A Little English Gallery

by Louise Imogen Guiney

Lady Beauclerk, Topham’s mother, had died in 1766; and he asked to be buried beside her, or at her feet, in the old chapel of Garston, near Liverpool: “an instance of tenderness,” said Johnson, “which I should hardly have expected.” There, in the place of his choice, he rests, without an epitaph.

After this the Doctor consoled himself more than ever with Bennet Langton, and with the atmosphere of love and reverence which surrounded him in Langton’s house. He had been of old the most desired of all guests at the family seat in Lincolnshire. “Langton, sir!” as he liked to announce, “had a grant of warren from Henry II.; and Cardinal Stephen Langton, of King John’s reign, was of this family.” Peregrine Langton, Bennet’s uncle, was a man of simple and benevolent habits, who brought economy to a science, without niggardliness, and whom Johnson declared to be one of those he clung to at once, both by instinct and reason; Bennet’s father, learned, good, and unaffected, the prototype of his learned, good, and unaffected son, was, however, a more diverting character. He had sincerest esteem for Johnson, but looked askance on him for his liberal views, and suspected him, indeed, of being a Papist in secret! He once offered the Doctor a living of some value in the neighborhood, with the suggestion that he should qualify himself for Orders: a chance gravely refused. Of this exemplary but rather archaic squire, Johnson, a dissector of everything he loved, said: “Sir! he is so exuberant a talker in public meetings that the gentlemen of his county are afraid of him. No business can be done for his declamation.” In his behalf, too, Johnson produced one of his most astounding words; for having understood that both Mr. and Mrs. Langton were averse to having their portraits taken, he observed aloud that “a superstitious reluctance to sit for one’s picture is among the anfractuosities of the human mind.”

Bennet Langton married, on the 24th of May, 1770, Mary Lloyd, daughter of the Countess of Haddington, and widow of John, the eighth Earl of Rothes, the stern soldier in laced waistcoat and breastplate beneath, painted by Sir Joshua. It was a common saying at the time that everybody was welcome to a Countess Dowager of Rothes; for it did so happen that three ladies bearing that title were all remarried within a few years. Lady Rothes, although a native of Suffolk, had acquired from long residence in Scotland the accent of that country, which Dr. Johnson bore with magnanimously, on the consideration that it was not indigenous. She had a handsome presence, full of easy dignity, and a naturalness marked enough in the heyday of Georgian affectation. With a vivacity very different from Lady Di Beauclerk’s, she kept herself the spring and centre of Langton’s tranquil domestic circle: a more womanly woman historiographers cannot find. His own charm of character, after his marriage, slipped more and more into the underground channels of home-life, and so coursed on beneficently in silence. Their children were no fewer than nine,[55] “not a plain face nor faulty person among them:” the goddess daughters six feet in height, and the three sons so like their Maypole father that they were able once to amuse the Parisians by raising their arms to let a crowd pass. Langton was wont to repeat with some glee certain jests about his height, and Dr. Johnson’s nickname of “Lanky” he took ever with excellent grace; and when Garrick had leaped upon a chair to shake hands with him, in old days, he had knelt, at parting, to shake hands with Garrick. But the King’s awkward digs at his “long legs” he found terribly distasteful, nor was he thereby disposed to agree with the Doctor’s enthusiastic proclamation, after the famous interview of 1767, that George III. was “as fine a gentleman as Charles II.”

It was his cherished plan to educate his boys and girls at home, and to give them a thorough acquaintance with the learned languages. No social engagements were to stand in the way of this prime exigency. He was in great haste to turn his young brood into Masters and Mistresses of Arts. Johnson complained to Miss Burney, as they were both taking tea at Mrs. Thrale’s, that nothing would serve Langton but to stand them up before company, and get them to repeat a fable or the Hebrew alphabet, supplying every other word himself, and blushing with pride at the vicarious learning of his infants. But another of the tedious royal jokes, “How does Education go on?” actually lessened his devotion to his self-set task, and worried him like the water-drop in the story, which fell forever on a criminal’s head until it had drilled his brain. Again, both he and his wife, even after they had moved into the retirement of Great George Street, Westminster, in pursuance of their design, were far too agreeable and too accessible to be spared the incursions of society. In a word, Minerva found her seat shaken, and her altar-fires not very well tended, and therefore withdrew. Langton impressed one axiom on his young scholars which they never forgot: “Next best to knowing is to be sensible that you do not know.” An entirely superfluous waif of a baby was once left at the doors of this same many-childrened house, to be fed, clothed, and petted by Mr. Bennet Langton and Lady Rothes, without protest. Dr. Johnson, who made friends with all children, was especially attached to their third girl, his god-daughter, whom he called “pretty Mrs. Jane,” and “my own little Jenny.” The very last year of his life her “most humble servant” sent her a loving letter, extant yet, and written purposely in a large round hand as clear as print.

“Langton’s children are very pretty,” Johnson wrote to Boswell in 1777, “and his lady loses her Scotch.” But again, during the same year, condescendingly: “I dined lately with poor dear Langton. I do not think he goes on well. His table is rather coarse, and he has his children too much about him.” Boswell takes occasion, in reproducing this censure, to reprehend the custom of introducing the children after dinner: a parental indulgence to which he, at least, was not addicted. The Doctor gave him a mild nudge on the subject in remarking later: “I left Langton in London. He has been down with the militia, and is again quiet at home, talking to his little people, as I suppose you do sometimes.” While Langton was in camp on Warley Common, in command of the Lincolnshire troops, Johnson spent with him five delightful days, admiring his tall captain’s blossoming energies, and poking about curiously among the tents. Langton had fallen, little by little, into a confirmed extravagance, so that the moral of Uncle Peregrine’s sagacious living bade fair to be lost upon him. Boswell had a quarrel with Johnson on the subject of Langton’s expenditure, during the course of which, according to his own report, the Laird of Auchinleck suffered a “horrible shock” by being told that the best way to drive Langton out of his costly house would be to put him (Boswell) into it. The Doctor was truly concerned, nevertheless, about his engaging spendthrift; up to the very end, he would implore him to keep account-books, even if he had to omit his Aristophanes. “He complains of the ill effects of habit,” grumbled the great moralizer, “and he rests content upon a confessed indolence. He told his father himself that he had ‘no turn for economy!’ but a thief might as well plead that he had no turn for honesty.” Such were the hard hits sacred to those Dr. Johnson most esteemed. It transpires from his will that, by way of discouragement, he had lent Langton £750.[56]

In the winter of 1785, Langton came from the country, and took lodgings in Fleet Street, in order to sit beside Johnson as he lay dying, and hold his hand. Nor was he alone in his pious offices: the Hooles, Mr. Sestre, and several others were there, to keep constant vigil. Miss Burney met Langton in the passage December 11th, two days before the end: “He could not,” she wrote in her journal, “look at me, nor I at him.” But through the foggy and restless nights when Johnson tried to cheer himself, like More and Master William Lilly, by translating into Latin some epigrams from the Anthologia, the true Grecian beside him must have been his chief comfort. One can picture the old eyes turning to him for sympathy, perhaps with that same murmured “Lanky!” on awaking, which Boswell laughed to hear from him one merry Hebridean morning, twelve years before. The last summons did not come in Langton’s presence. Hurrying over to Bolt Court at eight of the fatal evening, he was told that all was over three-quarters of an hour ago. That large soul had gone away, as Leigh Hunt so beautifully said of Coleridge, “to an infinitude hardly wider than his thoughts.” Then Langton, who was wont to shape his words with grace and ease, went up-stairs, and tried to pen a letter to Boswell, which is more touching than tears: “I am now sitting in the room where his venerable remains exhibit a spectacle, the interesting solemnity of which, difficult as it would be in any sort to find terms to express, so to you, my dear sir, whose sensations will paint it so strongly, it would be of all men the most superfluous to”—and there, hopelessly choked and confused, it broke off.

Langton bore Johnson’s pall; and he succeeded him as Professor of Ancient Literature in the Royal Academy, as Gibbon had replaced Goldsmith in the chair of Ancient History. He survived many years, the delight of his company to the last. He, like others, was given in his later years to detailing anecdotes of his great friend, with an approximation to that friend’s manner. One lady critic, at least, thought that these explosive imitations did not become “his own serious and respectable character.” On December 18, 1801, in Anspach Place, Southampton, a venerable nook “between the walls and the sea,” when Wordsworth, Scott, and Coleridge were yet in their unheralded prime, when Charles Lamb was twenty-six, Byron a dreaming boy on the Cotswold hills, and Keats and Shelley little fair-eyed children, gentle Bennet Langton, known to none of these, and somewhat forgotten as a loiterer from the march of a glorious yesterday, slipped out of life. “I am persuaded,” wrote one who knew him well, “that all his inactivity, all the repugnance he showed to putting on the harness of this world’s toil, arose from the spirituality of his frame of mind . . . I believe his mind was in Heaven, wheresoever he corporeally existed.” He was laid under the chancel of ancient St. Michael’s at Southampton, with Johnson’s fond benison, “Be my soul with Langton’s!” inscribed on the marble tablet above him.[57] The Rev. John Wooll of Midhurst, Joseph Warton’s editor, was one of the few present at the funeral ceremony, and he leaves us to infer that it had a rather neglectful privacy, not, indeed, out of keeping with the “godly, righteous, and sober life” it closed. Langton’s will, drawn up in the June of 1800, and preserved in Somerset House, devised to the sole executrix, his “dear wife,” who outlived him by nearly twenty years, his real and personal estate, his books, his wines, his prints, his horses, and, as a gift particularly pretty, his right of navigation in the river Wey. George Langton was separately provided for, but there were some £8000 for the eight younger children. The document is crowded with technical details, and very long; and the manifest inference, on the whole, is that the dear squire’s affairs were in a prodigious tangle. There is no wish expressed concerning his burial, and, what is more curious, there are no Christian formulas for the committal of the animula vagula blandula: a lack perhaps not to be wondered at in Beauclerk’s concise testament, but somewhat notable in the case of a person who certainly had a soul.

So went Beauclerk first of the three, Langton last, with the good ghost still between them, as he in his homespun, they in their flowered velvet, had walked many a year together on this earth. The old companionship had undergone some sorry changes ere it fell utterly to dust and ashes. Its happy prime had been in the Oxford “Longs,” when the Doctor humored his lads, and tented under their roofs, plucking flowers at one house, and romping with dogs at the other; or in 1764, at the starting of the immortal Club, when the two of its founders, who had no valid or pretended claim to celebrity, perched on the sills like useful genii, with a mission to overrule sluggish melancholy, and renew the sparkle in abstracted eyes. How supereminently they did what they chose to do, and what vagaries they roused out of Johnson’s profound hypochondria! Did not Topham Beauclerk’s mother once have to reprove that august author for a suggestion to seize some pleasure-grounds which they were passing in a carriage? “Putting such things into young people’s heads!” said she. Where could the innocent Beauclerk’s elbow have been at that moment, contrary to the canons of polite society, but in the innocent Langton’s ribs? The gray reprobate, so censured, explained to Boswell: “Lady Beauclerk has no notion of a joke, sir! She came late into life, and has a mighty unpliable understanding.” Who can forget the Doctor’s visit to Beauclerk at Windsor, when, falling into the clutches of that gamesome and ungodly youth, he was beguiled from church-going of a fine Sunday morning, and strolled about outside, talking and laughing during sermon-time, and finally spread himself at length on a mossy tomb, only to be told, with a giggle and a pleased rub of the hands, that he was as bad as Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice? Or the other visit in the north, when, after ceremoniously relieving his pockets of keys, knife, pencil, and purse, Samuel Johnson, LL.D., deliberately rolled down a hill, and landed, betumbled out of all recognition, at the bottom? Langton had tried to dissuade him, for the incline was very steep, and the candidate scarcely of the requisite suppleness. “Oh, but I haven’t had a roll for such a long time!” pleaded his unanswerable big guest.

Best of all, we have the history of that memorable morning when Beauclerk and Langton, having supped together at a city tavern, roused Johnson at three o’clock at his Inner Temple Lane Chambers, and brought him to the door, fearful but aggressive, in his shirt and his little dark wig, and his slippers down at the heels, armed with a poker. “What! and is it YOU? Faith, I’ll have a frisk with you, ye young dogs!” We have visions of the Covent Garden inn, and the great brimming bowl, with Lord Lansdowne’s drinking-song for grace; the hucksters and fruiterers staring at the strange central figure, always sure to gather a mob, even during the moment he would stand by a lady’s coach-door in Fleet Street; the merry boat going its way by oar to Billingsgate, its mad crew bantering the watermen on the river; and two of the roisterers (equally wild, despite a little chronological disparity of thirty years or so) scolding the other for hastening off, on an afternoon appointment, “to dine with wretched unidea’d girls!” What golden vagabondism! “I heard of your frolic t’other night; you’ll be in The Chronicle! . . . I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house!” said Garrick. “As for Garrick, sirs,” tittered the pious Johnson aside to his accomplices, “he dare not do such a thing. His wife would not let him!” All this mirth and whim sweetened the Doctor’s heavy life. He had other intimates, other disciples. But these were Gay Heart and Gentle Heart, who drove his own blue-devils away with their idolatrous devotion, and whose bearing towards him stands ever as the best possible corroboration of his great and warm nature. With him and for him, they so fill the air of the time that to whomsoever has but thought of them that hour, London must seem lonely without their idyllic figures.