'You perhaps ask, whither should I go? any whither where your case is not known, and where your presence will cause neither looks nor whispers. Where you are the necessary subject of common talk, you will not safely be at rest.
'If you cannot conveniently write to me yourself let somebody write for you to
'Dear Sir,
'Your most affectionate,
'SAM. JOHNSON.
'August 25, 1763.
'To the Reverend Dr. Taylor in Ashbourne, Derbyshire.'
Five other letters on the same subject are given in Notes and Queries, 6th S. v. pp. 324, 342, 382. Taylor and his wife 'never lived very well together' (p. 325), and at last she left him. On May 22nd of the next year Johnson congratulated Taylor 'upon the happy end of so vexatious an affair, the happyest [sic] that could be next to reformation and reconcilement' (p. 382). Taylor did not follow the advice to leave Ashbourne; for on Sept. 3 Johnson wrote to him:--'You seem to be so well pleased to be where you are, that I shall not now press your removal; but do not believe that every one who rails at your wife wishes well to you. A small country town is not the place in which one would chuse to quarrel with a wife; every human being in such places is a spy.' Ib. p. 343.
[1391] According to Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 210) he was accompanied by his black servant Frank. 'I must have you know, ladies,' said he, 'that Frank has carried the empire of Cupid further than most men. When I was in Lincolnshire so many years ago he attended me thither; and when we returned home together, I found that a female haymaker had followed him to London for love.' If this story is generally true, it bears the mark of Mrs. Piozzi's usual inaccuracy. The visit was paid early in the year, and was over in February; what haymakers were there at that season?
[1392] Boswell by his quotation marks refers, I think, to his Hebrides, Oct. 24, 1773, where Johnson says:--'Nobody, at times, talks more laxly than I do.' See also post, ii. 73.
[1393] See post, April 26, 1776, for old Mr. Langton's slowness of understanding.
[1394] See ante, i. 320.
[1395] Mr. Best (Memorials, p. 65) thus writes of a visit to Langton:--'We walked to the top of a very steep hill behind the house. Langton said, "Poor dear Dr. Johnson, when he came to this spot, turned back to look down the hill, and said he was determined to take a roll down. When we understood what he meant to do, we endeavoured to dissuade him; but he was resolute, saying, he had not had a roll for a long time; and taking out of his lesser pockets whatever might be in them, and laying himself parallel with the edge of the hill, he actually descended, turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom." This story was told with such gravity, and with an air of such affectionate remembrance of a departed friend, that it was impossible to suppose this extraordinary freak an invention of Mr. Langton.' It must have been in the winter that he had this roll.
[1396] Boswell himself so calls it in a Mr. letter to Temple written three or four months after Garrick's death, Letters of Boswell, p. 242. See also Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 25, 1773.
[1397] Malone says:--'Reynolds was the original founder of our Literary Club about the year 1762, the first thought of which he started to Dr. Johnson at his own fireside.' Prior's Malone, p. 434. Mrs. Piozzi (Anec. p. 122) says:--'Johnson called Reynolds their Romulus, or said somebody else of the company called him so, which was more likely.' According to Hawkins (Life, p. 425) the Club was founded in the winter of 1763, i.e. 1763-4.
[1398] Dr. Nugent, a physician, was Burke's father-in-law. Macaulay (Essays, i. 407) says:--'As we close Boswell's book, the club-room is before us, and the table on which stands the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson.' It was from Mrs. Piozzi that Macaulay learnt of the omelet. Nugent was a Roman Catholic, and it was on Friday that the Club before long came to meet. We may assume that he would not on that day eat meat. 'I fancy,' Mrs. Piozzi writes (Anec. p. 122), 'Dr. Nugent ordered an omelet sometimes on a Friday or Saturday night; for I remember Mr. Johnson felt very painful sensations at the sight of that dish soon after his death, and cried:--"Ah my poor dear friend! I shall never eat omelet with thee again!" quite in an agony.' Dr. Nugent, in the imaginary college at St. Andrews, was to be the professor of physic. Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 25, 1773.
[1399] Mr. Andrew Chamier was of Huguenot descent, and had been a stock-broker. He was a man of liberal education. 'He acquired such a fortune as enabled him, though young, to quit business, and become, what indeed he seemed by nature intended for, a gentleman.' Hawkins's Johnson, p. 422. In 1764 he was Secretary in the War Office. In 1775 he was appointed Under Secretary of State. Forster's Goldsmith, i. 310. He was to be the professor of commercial politics in the imaginary college. Johnson passed one of his birth-days at his house; post, under Sept.