herself for the entertainment of company (as some ladies sing a song, or gentlemen are prevailed upon to make a speech); and the Countesses Vere de Vere look coldly on her, and whisper to one another that as it was her métier to do this once, when she was the mignonne of George Rom

hides her bosom; she has a gift of jewels
on her; and her hands are warm and limber
in the nest of a wide fur muff; but the
threat of Polixenes-enchantment, as his
eye-sight forced him to call her —
I'll have thy beauty scratch'd with briers, and
More homely than thy state,

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ney's studio, it is no wonder she is so skilful still. But she is not hindered by the taunt. Wisely enough, she knows there is no harm in having lent her beauty to be painted; possibly - and with what deep and poisonous remorse! she thinks that if that were the only stain upon her, she could laugh in all these aristocratic faces, loudly and triumphantly indeed! But no reflex of this casts a blemish (or a glory!) is to be fulfilled, and death is at hand for on her loveliness. She is a Bacchante; her, as cruel as she is tender," without wanton, sportive, brilliant, and caressing as any need of his devising. Not far from her a witch; and now she is a Magdalene, and are Peg Woffington and Kitty Clive, and all her smiles are gone, and her melting there is a solidity in their Bohemianism that eyes are raised to heaven, and her lips makes the spirits rise again, after contact quiver and are parted with a prayer. She with the perils of a glittering and renowned is to die some day at white-cliffed Calais, court. "Clive, sir," declares Johnson, neglected and wretchedly poor; has she a "is a good thing to sit by! She always thought of this, now she has poems written understands what you say! And Kitty in her honour, and she has this grave sailor laughs out to her neighbour "I love to sit sitting at her side? She might feel the by Dr. Johnson; he always entertains shadow overhanging her; but if she does, me!" Mrs. Woffington comes from makshe braves the death for the taste of this ing tea for Dr. Johnson at Garrick's lodgglad mirth and glitter; and she loves her ings, and though Johnson and she are mained and helpless sailor; and he loves guests, and before company a host should her; and his love strengthens for her deft hold his tongue, David has launched out a helping; and—the end is what was threat-grumble at her for making the tea too ened from the beginning. strong. "Peg!" he complained, "it is as red as blood!" But then the trio are poor together now, and Peg's extravagance may not be passed by! Besides, Garrick's supervision of his house-expenses shows he has a thought to the payment of them, and that sounds wholesome. It is not good, after this, to think of Peggy being struck with paralysis on the stage as she is acting, and dying of the disease after a long three years; but that is how the dart is hurled at her, and there is no turning the aim away.

Perdita! Ah! Perdita, truly! · A loss, indeed! As good an epitaph to cut deeply over her as Traviata one who has lost her way! And here comes she to whom the name was given; Mary Darby once, when she was scholar and protégée of Hannah More; Mary Robinson after, when she was actress, novelist, verse-writer, wife; Perdita for now and ever, since she has acted the " queen of curds and cream," the "poor lowly maid most goddess-like prank'd up," Florizel's dearest and sweet Perdita, "the prettiest low-born lass that ever ran on the green sward," and since George, Prince of Wales, has seen her, and the Winter's Tale thaws into one that has been for all time, and she is "even here undone," and can 66 queen it no inch further," but will milk her ewes and weep." She is, indeed, dainty and sweet-favoured. She has soft black eyes-no fire in them, but tender, sleepy, with long black lashes sweeping upon her cheeks, giving them deeper languor; she has clear-traced brows, as even and exact as if they had been marked out by a pencil; and she has a modest appealing look, that might spring to the memory of those who have cursed her with their caresses, and lead them to have pity for her when these supple limbs of hers are stiff and useless from rheumatics, and she is left, maimed and tortured so, to die. Poor beauty! Her glossy hair is turned back over a high cushion now; fine lace

Who is it arriving now? Lady Bolingbroke puts her face behind her fan and whispers, he is "un politique aux choux et aux raves," and people titter; but Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi has the best tale to tell of him. She points to his light-blue, loose head-dress, and his environment of lightblue folds; she bids every one notice his hairless face, his delicate mournful features, his sharp clear eyes. His "Rape of the Lock," is in her hand, and she tells how Arabella Fermor, " Belinda," is made quite troublesome and conceited by his having written it, and his own caprices are so numerous they would employ as many as ten servants to satisfy them! She has just_returned from a visit to Mademoiselle Fermor, Arabella's niece, the prioress of the Austin nuns at La Fossée, so she knows all about it! Her report is, that this wee, infirm, irritable, lady-spoiling man sits dozing all day in idleness, and makes his verses at night! - keeping himself awake by drink

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ing coffee, which one of the maids goes sleepless to prepare for him, they taking it each in turn! Oh! Mr. Pope! How can you carry on such an inconsiderate manufactory! How can you be such an exacting Alexander! Why don't you think of the yawns, and crawls," and shudders, in the kitchen, and go early to bed and be early to rise, like a respectable, steady, verse-making little gentleman? You yourself ask, What can ennoble knaves, or fools, or cowards? Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards! and

What can pay maids for Slumber's cheated hopes?

Alas! not piles of poems by piles of Popes! So Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi thinks, at any rate; or else she would not be so vehement!.

A double duchess sails in now. Two dukes Hamilton and Argyll — besides all the world, are enamoured of her, and she wears one coronet after the other with all the serenity of her native Irish grace. She is charmingly impartial. She gives two little dukes to each ducal husband; in each case the younger boy succeeding to the title after the heir has reigned, and had no son, and died; and the face that has been her fortune has the oval regularity of a pure Madonna's, and is so lovely it is not surprising that all the world was mad after her when she was in her first bloom, and her name was Elizabeth Gunning. But there is something amounting almost to a bar sinister upon her. Stoop, and it shall be whispered out of the hearing of the mass of the company. She snubbed, Boswell! It occurred anno domini 1773, on two red-letter days following. Johnson and his Boswell were returning from a certain tour to the Hebrides that they took in company, and night had brought them to an inn close under the walls of the Duke of Argyll's castle. Johnson was in an ecstasy. He called for a gill of whisky, that he might taste "what made Scotchmen happy," and after he had drank it, Boswell begged leave to drain the drop clinging to the glass into his own, that he might be able to boast how he and the great man had drank fermented liquor together! Fired with the inspiration of which fact, he proposed next day that he should go to the duke their neighbour, and make known that they were there. "After dinner, mind you!" bargained Johnson; "before will look like seeking an invitation." And after dinner, just when he had calculated the ladies would have left the table, Boswell started. Now, James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck, was perfectly well

aware that he was in bad odour with the Duchess of Argyll; he was going to intrude himself into her home, although he knew his company was disagreeable to her, and he was paid out for his bad manners. He found the duke over his wine, as he expected, and when his grace conducted him to the drawing-room to tea, and announced him by his name, the duchess, sitting amidst a bevy of grand ladies, rose not, and gave no bend, or bow, or salutation! She took no notice of him. She never raised her eyes. Did Boswell resent this insult (bad breeding as it was), and decline the invitation to accompany his great curiosity to

dinner next afternoon? Not he. He would have been mortified, he wrote; only-he was consoled by the obliging attention of the duke! Of course. A duke (an amiable duke, so great a chieftain, so exalted a nobleman, as he dubbed him), would have consoled him for worse than this, and did, when next day there came off the second visit to the castle, and Johnson, welcomed ducally, was made much of by his hostess, and was seated at his host's side. Boswell was in fine spirits (this is his boast). He was not in the least disconcerted. It was quite right, he felt, to be unconcerned if he could (!). And he was determined her grace should speak to him, if he could make her. To effect this he offered her some of the dish that was before him, and though he knew it was not en règle to drink to anybody, yet, that he might have the satisfaction for once to look her in the face with a glass in his hand, he drank to her good health fulsomely, and when she passed it by in silence still, repeated his words loudly, and looked her steadily in the face.

"Mr. Boswell, madam," Dr. Johnson explained something to her, "has, you know, to attend the court of session."

And then her ire at last exploded. "Mr. Boswell!" she cried. "I know nothing of Mr. Boswell!"

And Bozzy was by, and bore it, and wrote it in a book, and published it, that those who knew him then might read it (her grace among the number), and that it might, untainted, be handed down! He he he! But three cheers for Elizabeth Gunning! And if she could be a widow a second time, and be thrice duchessed, she would be worthy of the honour.

"Lanky," sounds not inharmoniously in such company, and directly the name is called the owner of it comes. The earth does not bear a worthier name than Bennet Langton," Johnson declared feelingly. “I know not who will go to heaven if Langton does not." And he shortened his patronym

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ic into Lanky because it described his un- | a judge, and created Lord Woodhouselee. usual stature, and because he was wishful"Reverend defender of beauteous Stuart," to give him an earnest of his deep-set re- Burns says (with a strong Scotch brogue), gard. Langton knew Johnson thirty years. when he writes a poem on the first of them; It was he who went with Topham Beauclerk and Johnson reviews the book that calls this to knock him up out of his sleep, when he forth in a 1760 number of the Gentleman's popped his head out of the window, and Magazine. It is a "Vindication of Mary cried. 66 What is it you, you dogs? I'll Queen of Scots," and it is acute and able, have a frisk with you." And it was he who Johnson says, and he is glad, when he is at was with Johnson when he was dying, and Edinburgh, to accept an invitation to the when he took his hand and whispered ten- author's house to supper. Mr. Tytler has derly, Te teneam moriens deficiente no cause to complain of an uninteresting manu." He looks such a lovable man — evening. James Boswell, Esq. entertains shaven, of course pale, brown-eyed, mild; the company and him uproariously. He rebut as dignified as a fine mind, and gener- lates how he once went with Dr. Blair to osity, and large possessions can make him, the pit of Drury Lane, and how, as a deliand as true and reliable as if he were formed cate entr'acte, he obliged the audience by of thrice-tempered steel. His wife, the imitating the lowing of a cow! "Encore! Countess of Rothes, is beside him. She is encore!" was the lusty cry from the gallethe graceful and gracious lady whose mother ries; "and in the pride of my heart," says had two husbands, one a plain Mr. and the Boswell, I attempted imitations of other other an earl, and who herself has had two animals; but he records, this evening, husbands, the one a plain Mr. and the other that he failed, and that his reverend friend of an earl, too (some things are hereditary, the sermons said gravely to him, "My dear we know, and pray, why not this?) "Lady sir, I would confine myself to the cow!" Rothes," Johnson writes of her, playfully, And now, when the room is in convulsions to Bennet Langton, "has, I find, disap- at the wise narrator, Johnson pulls him up pointed herself and you. Ladies will have about some fresh absurdity he is committing, these tricks. The queen and Mrs. Thrale, and orders him if he can't talk to bellow! both ladies of experience, yet both missed and it is a long time before there is an end their reckoning this summer. I hope a few to the brisk Ha! ha! ha! months will recompense your uneasiness." So many children, indeed, are born in time

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O that those lips had language!

The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears
away!"

to Lanky, that, as one part of provision for is uttered in a low voice close at hand. his household, he rides off one day to Not-Those lips are thine-thy own sweet smile I see, tingham fair, and buys fifteen tons of cheese! Johnson opens his eyes, and sets to work calculating instantly. At an ounce a-piece, he says, such a quantity will suffice after dinner for four hundred and eighty thousand men! Nothing is too trivial to And there is a sigh, and a melancholy pacing interest the big heart of Johnson in the of slow feet, and Cowper comes with the affairs of his good friend Langton. It is very miniature in his hand that points his Jane, one of the little folks who are to nib-present and past life to him, and that forces ble relishingly into this column of cheese, him to the emission of his sad words. It is who is Johnson's god-daughter. Johnson a charming face on which he gazes. It is calls her his own little Jenny, and a pretty, airy, and lively miss; and he writes to her in a large round hand, that she may have the satisfaction of reading his letter herself, and tells her above all things through life to read her Bible and carefully say her prayers. It is a pity that Bennet has not brought this epistolary pleasantry with him, that we may look over his high shoulder and give it an

fair, and young, and round, and smooth, with its own hair brushed simply back from it, and hanging in a long curl or two bebind. The shoulders under this face of Anne Donne are bare; there is a jewel upon her bosom; her dress is blue, with faint yellow trimming round it, and an edge to this of lace, whose device is as clearly painted as if it had been for a pattern, and as if taper fingers, like those that lay Here are father, son, and grandson being amongst it, were to be occupied with its ushered in now. It is not usual to see imitation. And is Cowper himself like his three generations at one assembly, and they mother? Do his cheeks, on which her make quite a stir. They are a trio of Tyt-"own hand bestowed fragrant waters till lers; William, Alexander, and Patrick; fresh they shone and glow'd," bear any reScotch lawyers all, and the middle of them semblance to those we see of hers? No;

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not a particle; not any. His skin is red his wife so madly, and insists that animals and withered-almost purple; it is stretched are rational, and with fine poetic justice tight upon a long thin face, and is merci- gets kicked to death eventually by the lessly shaved. His head is bound round hoofs of a favourite foal. A fifth is George with a hard linen cloth, or turban-cap; his Dempster, M. P., whose sister laughingly eyes are strained and wistful, as if tears undertook to teach Johnson knotting, and had been falling from them, and there were who heard the doctor discourse so honeyno hope they should be filled with ecstasy edly, while his huge fingers made tangles in their place. And yet he is gayer, glad- of his pins and cotton, he cried out in a rapder, than he is at times. He says to Rom-ture: "One had better be palsied at eighteen ney the painter (through whose medium we see him, and whose strokes ought Time never to efface," and "who paints the mind's impressions upon every face"):

But this I mark; that symptoms none of woe
In thy incomparable work appear;
Well I am satisfied it should be so,

Since, on maturer thought, the cause is clear;
For in my looks what sorrow couldst thou see,
When I was Hayley's guest, and sat to thee?"
Poor Cowper! Since Eartham comforted

him, we wish he had visited it a little oftener. Then yet more of his lamentations might have been smoothed away; and we

should have further confessions like

Vociferated logic kills me quite,
A noisy man is always in the right;
I twirl my thumbs, fall back into my chair,
Fix on the wainscot a distressful stare;
and that would have been pleasant.

than not keep such a great man's company!"
And then there follow the Swiss George
Michael Moser and his daughter, both Royal
Academicians, and he first elected keeper,
and the kind-hearted man who admits
Samuel Patterson, Johnson's godson, among
the students, when the great man writes
and earnestly beseeches him. And James
Quin, in a fine gold-laced coat, refusing
Gay to act Macheath in his "Beggar's
Opera," because he has such a low opinion
of the part.
And the Irish actor Moody,
who is being persuaded by Topham Beau-
The two have been dining at Tom Davies's,
clerk that he has been insulted mortally.
and the host has laid his hand encouragingly
on Moody's back. "I can conceive noth-
ing more humiliating," cries Beauclerk,

"It

round the world with Captain Cook: the
which trip Johnson had been half inclined
to undertake with them, and had only given
up because of his short-sighted eyes.
was not worth while, he said, "to go to see
fish swim which I should not have seen swim,
nor to go and see fish fly which I should not
have seen fly." Nor was it. But he petted

than to be clapped on the back by Tom Davies!" for he sees the Irishman is wincing under the recollection of it, and possibly Handsome Hayley, "For ever feeble, and he likes a spice of fun. And bringing up for ever tame," as Byron hisses out in that the rear are Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Sowonderful " English Bards and Scotch Re-lander, just landed from a second voyage viewers," bustles in not far after his friend. ("O! for permission from the skies to share with thee a partnership in literary ware!" writes Cowper, and seriously!) And near him sidles Anna Seward, in a white dress and indescribable hair, who also believes in Hayley (and herself) so thoroughly; and round them is a cluster of familiar folk" who have answered Adsum'a when their name is called," and to whom it is pleasant to hold out a hand. One of them is Joseph Priestly, about whom Johnson asks, in a stern manner, and with knitted brows, "Why do we hear so much of Dr. Priestley?" Another is " Pope in worsted stockings"-i. e., of course, Crabbewith his beautiful, calm, expansive face. A third is Daines Barrington, in his lawyer's crimson gown and bands, the immortal (and exceedingly handsome) he who proposed Boswell for the Literary Club, since Johnson, as is never likely to be forgotten (by Boswell!), invents a new word for his description, and calls him clubable. A fourth is Sandford and Merton Thomas Day, who has taken two foundling girls (new-named Lucretia and Sabrina) to model into his own notion of mind and manners, and who uses

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goat that was fortunate enough to survive the double circumnavigation, and wrote a Latin motto for it; and he was so interested in the strange animal, the kangaroo, the voyagers had lighted on, that he imitated its hop and jump to some friends in Scotland, and set them all off into a roar. He would not allow, though, that Dr. Solander was a Laplander. Sir, I don't believe it!" he declared. Laplanders are not much above four feet high, and he is as tall as you! Besides, he has not the copper colour!" And so, of course, Solander must be of any nation Johnson likes to settle it, and something else calls out a burst of laughter (taking care, however, that Johnson does not hear it), besides the imitations of the gambols of a great human kangaroo.

It is hard to tell who is the guest next

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