t--His motley Household--His Life
there--Still existing--The gallant "Lumber Troop"--Reform Bill
Riots--Sir Claudius Hunter--Cobbett in Bolt Court--The Bird Boy--The
Private Soldier--In the House--Dr. Johnson in Gough Square--Busy at
the Dictionary--Goldsmith in Wine Office Court--Selling "The Vicar
of Wakefield"--Goldsmith's Troubles--Wine Office Court--The Old
"Cheshire Cheese."

Of all the nooks of London associated with the memory of that good giant
of literature, Dr. Johnson, not one is more sacred to those who love
that great and wise man than Bolt Court. To this monastic court Johnson
came in 1776, and remained till that December day in 1784, when a
procession of all the learned and worthy men who honoured him followed
his body to its grave in the Abbey, near the feet of Shakespeare and by
the side of Garrick. The great scholar, whose ways and sayings, whose
rough hide and tender heart, are so familiar to us--thanks to that
faithful parasite who secured an immortality by getting up behind his
triumphal chariot--came to Bolt Court from Johnson's Court, whither he
had flitted from Inner Temple Lane, where he was living when the young
Scotch barrister who was afterwards his biographer first knew him. His
strange household of fretful and disappointed almspeople seems as well
known as our own. At the head of these pensioners was the daughter of a
Welsh doctor, (a blind old lady named Williams), who had written some
trivial poems; Mrs. Desmoulins, an old Staffordshire lady, her daughter,
and a Miss Carmichael. The relationships of these fretful and
quarrelsome old maids Dr. Johnson has himself sketched, in a letter to
Mr. and Mrs. Thrale:--"Williams hates everybody; Levett hates
Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll
(Miss Carmichael) loves none of them." This Levett was a poor eccentric
apothecary, whom Johnson supported, and who seems to have been a
charitable man.

The annoyance of such a menagerie of angular oddities must have driven
Johnson more than ever to his clubs, where he could wrestle with the
best intellects of the day, and generally retire victorious. He had done
nearly all his best work by this time, and was sinking into the sere
and yellow leaf, not, like Macbeth, with the loss of honour, but with
love, obedience, troops of friends, and golden opinions from all sorts
of people. His Titanic labour, the Dictionary, he had achieved chiefly
in Go