f the great ornament of the British stage; but
above all, Mr. Gilbert Walmsley, Register of the Prerogative Court of
Lichfield, whose character, long after his decease, Dr. Johnson has,
in his Life of Edmund Smith, thus drawn in the glowing colours of
gratitude:

'Of Gilbert Walmsley, thus presented to my mind, let me indulge myself
in the remembrance. I knew him very early; he was one of the first
friends that literature procured me, and I hope that, at least, my
gratitude made me worthy of his notice.

'He was of an advanced age, and I was only not a boy, yet he never
received my notions with contempt. He was a whig, with all the virulence
and malevolence of his party; yet difference of opinion did not keep us
apart. I honoured him and he endured me.

'At this man's table I enjoyed many cheerful and instructive hours, with
companions, such as are not often found--with one who has lengthened,
and one who has gladdened life; with Dr. James, whose skill in physick
will be long remembered; and with David Garrick, whom I hoped to have
gratified with this character of our common friend. But what are the
hopes of man! I am disappointed by that stroke of death, which has
eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the publick stock of
harmless pleasure.'

In these families he passed much time in his early years. In most of
them, he was in the company of ladies, particularly at Mr. Walmsley's,
whose wife and sisters-in-law, of the name of Aston, and daughters of a
Baronet, were remarkable for good breeding; so that the notion which has
been industriously circulated and believed, that he never was in good
company till late in life, and, consequently had been confirmed
in coarse and ferocious manners by long habits, is wholly without
foundation. Some of the ladies have assured me, they recollected him
well when a young man, as distinguished for his complaisance.

In the forlorn state of his circumstances, he accepted of an offer to be
employed as usher in the school of Market-Bosworth, in Leicestershire,
to which it appears, from one of his little fragments of a diary, that
he went on foot, on the 16th of July.

This employment was very irksome to him in every respect, and he
complained grievously of it in his letters to his friend Mr. Hector, who
was now settled as a surgeon at Birmingham. The letters are lost; but
Mr. Hector recollects his writing 'that the poet had described the dull
sameness of his existence in t