Volume I Part 18 (2/2)
Besides the clergymen already enumerated as authors, the Church has contributed a creditable list of bishops and inferior dignitaries: s.h.i.+pley of St. Asaph, Barnard of Killaloe, Marley of Pomfret, Hinchcliffe of Peterborough, Douglas of Salisbury, Blomfield of London, Wilberforce of Oxford, Dean Vincent of Westminster, Archdeacon Burney; and Dr. Hawtrey, late master and present provost of Eton.
”Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir Charles Eastlake are its two chief pillars of art, slightly unequal. With them we may a.s.sociate Sir William Chambers and Charles Wilkins. The presence of Drs. Nugent, Blagden, Fordyce, Warren, Vaughan, and Sir Henry Halford, is a proof that in the Club medicine has from the first kept up its kins.h.i.+p with literature.
”The profession of the law has given the Society Lord Ashburton, Lord Stowell, and Sir William Grant, Charles Austin, and Pemberton Leigh.
Lord Overstone may stand as the symbol of money; unless Sir George Cornewall Lewis is to be admitted to that honour by virtue of his Chancellors.h.i.+p of the Exchequer. Sir George would, probably, prefer his claims to Club members.h.i.+p as a scholar and political writer, to any that can be picked out of a Budget.
”Take it all in all, the Literary Club has never degenerated from the high standard of intellectual gifts and personal qualities, which made those unpretending suppers at the Turk's Head an honour eagerly contended for by the wisest, wittiest, and n.o.blest of the eighteenth century.”
Malone, in 1810, gave the total number of those who had been members of the Club from its foundation, at seventy-six, of whom fifty-five had been authors. Since 1810, however, literature has far less preponderance.
The designation of the Society has been again changed to ”the Johnson Club.” Upon the taking down of the Thatched House Tavern, the Club removed to the Clarendon Hotel, in Bond-street, where was celebrated its centenary, in September, 1864. There were present, upon this memorable occasion,--in the chair, the Dean of St. Paul's; his Excellency M. Van de Weyer, Earls Clarendon and Stanhope; the Bishops of London and Oxford; Lords Brougham, Stanley, Cranworth, Kingsdown, and Harry Vane; the Right Hon. Sir Edmund Head, Spencer Walpole, and Robert Lowe; Sir Henry Holland, Sir C. Eastlake, Sir Roderick Murchison, Vice-Chancellor Sir W. Page Wood, the Master of Trinity, Professor Owen, Mr. G. Grote, Mr. C. Austen, Mr. H. Reeve, and Mr. G.
Richmond. Among the few members prevented from attending were the Duke of Argyll (in Scotland), the Earl of Carlisle (in Ireland), Earl Russell, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Overstone (at Oxford), Lord Glenelg (abroad), and Mr. W. Stirling (from indisposition). Mr.
N. W. Senior, who was the political economist of the Club, died in June, preceding, in his sixty-fourth year.
Hallam and Macaulay were among the constant attendants at its dinners, which take place twice a month during the Parliamentary season. The custody of the books and archives of the Club rests with the secretary, Dr. Milman, the venerable Dean of St. Paul's, who takes great pride and pleasure in showing to literary friends the valuable collection of autographs which these books contain. Among the memorials is the portrait of Sir Joshua Reynolds, with spectacles on, similar to the picture in the Royal Collection: this portrait was painted and presented by Sir Joshua, as the founder of the Club.
Lord Macaulay has grouped, with his accustomed felicity of language, this celebrated congress of men of letters.
”To discuss questions of taste, of learning, of casuistry, in language so exact and so forcible that it might have been printed without the alteration of a word,” was to Johnson no exertion, but a pleasure. He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his talk out. He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full mind on anybody who would start a subject, on a fellow-pa.s.senger in a stage-coach, or on the person who sat at the same table with him in an eating-house. But his conversation was nowhere so brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once expressed it, to send him back every ball that he threw. Some of these, in 1764, formed themselves into a Club, which gradually became a formidable power in the commonwealth of letters.
The verdicts p.r.o.nounced by this conclave on new books were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the trunk-maker and the pastrycook. Nor shall we think this strange when we consider what great and various talents and acquirements met in the little fraternity. Goldsmith was the representative of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the Arts, Burke of political eloquence and political philosophy. There, too, were Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest linguist of the age. Garrick brought to the meetings his inexhaustible pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his consummate knowledge of stage effect. Among the most constant attendants were two high-born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound together by friends.h.i.+p, but of widely different characters and habits,--Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill in Greek literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanct.i.ty of his life; and Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his knowledge of the gay world, his fastidious taste, and his sarcastic wit. To predominate over such a society was not easy. Yet even over such a society Johnson predominated. Burke might indeed have disputed the supremacy to which others were under the necessity of submitting. But Burke, though not generally a very patient listener, was content to take the second part when Johnson was present; and the Club itself, consisting of so many eminent men, is to this day popularly designated as ”Johnson's Club.”
To the same master-hand we owe this cabinet picture. ”The [Literary Club] room is before us, and the table on which stand the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are a.s.sembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall thin form of Langton; the courtly sneer of Beauclerk, the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up--the gigantic body, the huge ma.s.sy face, seamed with the scars of disease; the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop; the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and the nose moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the 'Why, Sir?'
and the 'What then, Sir?' and the 'No, Sir!' and the 'You don't see your way through the question, Sir!'”
FOOTNOTES:
[18] The house in Ivy-lane, which bore the name of Johnson, and where the Literary Club is said to have been held, was burnt down a few years since: it had long been a chop-house.
GOLDSMITH'S CLUBS.
However Goldsmith might court the learned circle of the Literary Club, he was ill at ease there; and he had social resorts in which he indemnified himself for this restraint by indulging his humour without control. One of these was a s.h.i.+lling Whist Club, which met at the Devil Tavern. The company delighted in practical jokes, of which Goldsmith was often the b.u.t.t. One night, he came to the Club in a hackney-coach, when he gave the driver a guinea instead of a s.h.i.+lling.
He set this down as a dead loss; but, on the next club-night, he was told that a person at the street-door wanted to speak to him; he went out, and to his surprise and delight, the coachman had brought him back the guinea! To reward such honesty, he collected a small sum from the Club, and largely increased it from his own purse, and with this reward sent away the coachman. He was still loud in his praise, when one of the Club asked to see the returned guinea. To Goldsmith's confusion it proved to be a counterfeit: the laughter which succeeded, showed him that the whole was a hoax, and the pretended coachman as much a counterfeit as the guinea. He was so disconcerted that he soon beat a retreat for the evening.
Another of these small Clubs met on Wednesday evenings, at the Globe Tavern, in Fleet-street; where songs, jokes, dramatic imitations, burlesque parodies, and broad sallies of humour, were the entertainments. Here a huge ton of a man, named Gordon, used to delight Goldsmith with singing the jovial song of ”Nottingham Ale,”
and looking like a b.u.t.t of it. Here too, a wealthy pig-butcher aspired to be on the most sociable terms with Oliver; and here was Tom King, the comedian, recently risen to eminence by his performance of Lord Ogleby, in the new comedy of _The Clandestine Marriage_. A member of note was also one Hugh Kelly, who was a kind of compet.i.tor of Goldsmith, but a low one; for Johnson used to speak of him as a man who had written more than he had read. Another noted frequenter of the Globe and Devil taverns was one Glover, who, having failed in the medical profession, took to the stage; but having succeeded in restoring to life a malefactor who had just been executed, he abandoned the stage, and resumed his wig and cane; and came to London to dabble in physic and literature. He used to amuse the company at the Club by his story-telling and mimicry, giving capital imitations of Garrick, Foote, Colman, Sterne, and others. It was through Goldsmith that Glover was admitted to the Wednesday Club; he was, however, greatly shocked by the free-and-easy tone in which Goldsmith was addressed by the pig-butcher; ”Come, Noll,” he would say as he pledged him, ”here's my service to you, old boy.”
The evening's amus.e.m.e.nt at the Wednesday Club was not, however, limited; it had the variety of epigram, and here was first heard the celebrated epitaph, (Goldsmith had been reading Pope and Swift's Miscellanies,) on Edward Purdon:--
”Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed, Who long was a bookseller's hack; He had led such a d.a.m.nable life in this world, I don't think he'll wish to come back.”
It was in April of the present year that Purdon closed his luckless life by suddenly dropping down dead in Smithfield; and as it was chiefly Goldsmith's pittance that had saved him thus long from starvation, it was well that the same friend should give him his solitary chance of escape from oblivion. ”Doctor Goldsmith made this epitaph,” says William Ballantyne, ”in his way from his chambers in the Temple to the Wednesday evening Club at the Globe. _I think he will never come back_, I believe he said; I was sitting by him, and he repeated it more than once. _I think he will never come back!_ Ah! and not altogether as a jest, it may be, the second and the third time.
There was something in Purdon's fate, from their first meeting in college to that incident in Smithfield, which had no very violent contrast to his own; and remembering what Glover had said of his frequent sudden descents from mirth to melancholy, some such faithful change of temper would here have been natural enough. 'His disappointments at these times,' Glover tells us, 'made him peevish and sullen, and he has often left his party of convivial friends abruptly in the evening, in order to go home and brood over his misfortunes.' But a better medicine for his grief than brooding over it, was a sudden start into the country to forget it; and it was probably with a feeling of this kind he had in the summer revisited Islington; he laboured during the autumn in a room of Canonbury Tower; and often, in the evening, presided at the Crown tavern, in Islington Lower Road, where Goldsmith and his fellow-lodgers had formed a kind of temporary club. At the close of the year he returned to the Temple, and was again pretty constant in his attendance at Gerard-street.”[19]
FOOTNOTES:
[19] See Forster's _Life of Goldsmith_, pp. 422-424.
<script>