‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘anything about the subject, for I could not read on till I came to it; I got through half a dozen lines, but I could observe no other subject than eternal dulness. I don’t know what is the matter with David; I am afraid he is grown superannuated, for his prologues and epilogues used to be incomparable.’
‘Nothing is so fatiguing,’ said Mrs. Thrale, ‘as the life of a wit; he and Wilkes are the two oldest men of their ages I know, for they have both worn themselves out by being eternally on the rack to give entertainment to others.’
‘David, madam,’ said the doctor, ‘looks much older than he is; for his face has had double the business of any other man’s; it is never at rest; when he speaks one minute, he has quite a different countenance to what he assumes the next. I don’t believe he ever kept the same look for half an hour together in the whole course of his life; and such an eternal, restless, fatiguing play of the muscles must certainly wear out a man’s face before its real time.’
‘O yes,’ cried Mrs. Thrale; ‘we must certainly make some allowance for such wear and tear of a man’s face.’
The next name that was started was that of Sir John Hawkins, and Mrs. Thrale said:
‘Why now, Dr. Johnson, he is another of those whom you suffer nobody to abuse but yourself; Garrick is one, too; for if any other person speaks against him, you browbeat him in a minute!’
‘Why, madam,’ answered he, ‘they don’t know when to abuse him, and when to praise him; I will allow no man to speak ill of David that he does not deserve; and as to Sir John, why really I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom: but to be sure he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.’
We all laughed, as he meant we should, at this curious manner of speaking in his favour, and he then related an anecdote that he said he knew to be true in regard to his meanness. He said that Sir John and he once belonged to the same club, but that as he ate no supper after the first night of his admission, he desired to be excused paying his share.
‘And was he excused?’
‘O yes; for no man is angry at another for being inferior to himself! we all scorned him, and admitted his plea. For my part, I was such a fool as to pay my share for wine, though I never tasted any. But Sir John was a most unclubbable man!’