take warning by his faults and by his failures. In the tumult and storm of pleasures which distinguished his youth he had disdained all decorum, and, as a necessary consequence, both his constitution and his character had suffered. His ambition had been under no guidance, and so had destroyed both his fortune and his reputation.

But what limits were set to the young man's ambition if he would but take the trouble to perfect his manners? He might in time rise to the highest rank. But he must make a beginning. The Duke of Newcastle loves to have a favourite, and to open himself to that favourite. He has now no such person with him : the place is vacant, and if he had dexterity he might fill it. But in one thing he must not humour him. He had never been drunk in his life, and if he tried to humour his Grace by drinking, he might say or do a little too much, and so kick down all that he had done before.

Chesterfield in some ways showed great political foresight. He foretold the French Revolution nearly forty years before it took place. He foresaw the growth of the House of Savoy, and the overthrow of the Papacy. But could he have been gifted with the prophet's vision, he would have seen in this our time a man run that course for which he had in vain so carefully trained his son, and gain that prize which he looked upon as the highest of

all rewards. His disappointment in his own failure would have been, we may well believe, greatly lessened could he have foreseen the triumph of his system in the career of the Earl of Beaconsfield.

In the last chapter I attempted to prove that Lord Chesterfield and Johnson never were on terms of intimacy. Did the arguments that I have brought forward need strengthening, such strength would surely be given by the general tone of these Letters. Whoever carefully considers the character that Chesterfield here draws of himself, must feel that there was nothing in common between the two men. Chesterfield was, no doubt, a man of the world, and could, if he thought it worth the while, adapt himself to his company. Johnson also had seen so much of mankind that he felt at ease with men of almost every variety of character. But Chesterfield, when he had once learnt Johnson's power, and had once recognised the perfect simplicity of his nature, could never have felt at ease in his company; while Johnson, when he had seen through the hollowness of his patron's character, would not have cared long to hide the contempt which he felt. There could never have been any intimacy, still less could there have been any affection between the author of the 'Vanity of Human Wishes' and the writer of these 'Letters to a Son.'

Ir is not the portrait of Johnson only that Boswell has drawn for us. To most men Garrick and Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and even Goldsmith, are known only so far as they appear in the pages of the Life. Great though these men were, no one of them was so fortunate as to find an artist so skilled in painting him that his likeness, though made the very centre of the picture, stands out to us half so clear as it shows when given in the very background of Boswell's wide canvas. By the side of their great figures are sketched in, with no weaker hand, a host of lesser men. Had he not written, their very names would long ago have passed away, but now the men themselves live for us. The thought arises, not what they, but what we should have lost if they had missed their vates sacer. It is the living, not the dead who are to be pitied, when the good of a bygone age

1 Reprinted (with additions) from the Cornhill Magazine.

are left overwhelmed and unknown in the long night of which the Latin poet sings. What reader of Boswell does not almost feel that he would have had one friend less in the world had he never had his delightful pages to teach him the worth of the gentle Bennet Langton? Dear to us as are so many of the men who loved Johnson and whom Johnson loved, dear to us as is Goldsmith, dear to us as is the dear Knight of Plympton' himself, certainly not less dear is the tall Lincolnshire squire who, as a mere lad, came to London chiefly in the hope of getting introduced to the author of the 'Rambler,' and who, more than thirty years later, came up once more to tend his friend when the grand old man knew at last that that death which he had so long dreaded from afar was now close upon him and must be faced. Their long friendship had been but once broken. Happily, ten years or so before it was broken for ever it had been made whole again.

Boswell himself does not describe Bennet Langton's person, nor could he well have done so, as Langton was living when the Life was published. Miss Hawkins, however, in her 'Memoirs' has happily supplied the deficiency. She says, 'Oh! that we could sketch him with his mild countenance, his elegant features, and his sweet smile, sitting with one leg twisted round the other,

as if fearing to occupy more space than was equitable ; his person inclining forward, as if wanting strength to support his height, and his arms crossed over his bosom, or his hands locked together on his knee; his oblong gold-mounted snuff-box, taken from the waistcoat pocket opposite his hand, and either remaining between his fingers or set by him on the table, but which was never used but when his mind was occupied in conversation ; so soon as conversation began the box was produced.'

We find another description of him given by Mr. Best, in his 'Personal and Literary Memorials.' 'He was a very tall, meagre, long-visaged man, much resembling a stork standing on one leg near the shore, in Raphael's cartoon of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes. His manners were, in the highest degree, polished; his conversation mild, equable, and always pleasing.' Johnson, in a letter to Langton's tutor at Trinity College, Oxford, thus pleasantly alludes to his great height: 'I see your pupil sometimes; his mind is as exalted as his stature. I am half afraid of him; but he is no less amiable than formidable.' The nickname of Lanky that he gave him was, no doubt, not merely, like Sherry or Goldy, an abbreviation of a name; it was also a hit at his friend's person. Topham Beauclerk's wife also had her fling at his height.