Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

dearest Miss Jenny," and ends, "I am, my dear, your most humble servant, Sam. Johnson."

"Of the children of the family," says Miss Hawkins, "Dr. Johnson was very fond. They were, in their full number, ten, with not a plain face nor a faulty person. They were taught to behave to Johnson as they would have done to a grandfather, and he felt it." "It was Langton's intention," she goes on to state, "to educate his children at home, and under only parental tutelage. He therefore settled in Westminster, determined to live very quietly, and devote himself to this grand duty, in which the children of both sexes were to be equally considered. He told my father he should not only give his sons but his daughters a knowledge of the learned languages, and that he meant to familiarise the latter to the Greek language to such perfection, that while five of his girls employed themselves in feminine works, the sixth should read a Greek author for the general amusement." The home education would not seem to have succeeded. "Mr. Langton knew not how much the possession of extensive learning sometimes overshoots the power of communicating first elements; he was bewildered in his own labyrinth of ideas, and, I believe, was a little sickened of his plan by the late King's frequently repeated enquiry, 'How does education go on?"" George Langton, the eldest son, at all events, had, as Mr. Best tells us, "profited by the conversation and instruction of his father, so as to become a man of almost universal, though perhaps superficial, literary knowledge." A tutor, named Lusignan, had been engaged to teach him modern Greek, of whom he used to tell the following anecdote: "It had been imposed on him by his director as a penance to recite a certain number of times, before breakfast, the words Képie execîrov. He paced his chamber impatiently, repeating with what seemed practised rapidity the words prescribed, ever and anon, however, opening his door, and calling downstairs to the maid, 'Is my breakfast ready?'"

On one occasion, when Johnson was at Langton's house," before dinner," says Boswell, "he said nothing but 'Pretty baby!' to one of the children. Langton said very well to me afterwards, that he could repeat Johnson's conversation before dinner, as Johnson had said that he could repeat a complete chapter of the Natural History of Iceland,' from the Danish of Horrebow, the whole of which was exactly thus:

[ocr errors]

'CHAP. LXXII.-CONCERNING SNAKES.-There are no snakes to

be met with throughout the whole island.'"

When, on Beauclerk's death, Langton received by his will Reynolds' portrait of Johnson, with the inscription on the frame:

Ingenium ingens

Inculto latet hoc sub corpore,

he had the lines effaced.

Johnson said, complacently, "It was kind in you to take it off;" and then, after a short pause, added, “and not unkind in him to put it on." We must not forget that the great painter and the great lexicographer, as men then delighted to call him, had just before thought so highly of the two friends that when they were still quite young

men, they had invited them, with Goldsmith and Burke, to join them in founding The Club.

Nothing is more pleasant in Langton's life than that scene for a comedy, as Sir Joshua described it, when the penitent got into a panic and belaboured his confessor. "When I was ill," said Johnson, “I desired Langton would tell me sincerely in what he thought my life was faulty. Sir, he brought me a sheet of paper, on which he had written down several texts of Scripture, recommending Christian charity. And when I questioned him what occasion I had given for such animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this-that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation. Now what harm does it do to any man to be contradicted?" Boswell, in describing the scene, says that "Johnson, at the time when the paper was presented to him, though at first pleased with the attention of his friend, whom he thanked in an earnest manner, soon exclaimed, in a loud and angry tone, "What is your drift, sir?" What an admirable subject for Hogarth, if he had lived to paint it!

When Johnson's last illness was upon him, Langton, as we have said, came up from Lincolnshire to be with his dying friend. He took lodgings

[ocr errors]

66

in Fleet Street, so that he might be near at hand. 'Nobody," says Boswell, was more attentive to him than Mr. Langton, to whom he tenderly said, "Te teneam moriens deficiente manu."

His failing hand did not, indeed, at the very moment of death hold his friend's. Stupor had set in, and even the gentle Bennet Langton, the friend of thirty years, would have been as a stranger to him. A letter has been preserved, in Langton's handwriting, a letter which was never finished and never sent, but meant likely enough for Boswell, in which we read, "I am now writing in the room where his venerable remains exhibit a spectacle, the interesting solemnity of which, difficult as it would be in any sort to find terms to express, so to you, my dear Sir, whose own sensations will paint it so strongly, it would be of all men the most superfluous to attempt to." Here grief, it would seem, got the better of the writer, and the letter was left, with all the eloquence of a broken utterance.

Langton survived Johnson many years. Mrs. Piozzi, in a passage which shows all the spite of a small mind, writes, "The Dean of Winchester's account of Bennet Langton coming to town some few years. after the death of Dr. Johnson, and finding no house where he was even asked to dinner, was exceedingly comical. Mr. Wilberforce dismissed him with a cold Adieu, dear Sir; I hope we shall meet in heaven.' How capricious is the public taste! I remember when to have Langton at a man's house stamped him at once a literary character."

Public taste is capricious, but yet as long as Boswell's Life of Johnson is read, so long will there be men to love the memory of the gentle Bennet Langton, the worthy friend who was serious and yet cheerful, who did not keep his minutes of acceptum et expensum, but had read Clenardus.

G. B. H.

Three Feathers.

66

CHAPTER XVI.

SPRING-TIME.

[graphic]

Mabyn, is your sister at home?

HE Spring-time had indeed arrived-rapidly and imperceptibly; and all at once it seemed as if the world had grown green, and the skies fair and clear, and the winds sweet with a new and deJin lightful sweetness. Each morning that Wenna went out brought some further wonder with it-along the budding hedgerows, in the colours of the valley, in the fresh warmth of the air, and the white light of the skies. And at last the sea began to show its deep and resplendent summer blue, when the morning happened to be still, and there was a silvery haze along the coast.

And do you think she could go up to the Hall for a little while, for my mother wants to see her? And do you think she would walk round by the cliffs-for it is such a capital morning-if you came with her?"

"Oh, yes, Mr. Trelyon," said Mabyn, readily, and with far more respect and courtesy than she usually showed to the young gentleman, "I am quite sure Wenna can go; and I know she would like to walk round by the cliffs-she is always glad to do that-and I will tell her to get ready instantly. But I can't go, Mr. Trelyon-I am exceedingly busy this morning."

"Why, you have been reading a novel !"

"But I am going to be exceedingly busy," said Mabyn, petulantly. "You can't expect people to be always working-and I tell you I can't go with you, Mr. Trelyon."

[graphic][merged small]
« ZurückWeiter »