and to quote others only to the extent that they led up to, or induced him to expand, his table talk. Hawkins's remark quoted above reminds us that a mental picture of Reynolds listening patiently, trumpet to ear, Goldsmith scowling in a corner, Burke placidly silent, Beauclerk and Langton and the rest admiringly attentive while the stream of monologue flows on, broken only by occasional interjections crushingly silenced, is incorrect. On the contrary, everybody took their turn, though no doubt it was Johnson who gave the conversation its direction; and if in the warfare of words somebody sometimes got unhorsed, or even suffered momentary injury, it was no more than an incident, and the game went merrily on.

Hawkins was not a member of the club founded by Johnson in the last year of his life, the Essex Street Club. He speaks of it as a sorry "expedient to kill time," and says that it was a mortification to his friends to associate in idea the clink of the tankard with moral disquisition and literary investigation. This is supercilious nonsense on his part. Johnson was old, he was lonely, he was ill. The new club was intended to assure him company on three evenings a week; and the names of the members which Boswell supplies sufficiently show that those he collected around him were thoroughly qualified to enjoy his society. Miss Hawkins said later in her Memoirs: "Boswell was well justified in his resentment of my Father's designation of this club as a Sixpenny Club, meeting at an Alehouse. Honestly speaking, I dare say my Father did not like being passed over."

Boswell's last meeting with Johnson was on June 30, 1784, at dinner with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and two days later he left for Scotland. It was Hawkins who was with Johnson during his last days, Hawkins who induced him to make his will, Hawkins who was his executor, and Hawkins who arranged his funeral. The friendship between Boswell and Johnson was, it is clear, subject from time to time to interruptions, partly owing to Johnson's lethargy, but even more to Boswell's peculiar temperament. He was ready to sustain with perfect good humour, and subsequently to record, treatment which few other men would willingly sustain, and yet during his absences in Scotland he would write letters which show him to be petulant and exacting. He becomes silent, and a kindly and soothing letter from London is necessary in order to evoke a cheerful reply from Edinburgh or Auchinleck. In July 1779, for instance, Johnson writes to him: "What can possibly

have happened that keeps us two such strangers to each other?... Is it a fit of humour that has disposed you to try who can hold out longest without writing?" And again in the following month: "Are you playing the same trick again and trying who can keep silence longest ? What can be the cause of this second fit of silence, I cannot conjecture; but after one trick, I will not be cheated by another, nor will harass my thoughts with conjecture about the motives of a man who, probably, only acts by caprice (September 9th). Johnson's diagnosis was perfectly correct, for in the letter to him of July 17th Boswell says: "In a livelier state I had often suffered severely from long intervals of silence on your part and I had even been chid by you for expressing my uneasiness. I was willing to take advantage of my insensibility, and while I could bear the experiment, to try whether your affection for me would, after an unusual silence on my part, make you write first. I shall never again put you to any test." During the summer and autumn of 1784 Johnson was failing at any rate, he was not well enough for any more tests. It is noteworthy that Boswell, once he had left London, can quote no more of his own letters to Johnson, and only one from Johnson to himself. Boswell himself frankly admits that owing to ill-health he wrote but rarely. Having conjured him not to do me the injustice of charging me with affectation I was with much regret long silent." In his final letter to Boswell (November 5th) Johnson writes: "Are you sick or are you sullen? Whatever be the reason, if it be less than necessity drive it away: and of the short life that we have, make the best use for friends." Boswell comments on this: little painful to me to find that in a paragraph of this letter, which I have omitted, he still persevered in arraigning me as before, which was strange in him who had so much experience of what I suffered. I, however, wrote to him two as kind letters as I could: the last of which came too late to be read by him, for his illness increased more rapidly upon him than I had apprehended; but I had the consolation of being informed that he spoke of me on his deathbed with affection, and I look forward with humble hope of renewing our friendship in another world." Though there is something very touching in the phrasing of these sentences, it is significant that with the alarming details contained in Johnson's letter of November 5th before him, Boswell yet made no attempt to undertake the four days' journey to London. Mr. Percy Fizgerald conjectures that

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yourself and your Yet it was not a

though Johnson had been ailing so long, Boswell failed to realize that the end was indeed at hand, and that being in one of his frequent moods of depression, he could not face the death-bed of his friend. But he also points out that during his last visit to London, Boswell was less frequently than hitherto in Johnson's society, and that he had ceased to keep the same detailed reports of his friend's conversation. However this may be, in the codicil to his will, Johnson made bequests of books to certain of his friends, and Hawkins's name stands first on the list. He received the Annales Ecclesiastici of Baronius, Holinshed's and Stowe's Chronicles, and an octavo Prayer Book. The names of Dr. Burney, Dr. Taylor, Dr. Adams, and Boswell himself are all omitted, but this is no doubt due to the fact that the codicil was signed only five days before death. Boswell remarks that "by assiduous attendance upon Johnson in his last illness (Hawkins) obtained the office of one of his executors, in consequence of which the booksellers of London employed him to publish an edition of Dr. Johnson's works and to write his life." The implication here is clearly that Hawkins forced himself upon Johnson when he was dying in order to serve his own ends, to obtain the office of executor and to write his life. Hawkins was one of those unfortunate people who even when they do the right thing, do it in the wrong way. But he was a lawyer, and felt himself justified in urging Johnson to make his will. He was a man of standing and repute well fitted to be an executor: he was an author and an editor who had known Johnson well during thirty-five years. It is, therefore, not strange that the booksellers should invite him to write a Life and to edit the works, galling though it might be to Boswell away in Scotland, sulking or indifferent. One might indeed have thought that Hawkins was treated by his contemporaries with gross unfairness were it not that he is one of that great company who have committed the fatal error of writing a book. It is sufficient to read his Life of Johnson for anyone to be able to judge with a considerable measure of accuracy how much truth there was in the charges so freely brought against him. The answer can only be that there was a great deal.

It is perhaps curious that Hawkins's Life, which appeared in 1787, three years after Johnson's death, has never been reprinted in extenso. Dr. Birkbeck Hill gives about fifty-four pages to it in his Johnsonian Miscellanies, a substantial portion of which is taken up by his own excellent, if somewhat discursive, notes. With all its serious faults the

book throws light on many things besides the opinions of Hawkins. Its very discursiveness, naturally irritating to those contemporaries eager to read about Johnson, gives it an interest of its own for readers of to-day. Discursive it undeniably is. There is an account of a Portuguese Mission to Abyssinia, and a dissertation on the decline of British watchmaking. Long quotations are given from Urquhart's Life of the Admirable Crichton, and a statement as to the respective rights of debtor and creditor. We are given the author's views as to the proportions of columns, and as to the respective merits and defects of Fielding Smollett and Richardson. Among other things dealt withsometimes in considerable detail are the humanity of the law and its tenderness to felons, life in St. Kilda, the weakness and difficulties of the medical profession, the first Prayer Book of Edward VI, the gradual improvement in public morals, the failings of authors, Jonas Hanway's Essay on Tea (in which he asserts "that the practice of drinking tea is productive of harm among the lower classes of people "), the genius of Sterne, and a perambulation of London. The mention of Johnson's lack of appreciation of Milton in his Lives of the Poets is made the excuse for eight pages regarding an attack on Milton's memory and reputation in another quarter. As instances of the Parliamentary Reports contributed by Johnson to Cave's Magazine, he occupies no less than twelve pages in giving Lord Hardwicke's speech on Carteret's Address to the Crown praying for the removal of Walpole, and about nine in setting out Chesterfield's speech in regard to the retailing of liquor. No book was ever so outrageously padded. Out of its 600 pages, not more than half can truthfully be described as having any direct bearing on the life of Johnson.*

Hawkins's Life has been blamed for exhibiting Johnson in an unfavourable light, for emphasizing his weaknesses and peculiarities and inconsistencies; but in fact the picture drawn by Hawkins does not differ materially from the more famous work of Boswell. The qualities and weaknesses of the author are equally apparent in each book: and though the work of Hawkins is no more than a sketch, it supplies something that is lacking in the more finished portrait, and in no particular contradicts it. Whether either author, or all the contemporary writers put together, have given posterity a correct impression of Johnson raises an interest

*It is worth mentioning in extenuation that within three months of begin. ning the work, Hawkins lost his library by fire.

ing question. It was Hawkins himself who described him as the most humorous man I ever knew," and Jowett used always to maintain that he was much more what he called "A rollicking King of Society" than is generally

realized.

his

Within two years of the appearance of his book, Hawkins was dead. In the spring of 1789 he went to drink the waters of Islington Spa, in May he had a paralytic seizure, and on the 21st of that month he died. He lies buried in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey under a stone bearing, in accordance with his wish, merely the initials J. H.* In 1791 Boswell's work appeared, and the references to Hawkins in the text and in the notes make piquant reading. Hawkins has made a selection from material afterwards used by Johnson in the Rambler. “But he has not been able to read the manuscript distinctly. . . . It would have been better to have left blanks than to write nonsense. Hawkins compares the methods of Johnson in preparing Rambler papers with Addison's rough notes for his Spectator articles. articles. Boswell remarks that Hawkins was unlucky upon all occasions," and that in fact there is no comparison possible between them. Hawkins's Life gives, among many other things, an account of the controversy as to whether the arches of the new Blackfriars Bridge should be semicircular or elliptical. On this Boswell remarks: "Sir John Hawkins has given a long detail of it in that manner vulgarly but significantly called rigmarole. . . . To follow the knight through all this would be a useless fatigue to myself, and not a little disgusting to my readers." He considers that Hawkins regarded Johnson's character and conduct "with an unhappy prejudice." This criticism arose from the statement made by Hawkins that those who lent books to Johnson seldom saw them again. This, after all, was no very serious charge. Johnson kept a record of books borrowed and books lent, and the record was no doubt imperfect, as such records are liable to be. Those who lend books must face risks. Boswell even states that Hawkins's account of Johnson's last days is such as to "suggest a charge against Johnson of intentionally hastening his end." This is grossly unfair to Hawkins. What happened What happened was, according to Frank Barber's story,† that Johnson on the day before his death, * The Wits wrote an epitaph mocking his pompous and affected drawl: "Here lies Sir John Hawkins,

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In his shoes and stawkings."

† Johnson's negro servant.