If there is a spot in London which Johnson’s ghost might be expected to revisit, it is that quiet and lonely Adelphi Terrace. At night no sound comes to you but a shout from some passing barge, or the creak of a ship’s windlass. Here Johnson and Boswell once leant over, looking at the Thames. The latter said, “I was thinking of two friends we had lost, who once lived in the buildings behind us, Beauclerk and Garrick.” “Ay, sir,” replied Johnson, seriously, “and two such friends as cannot be supplied.” This is a recollection that should for ever hallow the Adelphi Terrace to us.
The Beauclerk above mentioned was one of the few rakes whom Johnson loved. He was a friend of Langton, and as such had become intimate with the great doctor. Topham Beauclerk was a man of acute mind and elegant manners, and ardently fond of literature. He was of the St. Albans family, and had a resemblance to swarthy Charles II., a point which pleased his elder friend. The doctor liked his gay, young manner, and flattered himself much as women do who marry rakes, that he should reform him in time.
“What a coalition!” said Garrick, when he heard of the friendship; “why, I shall have my old friend to bail out of the Round House.” Beauclerk, says Boswell, “could take more liberties with Johnson than any one I ever saw him with;”[181] but, on the other hand, Beauclerk was not spared. On one occasion Johnson said to him, “You never open your mouth, sir, without an intention to give pain, and you have often given me pain—not from the power of what you said, but from seeing your intention.” At another time he said, “Thy body is all vice, and thy mind all virtue.”
When the Adelphi was building, Garrick applied for the corner house of Adam Street for his friend Andrew Beckett, the bookseller in the Strand, and he obtained it. In this letter he calls the architects “the dear Adelphi,” and the western house “the corner blessing.” Garrick’s house was for some years occupied by the Royal Literary Fund, but is now a Club.
Garrick promised the brothers, if the request was granted, to make the shop, as old Jacob Tonson’s once was, the rendezvous of the first people in England. “I have,” he says, “a little selfishness in this request. I never go to coffee-houses, seldom to taverns, and should constantly (if this scheme takes place), be at Beckett’s at one at noon and six at night.”[182]
Garrick was a frequent visitor at the house of Mr. Thomas Beckett, the bookseller, in Pall Mall, and he obtained the appointment of sub-librarian at Carlton Palace for the son Andrew, who had written a comedy on the Emile of Rousseau at the age of fourteen, and produced a poem called Theodosius and Constantia. For nearly ten years he wrote for the British and Monthly Reviews. He was born in 1749, and died in 1843. His most useful work is called Shakspere Himself Again, in which he released the original text from much muddy nonsense of commentators. He complained bitterly of Griffiths, of the Monthly Review, having given him only £45 for four or five years’ work—280 articles, produced after reading and condensing 590 volumes; Mr. Griffiths’ annual profit by the Monthly being no less than £2000.
Into a house in John Street the Society of Arts, established in 1753 by Mr. Shipley, an artist, moved, about 1772. This society still give lectures and rewards, and does about as much good as ever it did. Art must grow wild—it will not thrive in hot-houses. The great room is still adorned with the six large pictures illustrating the “Progress of Society,” painted by poor, half-crazed Barry, the ill-educated artist, who, too proud to paint cabinet pictures, could yet paint nothing larger sound or well.
Shipley, who established the society of Arts in imitation of one already established at Dublin, was originally a drawing-master at Northampton. From its commencement in 1753-4 to 1778 the society distributed in premiums and bounties £24,616. A year after its foundation Josiah Wedgwood began to infuse a classical and purer taste among the proprietors of the Staffordshire potteries,[183] and employed Flaxman to draw some of his designs, and was the first to improve the shape and character of our simplest articles of use.
Mr. Shipley was a brother of the Bishop of St. Asaph, and had studied under a portrait-painter named Phillips. In 1738 the Society of Arts voted their founder a gold medal for his public spirit. His school was continued by a Mr. Pars. He died, aged upwards of ninety, in 1784.[184]
Nollekens, the sculptor, learned drawing there, and Cosway, afterwards the fashionable miniature-painter, was the errand-boy. The house was subsequently inhabited by Rawle, the antiquary, a friend of fat, coarse, clever Captain Grose.[185]