Part 5

Baretti was hurrying on when out of the darkness of Panton Street a big man sprang, followed quickly by two others. The first seized him by the right arm with the oath of a bully, the others tried to trip him up, shouting that he had killed a lady. Baretti was a powerful man and decidedly tough. He struck at the fellow who had closed with him, and used his feet against the attack of the others with considerable effect. He managed to free his arm, but before he could draw his sword he was pulled backward and would have fallen upon his head if he had not clutched the coat of the man from whom he had freed himself. There was a pause of a few seconds, filled up by the wild street yell of the women. The most aggressive of the three men leapt upon the unfortunate Baretti, but before their bodies met, gave a guttural shriek, then a groan. He staggered past, his fingers tearing like talons at his ribs; he whirled twice round and, gasping, fell on his knees, motionless only for a few seconds; his hands dropped limply from his side, and he pitched forward on his head into the gutter.

Baretti was standing, awaiting a further attack, with a knife in his hand, when he was seized by some of the crowd. He offered no resistance. He seemed to be so amazed at finding himself alive as to be incapable of taking any further action.

“He has killed the man--stabbed him with a dagger to the very heart!” was the cry that came from those of the crowd who were kneeling beside the wretch in the gutter.

“And a woman--he had slain a woman at the outset. Hold him fast. None of us are safe this night. Have a care for the dagger, friends!”

A sufficiency of advice was given by the excited onlookers to the men who had encircled Baretti--one of them was clinging to him with his arms clasped around his body--until two of the Haymarket watch hurried up, striking right and left with their staves after the wholesome manner of the period, and so making a way for their approach through the crowd.

“'Tis more than a street brawl--a man has been slain--some say a woman also,” a shopkeeper explained to them, having run bareheaded out of his shop; his apprentice had just put up the last of the shutters.

They had Baretti by the collar in a second, cautiously disarming him, holding the weapon up to the nearest lamp. The blade was still wet with blood.

“A swinging matter this,” one of them remarked. “I can swear to the blood. No dagger, but a knife. What man walks the streets at night with a naked knife unless slaughter is his intent?”

“Friends, I was attacked by three bullies, and I defended myself--that is all,” said Baretti. He spoke English perfectly.

“You will need to tell that to Sir John in the morning,” said one of the watchmen. “You are apprehended in the King's name. Where is the poor victim?”

“There must be some of the crowd who saw how I was attacked,” said Baretti. “They will testify that I acted in self-defence. Sirs, hear me make an appeal to you. Out of your sense of justice--you will not see an innocent man apprehended.”

“The knife--who carries a bare knife in the streets unless with intent?” said a man.

“'Twas my fruit-knife. I never go abroad without it. I eat my fruit like a Christian, not like a pig or an Englishman,” was the defence offered by Baretti, who had now quite lost his temper and was speaking with his accustomed bitterness. He usually sought to pass as an Englishman, but he was now being arrested by the minions of the law as it was in England.

“Hear him! A pig of an Englishman. Those were his words! A foreign hound. Frenchie, I'll be bound.”

“A spy--most like a Papist. He has the hanging brow of a born Papist.”

“He'll hang like a dog at Tyburn--he may be sure o' that.”

“'Tis the mercy o' Heaven that the rascal was caught red-handed! Sirs, this may be the beginning of a dreadful massacring plot against the lives of honest and peaceful people.”

The comments of a crowd of the period upon such an incident as the stabbing of an Englishman by a foreigner in the streets of London can easily be imagined.

Even when Baretti was put into a hackney coach and driven off to Bow Street the crowd doubtless remained talking in groups of the menace to English freedom and true religion by the arrival of pestilent foreigners, every man of them carrying a knife. It would be a sad day for England when Jesuitical fruit-knives took the place of good wholesome British bludgeons in the settlement of the ordinary differences incidental to a Protestant people.

It is certain that this was one of the comments of the disintegrating crowd, and it is equally certain that Baretti commented pretty freely to his custodians in the hackney coach upon the place occupied in the comity of nations of that State, the social conditions of whose metropolis made possible so gross a scandal as the arrest of a gentleman and a scholar, solely by reason of his success in snatching his life out of the talons of a ruffian and a bully.

Mr. Baretti was a gentleman and a scholar whose name appears pretty frequently in the annals of the eighteenth century, but seldom with any great credit to himself. As a matter of fact, this dramatic episode of the stabbing of the man in the Haymarket is the happiest with which his name is associated. He made his most creditable appearance in the chronicles of the period as the chief actor in this sordid drama. He cuts a very poor figure indeed upon every other occasion when he appears in the pages of his contemporaries, though they all meant to be kind to him.

He never could bear people to be kind to him, and certainly, so far as he himself was concerned, it cannot be said that any blame attaches to him for the persistence of his friends in this direction. He did all that mortal man could do to discourage them, and if after the lapse of a year or two he was still treated by some with cordiality or respect, assuredly it was not owing to his display of any qualities that justified their maintenance of such an attitude.

Mr. Baretti was an eminently detestable scholar of many parts. He was as detestable as he was learned--perhaps even more so. Learned men are not invariably horrid, unless they are men of genius as well, and this rarely happens.

Baretti had no such excuse, though it must be acknowledged that his capacity for being disagreeable almost amounted to genius. Such a character as his is now and again met with in daily life. A man who feels himself to be, in point of scholarly attainment, far above the majority of men, and who sees inferiority occupying a place of distinction while he remains neglected and, to his thinking, unappreciated, is not an uncommon figure in learned or artistic circles. Baretti was a disappointed man, and he showed himself to be such. He had a grievance against the world for being constituted as it is. He had a grievance against society. He had a grievance against his friends who got on in the world. But the only people against whom he was really malevolent were those who were signally and unaccountably kind to him. He accepted their kindness, and then turned and rent them.

Dr. Johnson met him when they were both working for the booksellers, and when the great dictionary scheme was floated his co-operation was welcomed. Johnson's success in life was largely due to his faculty for discovering people who could be useful to him. It can easily be believed that, knowing something of the scholarship of Baretti, he should be delighted to avail himself of his help. Baretti had an intimate knowledge of several languages and their literature; as a philologist he was probably far superior to Johnson; and possibly Johnson knew this, though he was doubtless too wise ever to acknowledge so much openly. We do not hear that the relations between the two ever became strained while the great work was in course of progress. Shortly after it was completed Baretti returned to his native Italy, and began to reproach Johnson for not writing to him more frequently. We have several examples of the cheerfulness with which Johnson set about exculpating himself from such reproaches. The letters which he wrote to him at Italy are among the most natural that ever came from his pen. They are models of the gossipy style which Johnson could assume without once deviating from that dignity which so frequently became ponderous, suggesting the dignity of the elephant rather than that of the lion. Walpole was a master of the art of being gossipy without being dignified. But Johnson's style was not flexible. We have not Baretti's letters to Johnson, but the references made by the latter to some matters communicated to him by his correspondent let us know something of how Baretti was getting on in the land of his birth. He seems to have set his heart upon obtaining some appointment in Italy, and his aspirations included marriage. He was disappointed in both directions; and it would be too much to expect that his temper was improved by these rebuffs.

It may well be believed that he quarrelled his way through Italy. “I have lately seen Mr. Stratico, Professor of Padua, who has told me of your quarrel with an abbot of the Celestine Order, but had not the particulars very ready in his memory,” Johnson wrote to him at Milan. Any one who could quarrel with an abbot of the Celestine Order would, we fancy, be _capable de tout_, like the prophet Habakkuk, according to the witty Frenchman. One is not disposed to be hard upon Professor Stratico for his shortness of memory in regard to this particular quarrel; the strain of remembering the details of all the quarrels of Mr. Baretti would be too great for any man.

Of course, Dr. Johnson gave him some excellent advice. It seems that poor Baretti had been at first so well received on his return to Italy that he became sanguine of success in all his enterprises, and when they miscarried he wrote very bitterly to Johnson, who replied as follows:

“I am sorry for your disappointment, with which you seem more touched than I should expect a man of your resolution and experience to have been, did I not know that general truths are seldom applied to particular occasions; and that the fallacy of our selflove extends itself as wide as our interests or affections. Every man believes that mistresses are unfaithful and patrons capricious; but he excepts his own mistress and his own patron. We have all learned that greatness is negligent and contemptuous, and that in Courts life is often languished away in ungratified expectation; but he that approaches greatness or glitters in a Court, imagines that destiny has at last exempted him from the common lot.”

It is doubtful if this excellent philosophy made the person to whom it was addressed more amiable to his immediate entourage; nor is it likely that he was soothed by the assurance that his “patron's weakness or insensibility will finally do you little hurt, if he is not assisted by your own passions.”

“Of your love,” continued Johnson, “I know not the propriety; we can estimate the power, but in love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we ought always to remember the uncertainty of events.” He then hastens to add that “love and marriage are different states. Those who are to suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look, and that benevolence of mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and success in amusement.”

The pleasant little cynical bark in the phrase “those that are to suffer the evils together,” as if it referred to love and marriage, is, Malone thinks, not Johnson's, but Baretti's. It is suggested that Johnson really wrote “those that are to suffer the evils _of life_ together,” and that Baretti in transcribing the letter for Boswell, purposely omitted the words “_of life_.” It would be quite like Baretti to do this; for he would thereby work off part of his spite against Johnson for having given him the advice, and he would have had his own sneer against “love and marriage,” the _fons et origo_ of his disappointment.

But of Dr. Johnson's esteem for the attainments of Baretti there can be no doubt. He thought that the book on Italy which he published on his return to England was very entertaining, adding: “Sir, I know no man who carries his head higher in conversation than Baretti. There are strong powers in his mind. He has not, indeed, many hooks; but with what hooks he has he grapples very forcibly.”

It may seem rather strange after this that Baretti was never admitted to the membership of the celebrated club. He was intimate with nearly all the original members, but the truth remained that he was not what Johnson called a clubbable man: he had too many hooks, not too few.

Such was the man who was brought before Sir John Fielding, the magistrate at Bow Street, on the morning after the tragedy, charged with murder; and then it was that he found the value of the friendships which he had formed in England. The first person to hasten to his side in his extremity was Oliver Goldsmith, the man whom he had so frequently made the object of his sarcasm, whose peculiarities he had mimicked, not in the playful manner of Garrick or Foote, but in his own spiteful style, with the grim humour of the disappointed man. Goldsmith it was who opened his purse for him and got a coach for him when he was remanded until the next day, riding by his side to the place of his incarceration. Goldsmith was by his side when the question of bail was discussed before Lord Mansfield. For some reason which does not require any particular explanation, it was not thought that Goldsmith as a bailsman would appeal irresistibly to the authorities, but the names of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Edmund Burke, Mr. David Garrick, and Mr. H. Fitzherbert were submitted to Lord Mansfield, and immediately accepted. An amusing anecdote was current regarding the few days of Baretti's incarceration. One morning he was visited by a teacher of languages, who begged a trifling favour of him. This was merely a letter of recommendation to Baretti's pupils, so that the applicant might have a chance of taking them over “when you are hanged, sir.” The fact that this sympathetic visitor was allowed to depart without molestation makes people doubt whether Baretti was so bad-tempered after all. He did not assault the man. “You rascal!” he cried. “If I were not in my own room, I would kick you downstairs directly.”

The trial was fixed for October 20th at the Old Bailey, and a few days before this date a number of the prisoner's friends met together to consult as to the line which should be taken for his defence. It seems that they were not all agreed on some points; this was only to be expected, considering what an array of wisdom was brought together upon the occasion of these consultations, and considering also the course which was adopted by Dr. Johnson, who thought that the interests of the prisoner would be advanced by getting up an academical discussion with Burke. Johnson and Burke were notorious rivals in conversation in those days when conversation was regarded as an art, and men and women seemed to have plenty of leisure to talk together for the sake of talking, and to argue together for the sake of argument, and to be rude to one another for the sake of wit. Boswell was for ever extolling Johnson at the expense of Burke; and indeed, so far as one can gather from his pages, Johnson was the ruder man.

The example that Boswell gives of his own readiness in making Goldsmith “shut up” when he questioned Johnson's superiority to Burke in discussion is one of the best instances of the little Scotsman's incapacity to perceive the drift of an argument. “Is he like Burke who winds into a subject like a serpent?” asked Goldsmith.

“But” (said I) “Dr. Johnson is the Hercules that strangled serpents in his cradle.”

This repartee which Boswell gleefully records is about equal to the reply made by one of the poets who was appealed to in the “Bab Ballads” to say if he wrote “the lovely cracker mottoes my Elvira pulls at supper.” It will be remembered that the poet whose name rhymes with “supper” replied:

“'A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men dread a bandit,'

Which” (the earnest inquirer said) “I felt was very wise,

but I didn't understand it.”

It was in regard to this consultation as to the best defence to be made out for Baretti that Johnson admitted to have opposed Burke simply for the sake of showing the rest of the company that he could get the better of Burke in an argument. “Burke and I,” he said, “should have been of one opinion if we had had no audience.” Such a confession! There was the life of his friend Baretti trembling in the balance, and yet Johnson, solely for the sake of “showing off,” opposed the wisdom and ingenuity Burke exercised to save from the gallows a man whom Johnson professed to admire!

But if we are to believe Boswell, Johnson cared very little whether his friend was hanged or not. As for Boswell himself, he always detested Baretti, and is reported to have expressed the earnest hope that the man would be hanged. However, the “consultations” went merrily on, and doubtless contributed in some measure to a satisfactory solution of the vexed question as to whether Johnson or Burke was the more brilliant talker. They formed a tolerably valid excuse for the uncorking of several bottles, and perhaps these friends of Baretti felt that even though he should die, yet the exchange of wit in the course of these happy evenings would live for ever in the memory of those present, so that after all, let the worst come to the worst, Baretti should have little cause for complaint.

It is reported that the prisoner, upon the occasion of his receiving a visit from Johnson and Burke, cried: “What need a man fear who holds two such hands?” It may here be mentioned, however, that although it was asserted that Johnson and Murphy were responsible for the line of defence adopted at the trial, yet in after years Baretti was most indignant that it should be suggested that credit should be given to any one but himself for his defence; and he ridiculed the notion that Johnson or Burke or Murphy or even Boswell--himself an aspirant to the profession of law in which he subsequently displayed a conspicuous lack of distinction--had anything to do with the instruction either of solicitors or barristers on his behalf.

At any rate, the “consultations” came to an end, and the friends of the accused awaited the trial with exemplary patience. Mr. Boswell seems suddenly to have become the most sympathetic of the friends; for three days before the event he took a journey to Tyburn to witness the hanging of several men at that place, and though it is known that the spectacle of a hanging never lost its charm for him, yet it is generous to assume that upon this occasion he went to Tyburn in order to qualify himself more fully for sympathising with Baretti, should the defence assigned to him break down.

Another ardent sympathiser was Mr. Thomas Davies the bookseller, a gentleman whose chief distinction in the eyes of his contemporaries consisted--if we are to believe one of the wittiest of his associates--in the fact that he had an exceedingly pretty wife; but whose claim to the gratitude of coming generations lies in the circumstance of his having introduced Boswell to Johnson. Tom Davies was terribly cut up at the thought of the possibility of Baretti's being sentenced to be hanged. Boswell, on the day before the trial, after telling Johnson how he had witnessed the executions at Tyburn, and expressing his surprise that none of the wretches seemed to think anything of the matter, mentioned that Foote, the actor, had shown him a letter which he had received from Tom Davies, and in which the writer affirmed that he had not had a wink of sleep owing to his anxiety in respect of “this sad affair of Baretti,” and begging Foote to suggest some way by which he could be of service to the accused, adding that should Mr. Foote be in need of anything in the pickle line, he could strongly recommend him to an industrious young man who had lately set up in that business.

Strange to say, Johnson was not impressed with this marked evidence of Mr. Davies' kind heart.

“Ay, sir, here you have a specimen of human sympathy,” he cried. “A friend hanged and a cucumber pickled! We know not whether Baretti or the pickle man has kept Davies from sleep; nor does he know himself.”

This was rather sweeping, but his dictum showed that he was rather a poor analyser of human emotion. In the minds of the people of to-day who read of Tom Davies' bad nights there is no manner of doubt whatever that the sequence of his emotions was to be attributed to his intimacy with the industrious young pickle maker. Tom had indulged rather too freely in some of the specimens of his art presented to him by the pickler, and the result was a melancholy night; and, being melancholy, he was led to think of the most melancholy incident that had recently come under his notice. When a man is full of mixed pickles he is liable to get a little mixed, and so in the morning he attributed his miserable night to his thoughts about Baretti, instead of knowing that his thoughts about Baretti were the natural result of his miserable night. If he had been acquainted with an industrious young onion merchant he might have passed the night in tears.

“As for his not sleeping,” said Dr. Johnson, “sir, Tom Davies is a very great man--Tom has been on the stage, and knows how to do those things.”

Boswell: “I have often blamed myself, sir, for not feeling for others as sensibly as many say they do.” Johnson: “Sir, don't be duped by them any more. You will find those very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling.” Mr. Boswell thought that he would do well to turn his friend from the subject under discussion, so he made the apparently harmless remark that Foote had a great deal of humour and that he had a singular talent of exhibiting character. But Johnson had on him the mood not only of “the rugged Russian bear,” but also of “the armed rhinoceros and the Hyrcan tiger.”

“Sir, it is not a talent: it is a vice; it is what others abstain from,” he growled.

“Did not he think of exhibiting you, sir?” inquired the tactful Mr. Boswell, though he knew all about Foote and Johnson long before.

“Sir, fear restrained him,” said Johnson. “He knew I would have broken his bones. I would have saved him the trouble of cutting off a leg: I would not have left him a leg to cut off.”

This brutal reference to the fact that Foote's recent accident had compelled him to have a leg amputated should surely have suggested to his inquisitor that he had probably been paying a visit to an industrious young pickle maker without Tom Davies' recommendation, or that he had partaken of too generous a helping of his favourite veal, baked with plums, and so that he would do well to leave him alone for a while. But no, Mr. Boswell was not to be denied.

“Pray, sir, is not Foote an infidel?” he inquired. But as he himself had been dining with Foote the previous day, and as he possessed no more delicacy than a polecat, he could easily have put the question to Foote himself.

But Johnson would not even give the man credit for his infidelity.

“I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an infidel,” he said; “but if he is an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel, that is to say, he has never thought on the subject.”