WHERE BOSWELL FIRST MET JOHNSON.
“I was highly pleased with the extraordinary vigour of his conversation,” he concludes his account of the meeting, “and regretted that I was drawn away from it by an engagement at another place. I had for a part of the evening been left alone with him, and had ventured to make an observation now and then, which he received very civilly; so I was satisfied that, though there was a roughness in his manner, there was no ill-nature in his disposition. Davies followed me to the door; and when I complained to him a little of the hard blows which the great man had given me, he kindly took upon him to console me by saying, ‘Don’t be uneasy; I can see he likes you very well.’”
Davies’s shop is kept nowadays by a Covent Garden salesman. Instead of being lined with books, it is filled with baskets of fruit and sacks of potatoes, and the parlour wall and that glass-panelled parlour door are thrown down, and parlour and shop are all one. But the upper part of the house remains practically unaltered, and with a little imagining you can restore the lower to what it was when these walls held the gruff rumbling of the Doctor’s voice, and looked down on the humiliation of Boswell under the roguish eyes of Davies and his pretty wife.
Another house that has glamorous associations with Johnson is No. 5 Adelphi Terrace, where Garrick lived, and where he died, in a back room on the first floor, in 1779. Two years later Johnson was one of a party that dined there with Mrs. Garrick, and one cannot do better than repeat the indispensable Boswell’s report of the event:—
“On Friday, April 20, I spent with him one of the happiest days that I remember to have enjoyed in the whole course of my life. Mrs. Garrick, whose grief for the loss of her husband was, I believe, as sincere as wounded affection and admiration could produce, had this day, for the first time since his death, a select party of his friends to dine with her. The company was: Mrs. Hannah More, who lived with her, and whom she called her chaplain; Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Burney, Dr. Johnson, and myself. We found ourselves very elegantly entertained at her house in the Adelphi, where I have passed many a pleasing hour with him ‘who gladdened life.’ She looked well, talked of her husband with complacency, and while she cast her eyes on his portrait, which hung over the chimney-piece, said that ‘death was now the most agreeable object to her.’... We were all in fine spirits; and I whispered to Mrs. Boscawen, ‘I believe this is as much as can be made of life.’” After recording the conversation of Johnson and divers of the others, Boswell goes on: “He and I walked away together. We stopped a little by the rails of the Adelphi, looking on the Thames, and I said to him, with some emotion, that I was now thinking of two friends we had lost who once lived in the buildings behind us, Beauclerk and Garrick. ‘Ay, sir,’ said he tenderly, ‘and two such friends as cannot be supplied.’”
BOSWELL’S HOUSE. GREAT QUEEN STREET.