Part 9

Miss Hawkins, in her _Memoirs_, names him as the person with whom Johnson was certainly seen to the fairest advantage. His deferent suave manner was the best foil possible to the Doctor’s extraordinary explosions. He had supreme self-command; no one ever saw him angry; and in most matters of life, as a genuine contrast to his beloved friend Beauclerk, he was apt to take things a shade too seriously. We learn from Mr. Henry Best, author of some good _Personal and Literary Memorials_, that the advance rumors of the French Revolution found Langton, in the fullest sense, an aristocrat; but it was not long before he became, from conviction, a thorough Liberal, and so remained, although he suffered a great unpopularity, owing to this change, in his native county. He wrote, in 1760, a little book of essays entitled _Rustics_, which never got beyond the passivity of manuscript. The year before, under the date of July 28th, Langton contributed to the pages of _The Idler_ the paper numbered 67 and entitled _A Scholar’s Journal_. It is a pleasant study of procrastination and of shifting plans, a gentle bit of humor to be ranked as autobiographic. There is an indorsement of Montrose in its heroic advice to “risk the certainty of little for the chance of much.” But Langton’s graceful academic pen was not destined to a public career. Perseverance of any sort was not native to him. He fulfilled beautifully, adds the vivacious Miss Hawkins, “the pious injunction of Sir Thomas Browne, ‘to sit quietly in the soft showers of Providence,’ and might, without injustice, be characterized as utterly unfit for every species of activity.” Yet at the call of duty, so well was the natural man dominated by his unclouded will, he girded himself to any exertion. Wine-drinking was habitual with him, and he felt its need to sharpen and rouse his intellect; “but the idea of Bennet Langton being what is called ‘overtaken,’” wrote the same associate whom we have been quoting, “is too preposterous to be dwelt on.” She furnishes one illustration of Langton’s Greek serenity. Talking to a company, of a chilly forenoon, in his own house, he paused to remark that if the fire lacked attention it might go out: a brief, casual, murmurous interruption. He resumed his discourse, breaking off presently, and pleading abstractedly with eye in air: “Pray ring for coals!” All sat looking at the fire, and so little solicitous about the impending catastrophe that presently Langton was off again on the stream of his softened eloquence. In a few minutes came another lull. “Did anybody answer that bell?” A general negative. “Did anybody ring that bell?” A sly shaking of heads. And once more the inspired monody soared among the clouds, at last dropping meditatively to the hearthstone: “Dear, dear, the fire is out!”

Langton was the centre of a group, wherever he happened to be, talking delightfully, and twirling the oblong gold-mounted snuff-box, which promptly appeared as sociabilities began: a conspicuous figure, with his height, his courteous smile, his mild beauty, and his habit of crossing his arms over his breast, or locking his hands together on his knee. He was a great rider, and could run like a hound. He had a queerness of constitution which seemed to leave him at his lowest ebb every afternoon about two of the clock, forgetful, weary, confused, and without an idea in his head; but after a little food, he was himself again. At dinner-parties he usually rose fasting, “such was the perpetual flow of his conversation, and such the incessant claim made upon him.” A morning call from Mr. Langton was a thing to suggest the eternal years; yet we are told that satiety dwelt not where he was; like Cowley, “he never oppressed any man’s parts, or put any man out of countenance.” He had much the same sense of humor as Beauclerk had, and his speech was quite as full of good sense and direct observation, if not as cutting. He indicted a fault of Edmund Burke’s in one extreme stroke: “Burke whisks the end of his tail in the face of an arguer!” Johnson, the arch-whisker of tails, was not to be brought to book; but Burke’s greatness was of a texture to bear and enjoy the thrust. It is curious that Langton was markedly fond of _Hudibras_; such a relish indicates, perhaps, the turn his own wit might have taken, had it not been held in by too much second thought.

Johnson was wont to announce that he valued Langton for his piety, his ancient descent, his amiable behavior, and his mastery of Greek. “Who in this town knows anything of Clenardus, sir, but you and I?” he would say. In the midst of his talk Langton would fall into the “vowelled undertone” of the tongue he loved, correcting himself with a little wave of the hands, and the apologetic phrase: “And so it goes on.” “Steeped to the lips in Greek” he was indeed, bursting out with a joyous salute to the moon of Hellas, upon a friend’s doorstep, or making grotesque Hellene puns, for his own delight,[47] upon the blank leaves of a pocket-book. Every one familiar with Johnsoniana will recall the charming and spirited retort written by Dr. Barnard, then Dean of Derry, later, Bishop of Killaloe, which closes:

“If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em, Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em In terms select and terse; Jones teach me modesty and Greek; Smith, how to think; Burke, how to speak; And Beauclerk, to converse!”

In all deference to the illustrious Sir William Jones, it may be claimed that “modesty and Greek” were the very arts in which Langton was a past-master. But he was an amateur, and a private scholar, and his name was a dissyllable; else the Dean might have tossed at his feet as pretty a compliment as that given in the last line to his colleague. It must have gratified Johnson that Langton refused, at Reynolds’s dinner-table, “like a sturdy scholar,” to sign the famous Round Robin (not signed, either, by Beauclerk) which besought him to “disgrace the walls of Westminster with an English inscription.” And as if to keep Langton firmly of his own mind on the subject, it was to him the Doctor confided the Greek quatrain, sad and proud, which he had dedicated to Goldsmith’s[48] memory.

For Bennet Langton Johnson had no criticism but praise. He presented him with pride to Young and to Richardson, described him handsomely to Hannah More, and proceeded to draw his character for Miss Reynolds, ere she had met him, with such “energy and fond delight” as she avowed she never could forget. What fine ringing metal was Johnson’s commendation! “He is one of those to whom Nature has not spread her volumes, nor uttered her voices, in vain.” “Earth does not bear a worthier gentleman.” “I know not who will go to Heaven if Langton does not.” And in the sweetest and completest approval ever put by one mortal upon another: “_Sit anima mea cum Langtono!_” Yet even with this “angel of a man” the Doctor had one serious and ludicrous quarrel.

It was the fatal outcome of his uneven moods that he must needs be disenchanted at times even with his best beadsmen: there came days when he would deny Beauclerk’s good-humor to be anything but “acid,” Langton’s anything but “muddy.” He considered it the sole grave fault of the latter that he was too ready to introduce a religious discussion into a mixed assembly, where he knew scarcely any two of the company would be of the same mind. On Boswell’s suggestion that this may have been done for the sake of instructing himself, Johnson replied angrily that a man had no more right to take that means of gaining information than he had to pit two persons against each other in a duel for the sake of learning the art of self-defence. Some indiscretion of this sort on Langton’s part seems to have alienated the friends for the first and last time. It was during their transient bitterness that the Doctor made the historic apology, across the table, to Oliver Goldsmith; an incident which, however beautiful in itself, was a hard back-handed hit at Langton, standing by. Croker’s conjecture may be true that the business which threatened to break a fealty of some sixteen years’ standing arose rather from Langton’s settling his estate by will upon his sisters, whose tutor he had been. On hearing of it, the Great Cham grumbled and fumed, politely applying to the Misses Langton the title of “three dowdies!”[49] and shouting, in a feudal warmth, that “an ancient estate, sir! an ancient estate should always go to males.” In fact, the Doctor behaved very badly, very sardonically, and was pleased to lay hold of a post by Temple Bar one night, and roar aloud over a piece of possible folly up in Lincolnshire which concerned him not in the least. But in due time the breach, whatever its cause, was healed. The Doctor, in writing of it, uses one of his balancing sentences: “Langton is a worthy fellow, without malice, though not without resentment.” The two could not keep apart very long, despite all the unreason in the world. “Johnson’s quarrels,” Mr. Forster tells us, “were lovers’ quarrels.” Another memorable passage-at-arms, rich in comedy, happened in the course of one of Johnson’s sicknesses, when, in the cloistral silence of his chamber, he solemnly implored Bennet Langton, always the companion who comforted his sunless hours, to tell him wherein his life had been faulty. His shy and sagacious monitor wrote down, as accusation enough, various Scriptural texts recommending tolerance, humility, long-suffering, and other meek ingredients which were not predominant in the sinner’s social composition. The penitent earnestly thanked Langton on taking the paper from his hand, but presently turned his short-sighted eyes upon him from the pillow, and emerging from what his own verbology would call a “frigorific torpor,” he exclaimed in a loud, wrathful, suspicious tone: “What’s your drift, sir?” “And when I questioned him,” so Johnson afterwards told his blustering tale—“when I questioned him as to what occasion I had given him for such animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this: that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation! Now, what harm does it do any man to be contradicted?” To this same paternal young Langton the rebel submitted his Latin verses; the _Poemata_, in the shape in which we possess them, were rigorously edited by him. And Johnson leaned upon him in more intimate ways, as he could never lean upon Beauclerk. To the scrupulous nature instinctively right he made comfortable confidences: “Men of harder minds than ours will do many things from which you and I would shrink; yet, sir, they will, perhaps, do more good in life than we.”

As to the Honorable Topham Beauclerk, more volatile than Langton, he had as steady a “sunshine of cheerfulness” for his heritage. We find him complaining to a friend in the July of 1773: “Every hour adds to my misanthropy; and I have had a pretty considerable share of it for some years past.” This incursion of low spirits was not normal with him. Johnson, bewailing his own morbid habits of mind, once said: “Some men, and very thinking men, too, have not these vexing thoughts. Sir Joshua Reynolds is the same all the year round; Beauclerk, when not ill and in pain, is the same.” Boswell attests that Beauclerk took more liberties with Johnson than durst any man alive, and that Johnson was more disposed to envy Beauclerk’s talents than those of any one he had ever known. Born into the freedom of London, Beauclerk was familiar with Fox, Selwyn, and Walpole, and with the St. James men who did not ache to consort with Johnson; and he was quite their match in ease and astuteness. He walked the modish world, where Langton could not and would not follow; he alternated the Ship Tavern and the gaming-table with the court levees; Davies’s shop with the golden insipidities of the drawing-room; _la comédie_, _la danse_, _l’amour même_, with the intellectual tie-wigs of Soho. It shows something of his spirit that whereas no member of the Club save himself was a frequenter of White’s and Betty’s,[50] or a chosen guest at Strawberry Hill, yet there was no person of fashion whom he was not proud to make known to Doctor Johnson whenever he judged the candidate for so genuine an honor worthy of it. Some of these encounters must have been queer and memorable!

Beauclerk’s unresting sarcasm often flattened out Boswell and irritated the Doctor, though Bennet Langton, in his abandonments of enthusiastic optimism, was never more than grazed. It is not to be denied that this spoiled child of the Club liked to worry Goldsmith, the maladroit great man who might have quoted often on such occasions the sad gibe of Hamlet:

“I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night, Stick fiery off indeed.”

What a pity that Goldsmith’s _Retaliation_ was never finished, so as to include his portrait of Beau! He was “a pestilent wit,” as Anthony à Wood calls Marvell. Johnson, shy creature! deplored Beauclerk’s “predominance over his company.” The tyranny, however, was gracefully and decorously exercised, if we are to believe the unique eulogy that “no man was ever freer, when he was about to say a good thing, from a look which expressed that it was coming; nor, when he had said it, from a look which expressed that it had come.” Few human beings have had a finer sense of fun than Topham Beauclerk. He had an infallible eye for the values of blunders, and an incongruity came home to him like a blessing from above. Life with him was a night-watch for diverting objects and ideas. When he was not studying, he was disporting himself, like the wits of the Restoration; and he was equal to all emergencies, as they succeeded one another. Every specimen preserved of his talk is perfect of its kind, and makes us long for a full index. Pointed his speech was, always, and reminds one indeed of a foil, but without the button; a dangerous little weapon, somewhat unfair, but carried with such consummate flourish that those whom it pricks could almost cheer it. “O Lord! how I did hate that horrid Beauclerk!” Mrs. Piozzi scribbled once on the margin of Wraxall’s _Memoirs_, in an exquisite feminine vindication of poor Beau’s accomplished tongue.

He was no disguiser of his own likes and dislikes. Politics he avoided as much as possible; but he affected less concern in public matters than he really felt. “Consecrate that time to your friends,” he writes with mock severity to the ideal Irishman, Lord Charlemont, “which you spend in endeavoring to promote the interests of a half-million of scoundrels.” For his private business he had least zeal of all; and cites “my own confounded affairs” as the cause of his going into Lancashire. Beauclerk had great tact, boldness, and independence; his natural scorn of an oppressor was his modern and democratic quality. His idleness (for he was as idle by habit as Langton was by nature) he recognized, and lightly deprecated. Fastidious in everything, he made “one hour of conversation at Elmsley’s”[51] his standard of enjoyment, and his imagined extreme of annoyance was “to be clapped on the back by Tom Davies.” What he chose to call his leisure (again the ancestral Stuart trait!) he dedicated to the natural sciences in his beloved laboratory. “I see Mr. Beauclerk often, both in town and country,” wrote Goldsmith to Bennet Langton; “he is now going directly forward to become a second Boyle, deep in chemistry and physics.” When there was some fanciful talk of setting up the Club as a college, “to draw a wonderful concourse of students,” Beauclerk, by unanimous vote, was elected to the professorship of Natural Philosophy.

Johnson’s influence on him, potent though it was, seems to have been negative enough. It kept him from a few questionable things, and preserved in him an outward decorum towards customs and established institutions; but it failed to incite him to make of his manifold talents the “illustrious figure” which Langton’s eyes discerned in a vain anticipation. Beauclerk and the great High Churchman went about much together, and had amusing experiences. On such occasions, as in all their familiar intercourse, the disciple had the true salt of the Doctor’s talk, which, as Hazlitt remarks, was often something quite unlike “the cumbrous cargo of words” he kept for professional use. In the late winter of 1765 the two visited Cambridge, Beauclerk having a mind to call upon a friend at Trinity.

These, as we know, had their many differences, “like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man-o’-war”; the one smooth, sharp, and civil, the other indignantly dealing with the butt-end of personality. Boswell gives a long account of a charming dispute concerning the murderer of Miss Reay, and the evidence of his having carried two pistols. Beauclerk was right; but Johnson, with quite as solid a sense of virtue, was angry; and he was soothed at the end only by an adroit and affectionate reply. “Sir,” the Doctor began, sternly, at another time, after listening to some mischievous waggery, “you never open your mouth but with the intention to give pain, and you often give me pain, not from the power of what you say, but from seeing your intention.” And again, he said to him whom he had compared to Alexander, marching in triumph into Babylon: “You have, sir! a love of folly, and a scorn of fools; everything you do attests the one, and everything you say the other.”[52] Beauclerk could also lecture his mentor. It was his steadfast counsel that the Doctor should devote himself to poetry, and draw in his horns of dogma and didactics.

He had, ever ready, some quaint simile or odd application from the classics; in the habit of “talking from books,” as the Doctor called it, he was, however, distanced by Langton. Referring to that friend’s habit of sitting or standing against the fireplace, with one long leg twisted about the other, “as if fearing to occupy too much space,” Beauclerk likened him, for all the world, to the stork in Raphael’s cartoon of The Miraculous Draught.[53] One of Beauclerk’s happiest hits, and certainly his boldest, was made while Johnson was being congratulated upon his pension. “How much now it was to be hoped,” whispered the young blood, in reference to Falstaff’s celebrated vow, “that he would purge and live cleanly, as a gentleman should do!” Johnson seems to have taken the hint in good-humor, and actually to have profited by it.

Very soon after leaving Oxford, Beauclerk became engaged to a Miss Draycott, whose family were well known to that affable blue-stocking, Mrs. Montagu; but some coldness on his part, some sensitiveness on hers, broke off the match. His fortune-hunting parent is said to have been disappointed, as the lady owned several lead-mines in her own right. That same year, with Bennet Langton for companion part of the way, Beauclerk, whose health, never robust, now began to give him anxiety, set out on a Continental tour. Baretti, whom he had met at home, received him most kindly at Milan, thanks to Johnson’s urgent and friendly letter. By his subsequent knowledge of Italian popular customs, he was able to testify in Baretti’s favor, when the latter was under arrest for killing his man in the Haymarket, and in concert with Burke, Garrick, Goldsmith, and Johnson, to help him, in a very interesting case, towards his acquittal. It was reported to Selwyn that the handsome gambling Inglese was robbed at Venice of £10,000! an incident which, perhaps, shortened his peregrinations. If the report were accurate, it would prove that he could have been in no immediate need of pecuniary rescue from his leaden sweetheart. It was Dr. Johnson’s opinion, coinciding with the opinion of Roger Ascham on the same general subject, that travel adds very little to one’s mental forces, and that Beauclerk might have learned more in the Academe of “Fleet Street, sir!”

Topham Beauclerk married Lady Diana Spencer, the eldest daughter of the second Duke of Marlborough, as soon as she obtained a divorce from her first husband. This was Frederick, Lord Bolingbroke, nephew and heir of the great owner of that title; a very trying gentleman, who was the restless “Bully” of Selwyn’s correspondence; he survived until 1787. The ceremony took place March 12, 1768, in St. George’s, Hanover Square, “by license of the Archbishop of Canterbury,” both conspirators being then residents of the parish. Lady Diana Spencer was born in the spring of 1734, and was therefore in her thirty-fifth year, while Beauclerk was but twenty-nine.[54] Johnson was disturbed, and felt offended at first with the whole affair; but he never withdrew from the agreeable society of Beauclerk’s wife. It is nothing wonderful that the courtship and honey-moon was signalized by the forfeit of Beauclerk’s place in the exacting Club, “for continued inattendance,” and not regained for a considerable period. “They are in town, at Topham’s house, and give dinners,” one of George Selwyn’s gossiping friends wrote, after the wedding. “Lord Ancram dined there yesterday, and called her nothing but Lady Bolingbroke the whole time!” Let us hope that “Milady Bully” triumphed over her awkward guest, and looked, as Earl March once described her under other difficulties, “handsomer than ever I saw her, and not the least abashed;” or as deliberately easy as when she entertained with her gay talk the nervous Boswell who awaited the news of his election or rejection from the Club. She was a blond goddess, exceedingly fair to see. In her middle age she fell under the observant glance of delightful Fanny Burney, who did not fail to allow her “pleasing remains of beauty.”

The _divorcée_ was fond of and faithful to her new lord, and no drawback upon his æsthetic pride, inasmuch as she was an artist of no mean merit. Horace Walpole built a room for the reception of some of her drawings, which he called his Beauclerk Closet, “not to be shown to all the profane that come to see the house,” and he always praised them extravagantly. It is surer critical testimony in her favor that her name figures yet in encyclopædias, and that Sir Joshua, the honest and unbought judge, much admired her work, which Bartolozzi was kept busy engraving. It was her series of illustrations to Bürger’s wild ballad of _Leonora_ (with the dolly knight, the wooden monks, the genteel heroine, and the vigorous spectres) which, long after, helped to fire the young imagination of Shelley. It is to be feared that her invaluable portrait of Samuel Johnson is not, or never was, extant. “Johnson was confined for some days in the Isle of Skye,” writes her rogue of a spouse, “and we hear that he was obliged to swim over to the mainland, taking hold of a cow’s tail. . . . Lady Di has promised to make a drawing of it.” Sir Joshua’s pretty “Una” is the little Elizabeth, afterwards Countess of Pembroke, elder daughter of Lady Di and Topham Beauclerk, painted the year her father died.

The family lived in princely style, both at their “summer quarters” at Muswell Hill, and on Great Russell Street, where the library, set in a great garden, reached, as Walpole mischievously gauged it, “half-way to Highgate.” Lady Di, an admirable hostess, proved herself one of those odd and rare women who take to their husbands’ old friends. Selwyn she cordially liked, and her warmest welcome attended Langton, whom she would rally for his remissness, when he failed to come to them at Richmond. He could reach them so easily! she said; all he need do was to lay himself at length, his feet in London and his head with them, _eodem die_. This Richmond home remained her residence during her widowhood. Walpole mentions a Thames boat-race in 1791, when he sat in a tent “just before Lady Di’s windows,” and gazed upon “a scene that only Richmond, on earth, can exhibit.” In the church of the same leafy town her body rests.