It may seem rather strange after this that Baretti was never admitted to the membership of the celebrated club. He was intimate with nearly all the original members, but the truth remained that he was not what Johnson called a clubbable man: he had too many hooks, not too few.
Such was the man who was brought before Sir John Fielding, the magistrate at Bow Street, on the morning after the tragedy, charged with murder; and then it was that he found the value of the friendships which he had formed in England. The first person to hasten to his side in his extremity was Oliver Goldsmith, the man whom he had so frequently made the object of his sarcasm, whose peculiarities he had mimicked, not in the playful manner of Garrick or Foote, but in his own spiteful style, with the grim humour of the disappointed man. Goldsmith it was who opened his purse for him and got a coach for him when he was remanded until the next day, riding by his side to the place of his incarceration. Goldsmith was by his side when the question of bail was discussed before Lord Mansfield. For some reason which does not require any particular explanation, it was not thought that Goldsmith as a bailsman would appeal irresistibly to the authorities, but the names of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Edmund Burke, Mr. David Garrick, and Mr. H. Fitzherbert were submitted to Lord Mansfield, and immediately accepted. An amusing anecdote was current regarding the few days of Baretti's incarceration. One morning he was visited by a teacher of languages, who begged a trifling favour of him. This was merely a letter of recommendation to Baretti's pupils, so that the applicant might have a chance of taking them over “when you are hanged, sir.” The fact that this sympathetic visitor was allowed to depart without molestation makes people doubt whether Baretti was so bad-tempered after all. He did not assault the man. “You rascal!” he cried. “If I were not in my own room, I would kick you downstairs directly.”
The trial was fixed for October 20th at the Old Bailey, and a few days before this date a number of the prisoner's friends met together to consult as to the line which should be taken for his defence. It seems that they were not all agreed on some points; this was only to be expected, considering what an array of wisdom was brought together upon the occasion of these consultations, and considering also the course which was adopted by Dr. Johnson, who thought that the interests of the prisoner would be advanced by getting up an academical discussion with Burke. Johnson and Burke were notorious rivals in conversation in those days when conversation was regarded as an art, and men and women seemed to have plenty of leisure to talk together for the sake of talking, and to argue together for the sake of argument, and to be rude to one another for the sake of wit. Boswell was for ever extolling Johnson at the expense of Burke; and indeed, so far as one can gather from his pages, Johnson was the ruder man.
The example that Boswell gives of his own readiness in making Goldsmith “shut up” when he questioned Johnson's superiority to Burke in discussion is one of the best instances of the little Scotsman's incapacity to perceive the drift of an argument. “Is he like Burke who winds into a subject like a serpent?” asked Goldsmith.
“But” (said I) “Dr. Johnson is the Hercules that strangled serpents in his cradle.”
This repartee which Boswell gleefully records is about equal to the reply made by one of the poets who was appealed to in the “Bab Ballads” to say if he wrote “the lovely cracker mottoes my Elvira pulls at supper.” It will be remembered that the poet whose name rhymes with “supper” replied:
“'A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men dread a bandit,'