Henrietta-street, that the great doctor used to
visit the father of the great orator Sheridan, the
Irish oratorical lecturer. It was at a drawing-room
window of this house that Sheridan—the man
whom Johnson despised and Foote ridiculed—and
a friend, stood one afternoon, with an opera-glass,
watching for the learned doctor, who was
expected to dinner. Presently he loomed through
the grey blue of the London distance, large,
cumbrous, and Cyclopean, and they "made him out,"
as the sailors call it, working along with a solemn
deportment, and an awkward, measured step.
There was at that time no side pavement of level
broad flags, but there were stone posts at intervals,
to guard foot-passengers from carriages. Upon
every post the two friends in the window—dull,
fluent Mr. Sheridan, and Mr. Whyte the short-
sighted—saw the doctor lay his hand; and if he
missed one, he would go on a trifle, then stop,
and seem to recollect and be troubled, and
go back, to complete the ceremony. This
strange, morbid, hypochondriac ceremonial was
one Mr. Sheridan said the doctor, in that street
at least, always performed.

We will follow the great lexicographer's ghost
to Bow-street, where the doctor once lived
for a short time; where all the great actors and
authors had lived when the place was fashionable,
and before that terrible, black, hearse-like
prisoners' van appeared there daily like a
spectre's coach. This was in his rough days,
when he was drudging for Cave, the editor of
the Gentleman's Magazine, tramping out
perpetually to St. John's Gate, in Clerkenwell, to
see him, and dine there behind a screen, that
hid his shabbiness from Cave's tradesmen guests.
Now, as we walk up Oxford-street, escaping
with difficulty at Regent-circus being
trampled to death by Lord Peabody's silver-
plated greys, watching the Lady Smalltalk
getting out at the fashionable bonnet-shop,
where the windows are a perfect flower-bed of
spring ribbons, it is hard to recal the simple days
when Johnson brought here his wife Zetty, from
Lichfield: the fat, red-cheeked, affected woman
whom Garrick used to mimic.

No reasonable ghost doing it quietly could
visit all Johnson's haunts in one night, between
sunset and cock-crow. For instance, now
breaking erratically down from Oxford Market,
and omitting many Johnson-haunted spots,
I must get again into Johnson's favourite river
street, the Strand, and go to Exeter-street,
where, in a lofty garret at the house of a certain
Norris, and staymaker, he lodged when he
first came to town. He had left the fair
widow he had married in Lichfield—had
given up his detested school where the
merciless boys used to watch and laugh at him
through key-holes, and had come up to London
with his pupil Garrick, who loved, ridiculed,
and feared him—to push his fortune as a writer.
Here, then, in this Venetian street, looking out
on the water, glittering under the sun and
leaden under the shadow, lived the struggler;
remarkable at the eightpenny ordinary at the
Pine Apple in New-street where he dined, for
his gaunt, lank form and scarred twitching face;
but more for his learning and conversational
powers, his sledge-hammer answers and pistol-
shot repartees. For some time he lived on
fourpence-halfpenny a day, and paid visits on
cleanshirt days only. He abstained from wine, and
waited bravely for sunshine; though a bookseller,
looking at his broad shoulders, did tell
him that he had better buy a porter's knot. He
met "very good company" at the Pine Apple,
in New-street, Covent Garden; for, though no one
knew his neighbour's name, some had travelled.
"It used to cost the rest," the doctor related,
proudly, in after life at great tables, Boswell
waiting at his elbow with his greedy note-book,
and Reynolds ready with his receptive ear-trumpet
and watchful glittering spectacles—"it used to
cost the rest a shilling, for they drank wine;
but I had a cut of meat for sixpence, and bread
for a penny, and gave the waiter a penny, so
that I was quite well served: nay, better than
the rest, for they gave the waiter nothing."
Part of that ponderous tragedy, Irene, which led
him a year afterwards to frequent the green-room
in a suit of scarlet and gold lace of extraordinary
splendour, was written in this healthy garret, in
the street where Exeter House once stood;
where Earl Cecil, son of the celebrated
Burleigh, who once nodded his head to some effect,
lived; and when the street was ever rustling
with satin, and there was perpetual grinding
by of gilded coaches, and putting off of silk-
canopied boats to Elizabeth's palaces, right or
left, of Greenwich and Whitehall.

But, we must go nearer the black dome, to
another river-side garret of the great man's, and see
him with his scorched wig (for he was short-
sighted, and was always singeing it by reading
with a candle held too close), in Gough-square,
Fleet-street. Here in the Dictionary time—in
a sort of rude counting-house, with his five Scotch
and one English secretaries and copyists—he
boasted that he (one Englishman) was doing
what it had taken forty French Academicians
to do.

It was at this time that the great doctor organised
a club in Ivy-lane, Newgate-street, every
Tuesday evening, at the King's Head Beef-steak
House: a club which he tried to re-organise the
year before his death, till he found to his regret
that the landlord was dead and the house shut
up. The members were merchants, booksellers,
physicians, and dissenting ministers. Here,
while the steak bubbled, or the chop hissed,
spat, and flared, Johnson beat down his
adversaries with his conversational club, talking more
for victory than truth: now, denying that a
country's luxury increased with its riches: now,
that card-playing was an increasing vice: now,
asserting that good, and now that evil,
predominated in the world.

He, of all great men, was a tavern haunter, as
Dryden had been, and as Addison had been. He
used to praise the civility of the waiters, the beaming
welcome of the landlord, the promptness of
the attendance, the readiness of the company to
be pleased. "Here, sir," he said, "I dogmatise