face, brown coat, black worsted stockings,
and breeches loose at the knees. Perhaps, with
rolling eyes and convulsively twitching mouth,
he is repeating to himself those solemn lines of
his poem on London, which he had founded on
such bitter experience:

        This mournful truth is everywhere confessed,
        Slow rises worth by poverty depressed;

or he is, with sarcastic smile, chewing the cud of
that cruel definition in his Dictionary, so
inhuman when we consider his young Scotch
friend Boswell's feelings:

OATS, a grain that the English feed their
horses with, and the Scotch their men.

Thanks, I say loudly, to that self-immolating
biographer of the doctor's, Boswell, that
"dunce, parasite, and coxcomb," as one of his
commentators calls him; that standing Scotch
bore who was laughed at in St. James's-street,
sneered at in the Temple, and despised
everywhere; who kept for years like a spaniel,
or a toadying poor relation, at the elbow of
the great doctor; who submitted patiently to
hurricanes of laughter, hailstorms of sarcasm,
and pelting rains of insolence, so that he could
keep his note-book open and take down the
aphorisms of the great club lawgiver he
idolised, and whose fame he hoped to share,
however humbly! Thanks, I say, to this
industrious, intellectual serf, this unpaid helot, we
know the minutest virtues and weaknesses of the
ponderous doctor, who has left such clear
footprints of his on these oblong London stones.

As we follow that ghost about his London
haunts we feel, as we watch his broad back,
that we know almost more about him than we
do about our own father; we know that in
Boltcourt, number eight, on the right hand,
opposite the Bolt-in-Tun, is where he lived for
seven years, where his ghost most delights
to haunt. There he kept his cat Hodge, who
put up his back and purred much like other cats,
and whom he was anxious should not be shot.
There, on the ground-floor, lived his pensioner,
blind Mrs. Williams, who used to tell if the tea-
cups were full enough by sounding them with
her snuffy, shrivelled fingers: much to the
horror of Miss Reynolds and Mrs. Piozzi, the
shrewd brewer's widow, who shocked everybody
by marrying an Italian master. Here was
the little garden that the great author of
Rasselas loved to watch and nurture; and
here were two floors piled with his books, and
only a way in one place for his study, where he
could fret, and think, and brood, and storm as
he liked. Here, within reach of the pleasant
friendly roar of Fleet-street, that he loved, then
waited on by his negro servant Frank Barber,
and the old, decayed, taciturn surgeon Mr.
Levett, used to sit the lawgiver of the club,
hoarding up mysterious scraps of orange-peel,
eating veal-pie and plums, till perspiration
dropped from his forehead; sleeping late and
then repenting it; praying, resolving, twitching,
grunting, shaking his head, puffing, blinking,
teazing Goldsmith and snubbing Boswell;
in a word, turning out down the court,
wig hind before and stockings down, amid
the clamour of boys and wonder of chairmen, to
hand Mrs. Montague or bewitching Miss Burney
to her carriage. Here it was, too—in this quiet
harbour of a court, where we put, as into
a haven, from the cataract of coaches in Fleet-
street, their thunder and tearing trample; in
the back room of the first floor of the now
vanished house—that the doctor surrendered his
poor soul to Him who gave it. Here, to this
quiet Bolt-court came the great Burke and
Langton, and all the club, to bid farewell to the
dying man, to shake his pale hand; and here
Reynolds promised him that he would read the Bible,
and never paint any more on Sundays. Here,
in the vanished house, he said, in his grand,
unchangeable manner, to the preternaturally solemn
doctor, who felt his purse and shook his head,
"No, sir, I am not better; you cannot conceive
with what acceleration I advance towards death."
Here, as he opened his last note, he said, "We
shall receive no letters in the grave." Here,
he was glad to know he would be buried in
the Abbey; here, on Monday, the 13th of
December, at seven o'clock in the evening, he
passed away so softly, that the watchers in his
room did not know he had left them for another
world. Here, was with him no departing
wrestle for life, no agonising struggle and clinging
to the sharp edge of the grave. And let us,
before we leave Bolt-court and push off for
another haunt of the great Lichfield man's,
execrate the memory of that ruthless printer who
pulled down the house where Johnson died,
erecting another, which, by a just retribution,
was eaten up indignantly, by fire, one November
night in 1807.

There is scarcely one of the streets leading
from the Strand down to the river—which, with
rusted railings at the ends of them, and ghostly
glimpses, at dusk, of giant shot-towers and
bridges of lamps—has not some memory of
Johnson, or has not echoed with his heavy
tread. In quiet John-street, Adelphi, in the
Society of Arts, for instance, and the council-
room hung round with the great allegorical
pictures by that wonderful, mad, quarrelsome,
Irish painter, Barry, painted by him for nothing,
at a time he was all but starving—there, amongst
naked Grecian striplings, nymphs, Dr. Burney
in his wig, Captain Cook, and Raleigh, is the
doctor's portrait. He sat for it; and here you
may detect, among gods and goddesses, his
purblind eyes, querulous mouth, elevated eyebrows,
and square, lined forehead. Here he enunciated
his tremendous abhorrence of Whig, Scotchman,
and foreigner. Here, in the green-room, Goldsmith
once got up to address the learned Society,
and, after floundering, blundering, and stammering,
sat down in vexed confusion; and here
Johnson spoke once on some subject relative
to mechanics, with all the clearness and vigour
for which he was renowned.

Let us push on for Bedford-street. It was
when living in this street, at a house opposite