wn. He envied the ease with which Beauclerk
brought out his sly incisive retorts. "No man," he said, "ever was so
free when he was going to say a good thing, from a look that expressed
that it was coming; or, when he had said it, from a look that expressed
that it had come." When Beauclerk was dying (in 1780), Johnson said,
with a faltering voice, that he would walk to the extremity of the
diameter of the earth to save him. Two little anecdotes are expressive
of his tender feeling for this incongruous friend. Boswell had asked him
to sup at Beauclerk's. He started, but, on the way, recollecting
himself, said, "I cannot go; but _I do not love Beauclerk the less_."
Beauclerk had put upon a portrait of Johnson the inscription,--

Ingenium ingens
Inculto latet hoc sub corpore.

Langton, who bought the portrait, had the inscription removed. "It was
kind in you to take it off," said Johnson; and, after a short pause,
"not unkind in him to put it on."

Early in their acquaintance, the two young men, Beau and Lanky, as
Johnson called them, had sat up one night at a tavern till three in the
morning. The courageous thought struck them that they would knock up the
old philosopher. He came to the door of his chambers, poker in hand,
with an old wig for a nightcap. On hearing their errand, the sage
exclaimed, "What! is it you, you dogs? I'll have a frisk with you." And
so Johnson with the two youths, his juniors by about thirty years,
proceeded to make a night of it. They amazed the fruiterers in Covent
Garden; they brewed a bowl of bishop in a tavern, while Johnson quoted
the poet's address to Sleep,--

"Short, O short, be then thy reign,
And give us to the world again!"

They took a boat to Billingsgate, and Johnson, with Beauclerk, kept up
their amusement for the following day, when Langton deserted them to go
to breakfast with some young ladies, and Johnson scolded him for
leaving his friends "to go and sit with a parcel of wretched _unidea'd_
girls." "I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house,"
said Garrick when he heard of this queer alliance; and he told Johnson
that he would be in the _Chronicle_ for his frolic. "He _durst_ not do
such a thing. His wife would not let him," was the moralist's retort.

Some friends, known to fame by other titles than their connexion with
Johnson, had by this time gathered round them. Among them was one, whose
art he was unable to appreciate, but whose f