s resist the billows and the sky.'

At night I supped with him at the 'Mitre' tavern, that we might renew
our social intimacy at the original place of meeting. But there was now
considerable difference in his way of living. Having had an illness, in
which he was advised to leave off wine, he had, from that period,
continued to abstain from it, and drank only water or lemonade."

"Mr. Beauclerk and I," says Boswell, in another place, "called on him in
the morning. As we walked up Johnson's Court, I said, 'I have a
veneration for this court,' and was glad to find that Beauclerk had the
same reverential enthusiasm." The Doctor's removal Boswell thus duly
chronicles:--"Having arrived," he says, "in London late on Friday, the
15th of March, 1776, I hastened next morning to wait on Dr. Johnson, at
his house, but found he was removed from Johnson's Court, No. 7, to Bolt
Court, No. 8, still keeping to his favourite Fleet Street. My reflection
at the time, upon this change, as marked in my journal, is as follows:
'I felt a foolish regret that he had left a court which bore his name;
but it was not foolish to be affected with some tenderness of regard for
a place in which I had seen him a great deal, from whence I had often
issued a better and a happier man than when I went in; and which had
often appeared to my imagination, while I trod its pavement in the
solemn darkness of the night, to be sacred to wisdom and piety.'"

Johnson was living at Johnson's Court when he was introduced to George
III., an interview in which he conducted himself, considering he was an
ingrained Jacobite, with great dignity, self-respect, and good sense.

That clever, but most shameless and scurrilous, paper, _John Bull_, was
started in Johnson's Court, at the close of 1820. Its specific and real
object was to slander unfortunate Queen Caroline and to torment,
stigmatise, and blacken "the Brandenburg House party," as her honest
sympathisers were called. Theodore Hook was chosen editor, because he
knew society, was quick, witty, satirical, and thoroughly unscrupulous.
For his "splendid abuse"--as his biographer, the unreverend Mr. Barham,
calls it--he received the full pay of a greedy hireling. Tom Moore and
the Whigs now met with a terrible adversary. Hook did not hew or stab,
like Churchill and the old rough lampooners of earlier days, but he
filled crackers with wild fire, or laughingly stuck the enemies of
George IV. over with pins. Hook had only