“Not because she loved Johnson better, but because she liked being in the limelight worse,” commented Mark.
“Of course,” he continued, “no Englishman misses doing the kowtow to Johnson when he’s got half a chance, but of our own people, coming to the Cheese, ninety-nine per cent. do so because they don’t know the man, and the others because they feel tickled to honor a writer a hundred and fifty years or so after he is good and rotten.”
“Read Johnson plentifully, I suppose,” mocked Bram Stoker, famous as author, critic, barrister and Henry Irving’s associate.
“Not guilty—never a written word of his,” answered honest Mark. “I gauge Johnson’s character by his talks with that sot Bozzy, whom foolish old Carlyle called the greatest biographer ever because, I suppose, Bozzy interviewed Johnson on such momentous questions as: ‘What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in the Tower with a baby?’”
“Well, what would you do,” asked Bram.
“Throw it out of the window to a passing milkman, if it was weaned and if there was no cow around,” said Mark.
When the merriment had subsided, Mark continued the slaughter of Johnson: “Why, he was a man who would have called brother a cannibal island king who had eaten a Jesuit, while he would have mobilized the whole British fleet against savages who dined off an Episcopalian.”
“And if they had fried a Bishop of the established Church down in the Pacific?”
“Ask me something easier,” answered Mark. “For all I know Johnson may have been the guy who invented a seething lake of fire and brimstone de luxe for married couples who had loved wisely and too well on a Christian holiday.”
“Boldly stolen from Voltaire,” suggested Bram.