Smith, thus drawn in the glowing colours of gratitude (1):

"Of Gilbert Walmesley, thus presented to my mind, let me indulge myself in the remembrance. I knew him very early; he was one of the first friends that literature procured me, and I hope, that at least my gratitude made me worthy of his notice.

"He was of an advanced age, and I was only not a boy, yet he never received my notions with contempt. He was a Whig, with all the virulence and malevolence of his party; yet difference of opinion did not keep us apart. I honoured him, and he endured me.

"He had mingled with the gay world without exemption from its vices or its follies; but had never neglected the cultivation of his mind. His belief of revelation was unshaken; his learning preserved his principles; he grew first regular, and then pious.

"His studies had been so various, that I am not able to name a man of equal knowledge. His acquaintance with books was great, and what he did not immediately know, he could, at least, tell where to find. Such was his amplitude of learning, and such his copiousness of communication, that it may be doubted whether a day now passes, in which I have not some advantage from his friendship.

"At this man's table I enjoyed many cheerful and instructive hours, with companions such as are not often found with one who has lengthened, and one who has gladdened life; with Dr. James, whose skill in physic will be long remembered; and with David Garrick, whom I hoped to have gratified with this character of our common friend. But what are the hopes of man! I am disappointed by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure."

(1) [The Life of Smith appeared in 1779.]

In these families he passed much time in his early years. In most of them, he was in the company of ladies, particularly at Mr. Walmesley's, whose wife and sisters-in-law, of the name of Aston, and daughters of a baronet, were remarkable for good breeding; so that the notion which has been industriously circulated and believed, that he never was in good company till late in life, and, consequently, had been confirmed in coarse and ferocious manners by long habits, is wholly without foundation. Some of the ladies have assured me, they recollected him well when a young man, as distinguished for his complaisance.

And that his politeness was not merely occasional and temporary, or confined to the circles of Lichfield, is ascertained by the testimony of a lady, who, in a paper with which I have been favoured by a daughter of his intimate friend and physician, Dr. Lawrence, thus describes Dr. Johnson some years afterwards.

"As the particulars of the former part of Dr. Johnson's life do not seem to be very accurately known, a lady hopes that the following information may not be unacceptable. She remembers Dr. Johnson on a visit to Dr. Taylor (1), at Ashbourn, some time between the end of the year 37, and the middle of the year 40; she rather thinks it to have been after he and his wife were removed to London. During his stay at Ashbourn, he made frequent visits to Mr. Meynell, at

(1) Dr. Taylor must have been at this time a very young man. His residence at Ashbourn was patrimonial, and not ecclesiastical; and the house and grounds which Dr. Johnson's visits have rendered remarkable, are now the property of Mr. Webster, Dr. Taylor's legatee. · CROKER.

Bradley, where his company was much desired by the ladies of the family, who were, perhaps, in point of elegance and accomplishments, inferior to few of those with whom he was afterwards acquainted. Mr. Meynell's eldest daughter was afterwards married to Mr. Fitzherbert, father to Mr. Alleyne Fitzherbert ('), lately minister to the court of Russia. Of her, Dr. Johnson said, in Dr. Lawrence's study, that she had the best understanding he ever met with in any human being. At Mr. Meynell's he also commenced that friendship with Mrs. Hill Boothby (2), sister to the present Sir Brook Boothby, which continued till her death. The young woman whom he used to call Molly Aston (3), was sister to Sir Thomas Aston (4), and daughter to a baronet; she was also sister to the wife of his friend, Mr. Gilbert Walmesley. Besides his intimacy with the above-mentioned persons, who were surely people of rank and education, while he was yet at Lichfield he used to be frequently at the house of Dr. Swinfen, a gentleman of very ancient family in Staffordshire, from which, after the death of his elder brother, he inherited a good estate. He was, besides, a physician of very extensive practice; but for want of

(1) [Afterwards Lord St. Helens.]

(2) [Miss Boothby was born in 1708, and died in 1756. For the last three years of her life this lady corresponded with Dr. Johnson, and some of her letters are inserted in the APPENDIX to Vol. II.]

(3) The words of Sir John Hawkins, p. 316.

(4) Sir Thomas Aston, Bart., who died in January, 1724-5, left one son, named Thomas also, and eight daughters. Of the daughters, Catharine married Johnson's friend, the Hon. Henry Hervey; Margaret, Gilbert Walmesley. Another of these ladies [Jane] married the Rev. Mr. Gastrell [the man who cut down Shakspeare's mulberry-tree]; Mary, or Molly Aston, as she was usually called, became the wife of Captain Brodie of the navy. Another sister, who was unmarried, was living at Lichfield in 1776. - -MALONE. [She died in 1785.]

due attention to the management of his domestic concerns, left a very large family in indigence. One of his daughters, Mrs. Desmoulins, afterwards found an asylum in the house of her old friend, whose doors were always open to the unfortunate, and who well observed the precept of the Gospel, for he was kind to the unthankful and to the evil.'" (')

In the forlorn state of his circumstances, he accepted of an offer to be employed as usher (2) in the

(1) Here Mr. Boswell has admitted the insinuation of an anonymous informant against poor Mrs. Desmoulins, as bitter, surely, as any thing which can be charged against any of his rival biographers; and, strange to say, this scandal is conveyed in a quotation from the book of Charity. Mrs. Desmoulins was, probably, not popular with "the ladies of Lichfield." She is supposed to have forfeited the protection of her own family by, what they thought, a derogatory marriage. Her husband, it is said, was a writing-master. CROKER.

(2) [It has appeared, since Boswell wrote, that Johnson had been endeavouring, the year before this, to obtain the situation of usher at the Grammar School of Stourbridge, where he himself had been partly educated. The following letter of thanks to the schoolmaster, who had tried to help him on that occasion, was first published in the Manchester Herald, and afterwards inserted in Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. viii. p. 416.:

"To MR. GEORGE HICKMAN.

"Lichfield, Oct. 30. 1731. "Sir, I have so long neglected to return you thanks for the favour and assistance received from you at Stourbridge, that I am afraid you have now done expecting it. I can, indeed, make no apology, but by assuring you, that this delay, whatever was the cause of it, proceeded neither from forgetfulness, disrespect, nor ingratitude. Time has not made the sense of obligation less warm, nor the thanks I return less sincere. But while I am acknowledging one favour, I must beg another that you would excuse the composition of the verses you desired. pleased to consider, that versifying against one's inclination is the most disagreeable thing in the world; and that one's own disappointment is no inviting subject; and that though the gratifying of you might have prevailed over my dislike of it, yet it proves, upon reflection, so barren, that, to attempt to write

Be

school of Market-Bosworth, in Leicestershire, to which it appears, from one of his little fragments of a diary, that he went on foot, on the 16th of July.

"Julii 16. Bosvortiam pedes petii." But it is not true, as has been erroneously related, that he was assistant to the famous Anthony Blackwall, whose merit has been honoured by the testimony of Bishop Hurd (1), who was his scholar; for Mr. Blackwall died on the 8th of April, 1730 (2), more than a year before Johnson left the University.

This employment was very irksome to him in every respect, and he complained grievously of it in his letters to his friend, Mr. Hector, who was now settled as a surgeon at Birmingham. The letters are lost; but Mr. Hector recollects his writing "that the poet had described the dull sameness of his existence in these words, Vitam continet una dies' (one day contains the whole of my life); that it was unvaried as the note of the cuckoo; and that he did not know whether it was more disagreeable for him to teach, or the boys to learn, the

As I am

upon it, is to undertake to build without materials. yet unemployed, I hope you will, if any thing should offer, remember and recommend, Sir, your humble servant, "SAM. JOHNSON."]

(1) There is here (as Mr. James Boswell observes to me) a slight inaccuracy. Bishop Hurd, in the Epistle Dedicatory prefixed to his Commentary on Horace's Art of Poetry, &c. does not praise Blackwall, but the Rev. Mr. Budworth, headmaster of the Grammar School at Brewood, in Staffordshire, who had himself been bred under Blackwall. MALONE. [We shall see presently, on the authority of Mr. Nichols, that Johnson proposed himself to Mr. Budworth, as an assistant.]

(2) See Gent. Mag., Dec. 1784, p. 957.