and am contradicted, and I love this conflict of
intellect and opinion."

It was in that airy haunt in Gough-street
that Johnson, waited on by the poor Dominie
Sampson of a doctor whom he pensioned, used
to hold his morning levees of all sorts of
incongruous people—kind gentle Mr. Langton, the
young dissipated beau who decoyed the doctor
into Covent-garden revels; Garrick, the actor;
Dodsley, the printer, once a footman; Strahan,
the printer; Mrs. Gardiner, the wife of a tallow-
chandler on Snow-hill; and Mr. Diamond, an
apothecary of Cork-street, with whom he had
planned an expedition to Ireland that never
took place.

Here, to this famous and honoured garret
came those friends of the club, till one settled
here, and another there; till one died, and another
went abroad, and Ivy-lane no longer echoed with
the stentorian wisdom of that voice. It must
have been affecting—that gathering of the
survivors of the old club—years afterwards at the
Queen's Arms, St. Paul's-churchyard, one
December afternoon at half-past three. The old
doctor himself wrote about it to tripping Mrs.
Thrale, and said pathetically enough, "We had
not met together for thirty years, and one of us
thought the others grown very old. Our meeting
may be supposed to be somewhat tender." They
had coffee after dinner, and broke up at ten. In
another letter he says of the survivors of that
dinner, "We were as cheerful as ever, but he
could not make quite so much noise, for since
the paralysis his voice had been sometimes
weak." They must have been "clubbable" men,
those survivors, to enjoy that thoughtful evening,
the anniversary of thirty years' buried joys,
affections, and hopes.

Another of the doctor's clubs was in one of his
favourite river-side streets, Essex-street, at the
Essex Head, now number forty, where, in 1783,
the kind doctor established a club for the benefit
of "Sam Greaves," an old servant of his
friend Mr. Thrale. They met three times a
week: "the terms low, the expenses light," said
the doctor. He who misses forfeits twopence.
Each man was president in turn, and the waiter's
fee was a penny. Barry was a member, but
Sir Joshua Reynolds was afraid of Barry, and
would not join. Bozzy was there, note-taking
as usual.

All these clubs, whether in Essex-street,
Strand, or Old-street, St. Luke's; whether they
were formed of mathematical tailors or young
physicians; fade away before the club—Johnson's
special haunt—THE CLUB held at the Turk's
Head in Gerrard-street, Soho, and founded, in
1764, in the street where Dryden had once
lived, and where James the First's unlucky son
Prince Henry, built a house. It was started by
the great painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, originally
consisted of ten members, and met every
Friday at seven for supper. Here, Sir John
Hawkins, that wrong-headed member, quarrelled with
Burke; here, Goldsmith tried to elbow in his
jokes; and here Reynolds shifted his ear-
trumpet and took snuff. Here, comes Johnson
from his room in Johnson's-court, or from his
bottle of port and talk about the Hebrides with
Boswell at the Mitre, in Fleet-street. It was
to this club that Boswell, who had been
fidgeting all the evening while talking to Lady
Di: Beauclerk for fear he should be rejected, was
taken; and to the Turk's Head, where Johnson,
leaning over a chair as if he was leaning from a
pulpit, delivered him a mock charge as to his
duties as a good fellow and a clubbable man.
Here the doctor enunciated all his prejudices,
his hatred of furious Frenchmen, Scotchmen,
Whigs, Dissenters, Fielding's novels, and his
love of city life, tavern, club, good haters. Here
he preached and thundered, teased Garrick, and
confuted Gibbon, lamented Goldsmith's death,
and railed at Wilkes, the despot and autocrat
on Friday nights.

But, one of the greatest haunts of Johnson
was the Mitre Tavern, in Fleet-street. He
seems, in 1763, when Boswell knew him, to
have been perpetually there. "When I go up
that quiet cloistered court, running up like a
little secure haven from the stormy ocean of
Fleet-street, and see the doctor's gnarled bust
on the bracket above his old hat, I sometimes
think the very waistcoat must still be impregnated
by the fumes of his seething punch-bowls."
At this time the doctor used to leave his chambers
in Inner Temple-lane, lately pulled down,
at four in the afternoon, and never go home
again till two in the morning, afraid of
solitude and the blue-devils that lurked in those
old Temple rooms waiting his return. The
first meeting of Boswell and Johnson in that
low-roofed mouldy hostelrie was arranged by
Bozzy, who had heard that the Mitre was a
place of frequent resort with the doctor, who
used to sit there late. Boswell, a young man
about town, wishing to get into the Foot Guards,
but determining, at his crabbed shrewd old
father's wish, to go to Utrecht and study law,
wanted Johnson's advice about a course of study,
and, having been introduced to him at Davies
the bookseller's, called upon the doctor at his
request, and proposed his coming at this very
Mitre, with its curtained partitions and
incomplete daylight. A few days later, Bozzy meets
the great doctor going home to Inner Temple-
lane at one in the morning. Ever impudent and
unabashed, he at once proposes the Mitre; but
"No, sir," said Johnson, kindly enough, "it is
too late. They won't let us in. But I'll go with
you another night with all my heart."

A week afterwards, Bozzy, somewhat
oblivious of the doctor, meets him in an eating-
house in the Strand, the right-hand side above
Temple-bar, and hears an Irishman quarrel with
him as to the cause of some men being black.
He follows him out, and agrees to come for
Johnson that evening at nine. At nine they
meet, go to the Mitre and sup, the doctor
emptying his bottle of port. That night was
the gem of Boswell's life: for, that night, Johnson
took his admirer's hand, and, pleased with
his frankness and veneration, said, "Sir, give
me your hand, I have taken a liking to