Had he ever seen the great dictator of letters,
he would probably recollect him. The time has
not long gone by, when it was no uncommon
thing to meet with men who could speak of
Johnson from personal remembrance; yet
Johnson had been touched for the king's evil by
Queen Anne. The writer has known two men,
one of whom had conversed with the
lexicographer, while the other had only seen him in
the streets. The former, at the time of the
interview, was a studious youth, preparing himself
for a literary career, in which he afterwards
acquired some name. He had gone into a
book-seller's shop to inquire for some classical author,
and found Johnson sitting there. The latter,
seeing the young man poring over a Greek or
Latin book, asked to look at it, questioned him
about his studies, and received such satisfactory
answers that he returned the volume with the
impressive sentence, uttered in his most dignified,
and yet blandest, manner: " You may go
on, sir; you may go on." The youth thus
magnificently ordained, as it were, ex cathedrâ, was
James Boaden, subsequently author of a Life of
John Kemble, and of a novel which attracted
attention, called The Man of Two Lives. He
survived until 1839, and prolonged to that late
period something of the Johnsonian manner,
though softened with greater amiability. His
deportment and mode of delivery were at once
formal and suave. He was fond of the Johnsonian
"sir;" and his respectful politeness in
addressing ladies was altogether that of the old
school. Like Johnson, Boaden loved nothing
better than to " fold his legs and have his talk
out;" and, being a man of large reading and
cultivated mind, his conversation was well worth
listening to.

Boaden reminds one of the Kembles, of whom
he was a devoted friend; and they suggest
another curious link with a bygone age. Thomas
Warton, in some prefatory observations to his
edition of Comus, speaks of Mrs. Siddons. So,
we have that actress directly associated with
the men who gathered about Johnson; yet the
brother of Mrs. Siddons—Charles Kemble—did
not finally leave the stage until 1840, though he
made his first appearance in London in 1794.

It does not always require extraordinary
longevity to connect a man with two distinct
epochs; but where any one has lived far beyond
the natural term of human existence, the
inter-linking is, of course, all the more remarkable.
That wonderful old man, Henry Jenkins, died
on the 6th of December, 1670, at the prodigious,
but doubtful, age of one hundred and sixty-nine.
If he were born in the reign of Henry
the Seventh, he must have died in the reign
of Charles the Second. His youth was passed in
days when the world was yet unshaken by the
thunders of Luther and his fellow-reformers; yet
he may have lived to find Protestantism an
old-established institution. He saw the rise of the
Church of England under Henry the Eighth, its
temporary extinction in an ocean of blood
during the reign of Mary, its re-establishment
under Elizabeth, its steady progress under
James, its explosion into jarring schisms and
sects in the stormy days of Charles the First, its
destruction under the Commonwealth, its
restoration with the restored monarchy. He could
speak, in the early years of Charles the Second's
reign, of the times when poor Englishmen were
relieved at convent-doors by abbots. When
first he drew breath, the discovery of the New
World was still the newest wonder in men's
mouths; and before he drew his latest breath, the
Pilgrim Fathers had for some years planted
another England beyond the waves of the
Atlantic. He beheld the whole progress of
Puritanism, from its infancy as a persecuted sect, to
the days of its brief ascendancy, and of its
subsequent fall to the level of barely tolerated dissent.
According to tradition, he lived for more than a
hundred years before the union of the crowns of
England and Scotland, and could tell stories of the
battle of Flodden Field, " where the Scots were
beat, with the death of their king;" yet he
endured for nearly seventy years after the fusion.
When he was a boy, arrows were still used in
warfare; he escorted a horse-load of arrows from
Flodden Field; but for years before his death,
gunpowder had blasted arrows into disuse and
oblivion. He was between thirty and forty
when the monasteries were dissolved; yet, in his
distant Yorkshire home, he must haye heard of
the Great Fire of London.

Little more than two years ago, our young
Prince of Wales shook hands with a man who had
stood in the rebel ranks against his (the prince's)
great-grandfather; a man who had been born a
colonial subject of England, and who had lived
for eighty years as a citizen of the republic he
had helped to establish. The old hero died a few
months later, but remained long enough in this
world to witness the commencement of the
dissolution of his nation. It must have seemed to
the prince as if he were contemplating a piece of
history done in flesh and blood. To a Frenchman
there must be something equally interesting
in the annual gathering on the emperor's
fête-day, of the remnant of the original Imperial
Guard; a handful of war-worn veterans,
scarred even as their flags are tattered by the
hurricane of battles that have long been history;
a feeble company, dwindling year by year,
and annually recording their own mortality in
their closer ranks. It is sad to think of the
days (now not far distant) when that impressive
troop will sink to six—to three—to one.
What will that one man do when he represents
the redoubtable Guard? Will he appear as usual
in the old costume on the 15th of August, and
parody that tragic epigram of the sole survivor
of a French regiment sent on some desperate
service, who, returning to his commanding officer,
reported himself in these words: " I am the
regiment"? Will that Last Man of the
Napoleonic military world, drink to his ghostly
comrades on the other side of death, as the last
of the crew of roysterers in the German ballad
drank to his—" and never again drank he"? Or,
when all the feasting is over in that gay Paris
which must be so strange and new to him—when