A Little English Gallery

by Louise Imogen Guiney

“If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,

Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em

In terms select and terse;

Jones teach me modesty and Greek;

Smith, how to think; Burke, how to speak;

And Beauclerk, to converse!”

In all deference to the illustrious Sir William Jones, it may be claimed that “modesty and Greek” were the very arts in which Langton was a past-master. But he was an amateur, and a private scholar, and his name was a dissyllable; else the Dean might have tossed at his feet as pretty a compliment as that given in the last line to his colleague. It must have gratified Johnson that Langton refused, at Reynolds’s dinner-table, “like a sturdy scholar,” to sign the famous Round Robin (not signed, either, by Beauclerk) which besought him to “disgrace the walls of Westminster with an English inscription.” And as if to keep Langton firmly of his own mind on the subject, it was to him the Doctor confided the Greek quatrain, sad and proud, which he had dedicated to Goldsmith’s[48] memory.

For Bennet Langton Johnson had no criticism but praise. He presented him with pride to Young and to Richardson, described him handsomely to Hannah More, and proceeded to draw his character for Miss Reynolds, ere she had met him, with such “energy and fond delight” as she avowed she never could forget. What fine ringing metal was Johnson’s commendation! “He is one of those to whom Nature has not spread her volumes, nor uttered her voices, in vain.” “Earth does not bear a worthier gentleman.” “I know not who will go to Heaven if Langton does not.” And in the sweetest and completest approval ever put by one mortal upon another: “Sit anima mea cum Langtono!” Yet even with this “angel of a man” the Doctor had one serious and ludicrous quarrel.

It was the fatal outcome of his uneven moods that he must needs be disenchanted at times even with his best beadsmen: there came days when he would deny Beauclerk’s good-humor to be anything but “acid,” Langton’s anything but “muddy.” He considered it the sole grave fault of the latter that he was too ready to introduce a religious discussion into a mixed assembly, where he knew scarcely any two of the company would be of the same mind. On Boswell’s suggestion that this may have been done for the sake of instructing himself, Johnson replied angrily that a man had no more right to take that means of gaining information than he had to pit two persons against each other in a duel for the sake of learning the art of self-defence. Some indiscretion of this sort on Langton’s part seems to have alienated the friends for the first and last time. It was during their transient bitterness that the Doctor made the historic apology, across the table, to Oliver Goldsmith; an incident which, however beautiful in itself, was a hard back-handed hit at Langton, standing by. Croker’s conjecture may be true that the business which threatened to break a fealty of some sixteen years’ standing arose rather from Langton’s settling his estate by will upon his sisters, whose tutor he had been. On hearing of it, the Great Cham grumbled and fumed, politely applying to the Misses Langton the title of “three dowdies!”[49] and shouting, in a feudal warmth, that “an ancient estate, sir! an ancient estate should always go to males.” In fact, the Doctor behaved very badly, very sardonically, and was pleased to lay hold of a post by Temple Bar one night, and roar aloud over a piece of possible folly up in Lincolnshire which concerned him not in the least. But in due time the breach, whatever its cause, was healed. The Doctor, in writing of it, uses one of his balancing sentences: “Langton is a worthy fellow, without malice, though not without resentment.” The two could not keep apart very long, despite all the unreason in the world. “Johnson’s quarrels,” Mr. Forster tells us, “were lovers’ quarrels.” Another memorable passage-at-arms, rich in comedy, happened in the course of one of Johnson’s sicknesses, when, in the cloistral silence of his chamber, he solemnly implored Bennet Langton, always the companion who comforted his sunless hours, to tell him wherein his life had been faulty. His shy and sagacious monitor wrote down, as accusation enough, various Scriptural texts recommending tolerance, humility, long-suffering, and other meek ingredients which were not predominant in the sinner’s social composition. The penitent earnestly thanked Langton on taking the paper from his hand, but presently turned his short-sighted eyes upon him from the pillow, and emerging from what his own verbology would call a “frigorific torpor,” he exclaimed in a loud, wrathful, suspicious tone: “What’s your drift, sir?” “And when I questioned him,” so Johnson afterwards told his blustering tale—“when I questioned him as to what occasion I had given him for such animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this: that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation! Now, what harm does it do any man to be contradicted?” To this same paternal young Langton the rebel submitted his Latin verses; the Poemata, in the shape in which we possess them, were rigorously edited by him. And Johnson leaned upon him in more intimate ways, as he could never lean upon Beauclerk. To the scrupulous nature instinctively right he made comfortable confidences: “Men of harder minds than ours will do many things from which you and I would shrink; yet, sir, they will, perhaps, do more good in life than we.”