They then took boat again, rowed to Billingsgate, and Johnson and Beauclerc determined, like “mad wags,” to “keep it up” for the rest of the day. Langton, however, the most sober-minded of the three, pleaded an engagement to breakfast with some young ladies; whereupon the great moralist reproached him with “leaving his social friends to go and sit with a set of wretched unideal girls.”
This madcap freak of the great lexicographer made a sensation, as may well be supposed, among his intimates. “I heard of your frolic t’other night,” said Garrick to him; “you’ll be in the ‘Chronicle.’” He uttered worse forebodings to others. “I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house,” said he. Johnson, however, valued himself upon having thus enacted a chapter in the Rake’s Progress, and crowed over Garrick on the occasion. “He durst not do such a thing!” chuckled he, “his wife would not let him!”
When these two young men entered the club, Langton was about twenty-two, and Beauclerc about twenty-four years of age, and both were launched on London life. Langton, however, was still the mild, enthusiastic scholar, steeped to the lips in Greek, with fine conversational powers and an invaluable talent for listening. He was upward of six feet high, and very spare. “Oh! that we could sketch him,” exclaims Miss Hawkins, in her Memoirs, “with his mild countenance, his elegant features, and his sweet smile, sitting with one leg twisted round the other, as if fearing to occupy more space than was equitable; his person inclining forward, as if wanting strength to support his weight, and his arms crossed over his bosom, or his hands locked together on his knee.” Beauclerc, on such occasions, sportively compared him to a stork in Raphael’s Cartoons, standing on one leg. Beauclerc was more “a man upon town,” a lounger in St. James’s Street, an associate with George Selwyn, with Walpole, and other aristocratic wits; a man of fashion at court; a casual frequenter of the gaming-table; yet, with all this, he alternated in the easiest and happiest manner the scholar and the man of letters; lounged into the club with the most perfect self-possession, bringing with him the careless grace and polished wit of high-bred society, but making himself cordially at home among his learned fellow members.
The gay yet lettered rake maintained his sway over Johnson, who was fascinated by that air of the world, that ineffable tone of good society in which he felt himself deficient, especially as the possessor of it always paid homage to his superior talent. “Beauclerc,” he would say, using a quotation from Pope, “has a love of folly, but a scorn of fools; everything he does shows the one, and everything he says the other.” Beauclerc delighted in rallying the stern moralist of whom others stood in awe, and no one, according to Boswell, could take equal liberty with him with impunity. Johnson, it is well known, was often shabby and negligent in his dress, and not overcleanly in his person. On receiving a pension from the crown, his friends vied with each other in respectful congratulations. Beauclerc simply scanned his person with a whimsical glance, and hoped that, like Falstaff, “he’d in future purge and live cleanly like a gentleman.” Johnson took the hint with unexpected good humor, and profited by it.
Still Beauclerc’s satirical vein, which darted shafts on every side, was not always tolerated by Johnson. ‘“Sir,” said he on one occasion, “you never open your mouth but with intention to give pain; and you have often given me pain, not from the power of what you have said, but from seeing your intention.”
When it was at first proposed to enroll Goldsmith among the members of this association, there seems to have been some demur; at least so says the pompous Hawkins. “As he wrote for the booksellers, we of the club looked on him as a mere literary drudge, equal to the task of compiling and translating, but little capable of original and still less of poetical composition.”
Even for some time after his admission, he continued to be regarded in a dubious light by some of the members. Johnson and Reynolds, of course, were well aware of his merits, nor was Burke a stranger to them; but to the others he was as yet a sealed book, and the outside was not prepossessing. His ungainly person and awkward manners were against him with men accustomed to the graces of society, and he was not sufficiently at home to give play to his humor and to that bonhomie which won the hearts of all who knew him. He felt strange and out of place in this new sphere; he felt at times the cool satirical eye of the courtly Beauclerc scanning him, and the more he attempted to appear at his ease the more awkward he became.