m Beauclerk, make a curious pair.
Yet both of them loved and honoured Johnson all their lives and both
were always loved, at any rate, by him; and the one who got the less
honour got the more love. No one could take such liberties with
Johnson as this man who had been the cause of a divorce and was
behaving badly to the wife whom he had stolen. Johnson did not spare
Beauclerk the rebukes he deserved: but he could not resist the
intellectual gifts and social charm of that true descendant of Charles
II. When Beauclerk {243} lay dying Johnson said, "I would walk to the
extent of the diameter of the earth to save Beauclerk"; and when he was
dead, Johnson wrote to Boswell, "Poor dear Beauclerk--_nec, ut soles,
dabis joca_." That he could win the warm affection of such a man as
Beauclerk is one more proof of the breadth of his sympathies. The most
surprising people felt his fascination. Wraxall says that he had seen
the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire, "then in the first bloom of youth,
hanging on the sentences that fell from Johnson's lips, and contending
for the nearest place to his chair"; and it is recorded of Kitty Clive
the actress, whom he used to go and see in the green-room, that she
said of him, "I love to sit by Dr. Johnson: he always entertains me."

But neither Duchesses, nor actresses, nor even young men of fashion,
whose conjugal affairs had been the talk of the town, were more than
occasional or single splendours in the Johnsonian heaven: its fixed
stars of ordinary nights were less dazzling persons. Many were
scholars, of course, as befitted a man of books. The greatest, but one
of the least frequent or intimate, was Gibbon. He was a member of "The
Club" and a friend of Reynolds and Fox: but his feeling for Johnson was
apparently one of fear unmingled with love. Though {244} he met them
both fairly often, he never mentions Boswell, and Johnson only once or
twice. The historian who could not talk was not likely to appreciate
the great talker who cared nothing for history: so one is not surprised
to find Johnson dismissed in the famous _Memoirs_ as merely the
"oracle" of Reynolds. A much greater friend was another member of "The
Club," Percy, of the _Reliques of Poetry_, afterwards a Bishop, with
whom he often quarrelled but was always reconciled. Boswell managed
the most important of their reconciliations by obtaining a letter from
Johnson testifying to Percy's merit which so pleased Percy that he