have attained no great measure of success. When he was thirty-four he married a woman with means, and when later she inherited a fortune from her brother, he retired from practice. He sat for many years as a Magistrate and Chairman of Quarter Sessions, and was knighted in 1772 for his services in this connection. But his real interests were literature and music. When twenty years of age he was already contributing to the Gentleman's Magazine, and while still a young man his compositions were played and applauded at Vauxhall and Ranelagh. A keen fisherman, he brought out an edition of the Compleat Angler in 1760, and in 1776 there appeared his General History of the Science and Practice of Music in five volumes. It was an unfortunate coincidence that the first volume of Dr. Burney's General History of Music, completed in four volumes in 1789, was published in the same year. The latter work was much the more popular of the two, as is shown by the once famous catch: Have you Sir John Hawkins' History? As performed it sounded like Sir John Hawkins How d'ye like him Burney's History pleases me.* Comparisons in this case were, in fact, ridiculous. Dr. Burney's was a careful scholarly treatise on music generally, beginning with that of the Egyptians, the Hebrews, and the Greeks, and going on to the great names of succeeding centuries. As is to be expected, there are many judgments which our own day would not accept, many composers now almost entirely forgotten who receive praise, while such names as Bach and Handel are barely noticed. It was a time when Reynolds himself was valuing the Caracci and Guido Reni far above the earlier masters whom later generations have learnt to appreciate. Hawkins' work was something entirely different, a collection of rare pieces of music with a continuous commentary; and, as Sir W. H. * Grove's Dictionary of Music, i. p. 423, Hadow has pointed out, posterity has reversed the verdict of his contemporaries. Burney's work has never been reprinted, while Novello issued a second edition of Hawkins' in 1852, and the one hundred and fifty items he prints are of permanent interest and value. The means brought him by his wife enabled him to purchase the rare works which had been collected by Dr. Pepusch, organist of the Charterhouse, and these no doubt formed the basis of his History.* He subsequently gave them to the British Museum. Hawkins was Horace Walpole's neighbour at Twickenham, and Walpole had all along encouraged the undertaking. There is a touch of contempt in his attitude: but the work appealed to him as an antiquarian, and his tone is not unfriendly. "(Hawkins) is so exceedingly religious and grave," he writes to Sir Horace Mann, as to abhor mirth except it is printed in the old Black Letter, and then he calls the most vulgar ballad pleasant and full of humour." 66 Hawkins met Johnson through Cave, and when in 1749 Johnson founded the Ivy Lane Club, he was one of the original members, together with Salter, Bathurst, Hawksworth, Ryland, Payne, Dyer, McGhie, and Barker. Johnson was then forty, Hawkins was thirty. Boswell, born in 1740, did not make Johnson's acquaintance until fourteen years later. The account he gives of the Ivy Lane Club is therefore inevitably slight, and he mentions but two names besides Hawkins-Dr. Richard Bathurst and Dr. Hawksworth. For information about this club, founded by Johnson we are told, with a view to enjoy literary discussion and amuse his evening hours, we must look not to Boswell but to Hawkins, who gives some account of most of the members, and incidentally throws light on his own personality. There was, first of all, Dr. Salter, Archdeacon of Norfolk, a man of about seventy when the club was founded. Of him Hawkins says no more than he was a deep scholar. Next comes Dr. Hawksworth, who had succeeded Johnson as compiler of the Parliamentary Debates in the Gentleman's Magazine while still in his twenties; and in his earlier years their relations were close. Boswell conjectures that it was because he resided at Bromley that Mrs. Johnson was buried there in 1752. Literary success may have turned his head; at any rate, it is significant that his name does not appear in Boswell's record of the last eight years of Johnson's life, and when Boswell * When Hawkins presented a copy of the book to the King, our amiable Monarch" said that he should not like to meet in the dark a man who had no love of music. 66 66 praised his imitation of Johnson's style, "he had the provoking effrontery to say he was not sensible of it." Hawkins, quoting the Gentleman's Magazine, records of his narrative of discoveries in the South Seas, that he was not a proper person to write it, and that the performance did not meet expectation. He died in 1773, some say of high living, others of chagrin from the ill reception of his narrative. It is also broadly hinted that he owed his Directorship of the East India Company to feminine influence. To this report he merely adds that Dr. Hawksworth "had been taught no art but that of writing, and was a hired clerk to one Harwood." John Ryland, though mentioned but casually by Boswell, was a lifelong friend of Johnson, who was with him during his last days. When within a few months of his death Johnson placed a stone on his wife's grave, he wrote to Ryland: Shall I ever be able to bear the sight of this stone? In your company I hope I shall." John Payne had published the Rambler, and was one of the survivors of the Ivy Lane Club who dined with Johnson during the last year of his life. "Dear Payne" became Accountant-General at the Bank of England. Of Ryland and Payne, Hawkins says nothing: but the rest of his fellow-members were less fortunate. Samuel Dyer was a young man of twenty-four when the club was founded. Johnson thought highly of his understanding and attainments, and he won the friendship of Burke. He was something of a dilettante, who, attaining a small fortune in middle life, promptly lost it. Hawkins devotes ten pages to a vicious attack on his memory, and states that, growing indifferent to the strict practice of religion, he showed easy compliance with invitations to Sunday evening parties in which mere conversation was not the chief amusement." But this was not the worst. "He had improved his relish for meats and drinks to such a degree of refinement that I once found him in a fit of melancholy, occasioned by a discovery that he had lost his taste for olives." He refused, when pressed by Hawkins, to write a life of Erasmus; he became a theist, he "entered into engagements for the sale and purchase of stock, and by violating them made shipwreck of his honour." It is fair to add that according to Malone and Dr. Percy the picture drawn by Hawkins is greatly overcharged and discoloured by his own malignant prejudices. McGhie was a doctor who came south after the '45, and though a physician at Guy's, appears to have met with little professional success. He gets off comparatively lightly as 66 66 66 one of those few of his countrymen whom Johnson could endure," a phrase which Boswell no doubt duly noted. Even Hawkins realized the pathos of his end: he "died of a broken heart, and was buried by a contribution of his friends." Dr. Bathurst was another physician who failed to attain success in spite of considerable attainments, and died an army physician twenty years before Johnson. "He never opened his hand to more than a guinea," says Hawkins. Dear Bathurst," says Johnson to Mrs. Piozzi, was a man to my heart's content: he hated a fool and he hated a rogue and he hated a Whig: he was a very good hater." The last of the company, Edmond Barker, another doctor, was a Unitarian and of the philosophical school of Lord Shaftesbury. The meetings must have been enlivened with many a battle, and so considerable were his attainments as a scholar and a metaphysician, that the victory need not always have rested with Johnson, so long as he was content to use the rapier and not the bludgeon. But perhaps because he found the contests too unequal or too exhausting, Barker's attendances became less frequent, and though in later life he was Librarian to the College of Physicians, his association was not renewed with Johnson. Hawkins, while admitting his intellectual capacity, calls him a thoughtless young man of slovenly appearance, and when fully dressed, a caricature. These, then, were the men with whom Johnson and Hawkins were associated when the former was still struggling into fame, and the latter, ten years his junior, was already fairly well known in musical and literary circles. It is in reading his remarks on his fellow-members that we are able to understand the dislike which Hawkins succeeded in evoking. If Johnson called Hawkins unclubable it can hardly be doubted that the name was deserved. The Ivy Lane Club came to an end in 1763, and some seven years afterwards, on the proposition of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there was founded the more famous "Literary Club," generally known as "The Club." The original members of this, in addition to Reynolds and Hawkins, were Burke, Nugent, Beauclerk, Langton, Goldsmith, and Chamier. These seven years had seen a substantial change in Johnson's fortunes. The Dictionary, which had appeared shortly before the Ivy Lane Club broke up, had established his reputation. The Idler and Rasselas had increased it. He had obtained a pension from the Government. The members of this club were not, as were for the most part the members of the Ivy Lane Club, seekers after fame. On the contrary, VOL. LXXXVII 6 they were men of established reputation or of high social standing, whereas Hawkins, still unknighted, was known, so far as he was known at all, merely as a man interested in music, an active magistrate, and a contributor to various magazines. It is therefore a safe conjecture that he owed his place in the club to Dr. Johnson, whose loyalty to old friends and to old associations was already a marked characteristic. Had the members of the new club been acquainted with the members of the old, it is doubtful, to say the least, whether they would have accepted Hawkins : and, as it was, they soon found him out. Hawkins gives two reasons for his withdrawal from it: first, that the meetings continued too late in the evening, and next that he "foresaw the impossibility of preventing the subversion of our society by the admission of exceptionable persons, yet another phrase which Boswell, who joined in 1773, must have noticed. The real reason, however, was almost certainly that given by Reynolds; Hawkins was on one occasion so rude to Burke that he was made to feel at the next meeting that his company was no longer desired. Rudeness to Burke was an unforgivable sin. "Burke," said Johnson, "is the only man whose common conversation corresponds with the general fame he has in the world." If Johnson was the outstanding personality of the club, Burke was indubitably the second. Johnson did not grudge Burke his pre-eminence in Parliament, for he said Burke was always the first man everywhere, while Burke on his side was content to allow Johnson more than his share of the conversation: "It is enough for me to have rung the bell for him." This relation between the two was something that Hawkins's small-mindedness could not understand, and more than his jealousy could bear. The incident recorded by Burney, that he refused to pay his portion of the reckoning for supper because he rarely ate his supper at home, can hardly have conduced to his popularity. He makes, however, an interesting remark about these meetings of the Literary Club. Though Johnson led the conversation, yet was he far from arrogating to himself that superiority which, some years before, he was disposed to contend for." The very vivacity of Boswell's narrative, it may be suggested, tends frequently to give a false impression. The most extended accounts of conversations which he supplies are no more than severely condensed reports of symposia which lasted during several hours. His purpose is to record the outstanding remarks of Johnson, |