A Little English Gallery

by Louise Imogen Guiney

IN Samuel Johnson’s famous circle nearly every man stands for himself, full of definite purpose and power. But two young men are there who did nothing of moment, whose names chime often down the pages of all his biographies, and to whom the world must pay honor, if only for the friendship they took and gave. As Apollo should be set about with his Graces “tripping neatly,” so the portentous old apparition of Johnson seems never so complete and endearing as when attended by these two above all things else Johnsonians. When the Turk’s Head is ajar in Gerrard Street, in shadow-London; when the “unclubable” Hawkins strides over the threshold, and Hogarth goes by the window with his large nod and smile; when Chamier is there reading, Goldsmith posing in purple silk small-clothes, Sir Joshua fingering his trumpet, Burke and little brisk Garrick stirring “bishop”[45] in their glasses, and the king of the hour, distinguished by his lack of ruffles, is rolling about in his chair of state, saying something prodigiously humorous and wise, it is still Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk who most give the scene its human genial lustre, standing with laughter behind him, arm in arm. They were his favorites, and it is the most adorable thing about them both that they made out to like James Boswell, who was jealous of them. (Perhaps they had apprehended thoroughly Newman’s fine aphorism concerning a bore: “You may yield, or you may flee: you cannot conquer!”) The rare glimpses we have of their brotherly lives is through the door which opens or shuts for Johnson. Between him and them was deep and enduring affection, and what little is known of them has a right to be more, for his sake.

Bennet Langton, born in 1741 in the very neighborhood famous now as the birthplace of Tennyson, was the elder son of the odd and long-descended George Langton of Langton, and of Diana his wife, daughter of Edmund Turnor, Esquire, of Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire. While a lad in the fen-country, he read The Rambler, and conceived the purest enthusiasm for its author. He came to London, indeed, on the ideal errand of seeking him out, and, thanks to the kind apothecary Levett, found the idol of his imagination at home at No. 17 Gough Square, Fleet Street. Despite the somewhat staggering circumstances of Johnson’s attire,—for the serious boy had rashly presupposed a stately, fastidious, and well-mannered figure,—he paid his vows, and commended himself to his new friend for once and all. Langton entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1757, at the age of sixteen.[46] The Doctor, who had known him about three years, followed his career at the university with interest, writing to Langton’s tutor, then “dear Tom Warton,” just appointed to the professorship of poetry held by his father, and afterwards poet-laureate: “I see your pupil: his mind is as exalted as his stature,” and to Langton’s self the sweet generality: “I love, dear sir, to think of you.” He even paid his Freshman a visit, and swam sportively across a dangerous pool in the Isis, in the teeth of his warning; and here also, in the Oxford which was long ago his own “tent of a night,” he fell across a part of his destiny in the shape of that strange bird, Mr. Topham Beauclerk, then a taking scapegrace of eighteen. The Doctor must have shaken his head at first, and wondered at the juxtaposition of this arrant Lord of Misrule and the “evangelical goodness” of his admirable Langton, until mollified by the knowledge that a species of cult for himself, and ardent perusal of his writings, had first brought them together. It was a pleasant thought to him, that of the two young ribboned heads high in the quadrangle, bending for the ninth time over The Reasons Why Advice is Generally Ineffectual, The Mischief of Unbounded Raillery, and the jolly satire on Screech-Owls; or smiling over the shy Verecundulus and the too-celebrated Misellus who were part of the author’s machinery for adding “Christian ardor to virtue, and Christian confidence to truth.”

Beauclerk, like Langton, was a critic and a student; he was well-bred, urbane, and of excellent natural parts; moreover, he was a wit, one of the very foremost of his day, when wits grew in every garden. An only child, he was born in London in the December of 1739, and named after that benevolent Topham of Windsor who left the manors of Clewer Brocas and Didworth and a collection of paintings and drawings to his father, the handsome wild Lord Sydney Beauclerk, fifth son of the first Duke of St. Albans, and also, in his time, a gentleman commoner of Trinity. Lord Sydney died early, in the autumn of 1744, and was buried in Westminster Abbey with his hero-brother Aubrey, whose epitaph, still to be read there, Thomson seems to have written. All the pretty toys and curios passed to Topham the little boy, under the guardianship of Lady Beauclerk, his excellent but literal mother, once Mary Norris of Speke in Lancashire. His tutor was named Parker, and must have been a much-enduring man. Young Beauclerk grew up, bearing a resemblance in many ways to Charles II.; and so it befell that with his aggravating flippancy, his sharp sense, his quiver full of gibes, his time-wasting, money-wasting moods, foreign as Satan and his pomps to those of his sweet-natured college companion, he was able to strike Dr. Johnson in his own political weak spot. A flash of the liquid Stuart eye was enough to disarm Johnson at the very moment when he was calling up his most austere frown; it was enough to turn the vinegar of his wrath to the honey of kindness. Il ne nous reste qu’une chose à faire: embrassons-nous! as the wheedling Prince, at a crisis, says to Henry Esmond. Johnson, as everybody knows, was a Jacobite. No sincerer testimony could he have given to his inexplicable liking for a royal rogue than that he allowed Nell Gwynn’s great-grandson to tease him and tyrannize over him during an entire lifetime. A choice spectacle this: Mr. Topham Beauclerk, on his introduction, literally bewitching Dr. Samuel Johnson! The stolid moralist was enraptured with his Jack-o’-lantern antics; he rejoiced in his manners, his taste and literary learning; admired him indiscreetly, rich clothes, equipage, and all; followed his whims meekly, expostulated with him almost against his traitorous impulses, and clung to him to the end in unbroken fondness and faith.

Beauclerk had immense gayety and grace, and the full force given by high spirits. His accurate, ever-widening knowledge of books and men, his consummate culture, and his fearlessness, sat handsomely on one who was regarded by contemporary old ladies as a mere “macaroni.” It was a matter of course that he tried for no degree at college. The mistress of Streatham Park, who was by no means his adorer, and who remembered his chief wickedness in remembering that “he wished to be accounted wicked,” informs us in a private jotting since published that he was “a man of very strict veracity.” A philosopher and a truth-teller, whatever his worldly weaknesses, was sure to be a character within the range of Johnson’s affections. It was he who most troubled the good Doctor, he for whom he suffered in silence, with whom he wrangled; he whose insuperable taunting promise, never reaching any special development, vexed and disheartened him; yet, perhaps because of these very things, though Bennet Langton was infinitely more to his mind, it was Absalom, once again, whom the old fatherly heart loved best. Nor was he unrepaid. None loved him better, in return, than his “Beau,” the very mirror of the name, who was wont to pick his way up the grimy Fleet Street courts “with veneration,” as Boswell records.

Bennet Langton, as Mr. Forster expresses it in his noble Life of Goldsmith, was “an eminent example of the high and humane class who are content to ‘ring the bell’ to their friends.” He was a mild young visionary, scrupulous, tolerant, and generous in the extreme; modest, contemplative, averse to dissipation; a perfect talker and reader, and a perfect listener; with a face sweet as a child’s, fading but now, among his kindred, on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He left a gracious memory behind at Oxford, where his musing bust adorns the old monastic library of Trinity. He was six feet six inches tall, slenderly built, and slightly stooping. “The ladies got about him in drawing-rooms,” said Edmund Burke, “like maids about the Maypole!”

Miss Hawkins, in her Memoirs, names him as the person with whom Johnson was certainly seen to the fairest advantage. His deferent suave manner was the best foil possible to the Doctor’s extraordinary explosions. He had supreme self-command; no one ever saw him angry; and in most matters of life, as a genuine contrast to his beloved friend Beauclerk, he was apt to take things a shade too seriously. We learn from Mr. Henry Best, author of some good Personal and Literary Memorials, that the advance rumors of the French Revolution found Langton, in the fullest sense, an aristocrat; but it was not long before he became, from conviction, a thorough Liberal, and so remained, although he suffered a great unpopularity, owing to this change, in his native county. He wrote, in 1760, a little book of essays entitled Rustics, which never got beyond the passivity of manuscript. The year before, under the date of July 28th, Langton contributed to the pages of The Idler the paper numbered 67 and entitled A Scholar’s Journal. It is a pleasant study of procrastination and of shifting plans, a gentle bit of humor to be ranked as autobiographic. There is an indorsement of Montrose in its heroic advice to “risk the certainty of little for the chance of much.” But Langton’s graceful academic pen was not destined to a public career. Perseverance of any sort was not native to him. He fulfilled beautifully, adds the vivacious Miss Hawkins, “the pious injunction of Sir Thomas Browne, ‘to sit quietly in the soft showers of Providence,’ and might, without injustice, be characterized as utterly unfit for every species of activity.” Yet at the call of duty, so well was the natural man dominated by his unclouded will, he girded himself to any exertion. Wine-drinking was habitual with him, and he felt its need to sharpen and rouse his intellect; “but the idea of Bennet Langton being what is called ‘overtaken,’” wrote the same associate whom we have been quoting, “is too preposterous to be dwelt on.” She furnishes one illustration of Langton’s Greek serenity. Talking to a company, of a chilly forenoon, in his own house, he paused to remark that if the fire lacked attention it might go out: a brief, casual, murmurous interruption. He resumed his discourse, breaking off presently, and pleading abstractedly with eye in air: “Pray ring for coals!” All sat looking at the fire, and so little solicitous about the impending catastrophe that presently Langton was off again on the stream of his softened eloquence. In a few minutes came another lull. “Did anybody answer that bell?” A general negative. “Did anybody ring that bell?” A sly shaking of heads. And once more the inspired monody soared among the clouds, at last dropping meditatively to the hearthstone: “Dear, dear, the fire is out!”

Langton was the centre of a group, wherever he happened to be, talking delightfully, and twirling the oblong gold-mounted snuff-box, which promptly appeared as sociabilities began: a conspicuous figure, with his height, his courteous smile, his mild beauty, and his habit of crossing his arms over his breast, or locking his hands together on his knee. He was a great rider, and could run like a hound. He had a queerness of constitution which seemed to leave him at his lowest ebb every afternoon about two of the clock, forgetful, weary, confused, and without an idea in his head; but after a little food, he was himself again. At dinner-parties he usually rose fasting, “such was the perpetual flow of his conversation, and such the incessant claim made upon him.” A morning call from Mr. Langton was a thing to suggest the eternal years; yet we are told that satiety dwelt not where he was; like Cowley, “he never oppressed any man’s parts, or put any man out of countenance.” He had much the same sense of humor as Beauclerk had, and his speech was quite as full of good sense and direct observation, if not as cutting. He indicted a fault of Edmund Burke’s in one extreme stroke: “Burke whisks the end of his tail in the face of an arguer!” Johnson, the arch-whisker of tails, was not to be brought to book; but Burke’s greatness was of a texture to bear and enjoy the thrust. It is curious that Langton was markedly fond of Hudibras; such a relish indicates, perhaps, the turn his own wit might have taken, had it not been held in by too much second thought.

Johnson was wont to announce that he valued Langton for his piety, his ancient descent, his amiable behavior, and his mastery of Greek. “Who in this town knows anything of Clenardus, sir, but you and I?” he would say. In the midst of his talk Langton would fall into the “vowelled undertone” of the tongue he loved, correcting himself with a little wave of the hands, and the apologetic phrase: “And so it goes on.” “Steeped to the lips in Greek” he was indeed, bursting out with a joyous salute to the moon of Hellas, upon a friend’s doorstep, or making grotesque Hellene puns, for his own delight,[47] upon the blank leaves of a pocket-book. Every one familiar with Johnsoniana will recall the charming and spirited retort written by Dr. Barnard, then Dean of Derry, later, Bishop of Killaloe, which closes: