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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
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