GOLDSMITH’S GRAVE.
When he lay dead in his chambers at 2 Brick Court, as Forster relates, the staircase was filled with mourners the reverse of domestic—“women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for; outcasts of that great, solitary, wicked city, to whom he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable. And he had domestic mourners, too. His coffin was reopened at the request of Miss Horneck and her sister (such was the regard he was known to have for them), that a lock might be cut from his hair. It was in Mrs. Gwyn’s possession when she died, after nearly seventy years.” When Burke was told that Goldsmith was dead, he burst into tears; and when the news reached Reynolds in his Leicester Square painting-room, he laid his brush aside—a thing he had not been known to do even in times of great family distress—left his study, and entered it no more that day. A vain and envious fool is not mourned in that fashion.
“I have been many a time in the chambers in the Temple which were his,” writes Thackeray, “and passed up the staircase which Johnson and Burke and Reynolds trod to see their friend, their poet, their kind Goldsmith—the stair on which the poor women sat weeping bitterly when they heard that the greatest and most generous of all men was dead within the black oak door.”
No. 2 Brick Court would be memorable enough if it held no other memory; but in 1839 Mackworth Praed died in the same house, and for a short time in 1855 Thackeray too had chambers in it.
CHAPTER VI
HOMES AND HAUNTS OF JOHNSON AND BOSWELL
If we were not quite such a business people, and had not so fully satisfied ourselves that the making of money is the chief end of existence, we should put up a statue to Dr. Johnson in Fleet Street, even if we had to knock down a house or two to find room for it. The statue by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald that has been erected in St. Clement Danes Churchyard, in the Strand, is better than nothing, but it is too insignificant in appearance, and stands in the wrong place. Johnson is still so far removed from death that he is more alive to-day than when he was living, and Fleet Street, and the courts and alleys opening out of Fleet Street, are his proper kingdom. Other great spirits haunt the same ground, but he overshadows them all.