He has, by his wife's persuasion and mine, taken down a present for his mother-in-law.' [? Step-mother, with whom he was always on bad terms; post, iii. 95, note 1.] Piozzi Letters, i. 219. Boswell, the evening of the same day, wrote to Temple from Grantham:--'I have now eat (sic) a Term's Commons in the Inner Temple. You cannot imagine what satisfaction I had in the form and ceremony of the Hall.... After breakfasting with Paoli, and worshipping at St. Paul's, I dined tete-a-tete with my charming Mrs. Stuart. We talked with unreserved freedom, as we had nothing to fear; we were philosophical, upon honour--not deep, but feeling; we were pious; we drank tea, and bid each other adieu as finely as romance paints. She is my wife's dearest friend; so you see how beautiful our intimacy is. I then went to Mr. Johnson's, and he accompanied me to Dilly's, where we supped; and then he went with me to the inn in Holborn, where the Newcastle Fly sets out; we were warmly affectionate. He is to buy for me a chest of books, of his choosing, off stalls, and I am to read more and drink less; that was his counsel.' Letters of Boswell, p. 196.
[1122] Yet Gilbert Walmsley had called him in his youth 'a good scholar.' Garrick Corres. i. 1; and Boswell wrote to him:--'Mr. Johnson is ready to bruise any one who calls in question your classical knowledge, and your happy application of it.' Ib p. 622.
[1123] 'Those whose lot it is to ramble can seldom write, and those who know how to write very seldom ramble.' Johnson to Mrs. Thrale. Piozzi Letters, i. 32. See post, April 17, 1778.
[1124] A letter from Boswell to Temple on this day helps to fill up the gap in his journal:--'It gives me acute pain that I have not written more to you since we parted last; but I have been like a skiff in the sea, driven about by a multiplicity of waves. I am now at Mr. Thrale's villa, at Streatham, a delightful spot. Dr. Johnson is here too. I came yesterday to dinner, and this morning Dr. Johnson and I return to London, and I go with Mr. Beauclerk to see his elegant villa and library, worth L3000, at Muswell Hill, and return and dine with him. I hope Dr. Johnson will dine with us. I am in that dissipated state of mind that I absolutely cannot write; I at least imagine so. But while I glow with gaiety, I feel friendship for you, nay, admiration of some of your qualities, as strong as you could wish. My excellent friend, let us ever cultivate that mutual regard which, as it has lasted till now, will, I trust, never fail. On Saturday last I dined with John Wilkes and his daughter, and nobody else, at the Mansion-House; it was a most pleasant scene. I had that day breakfasted with Dr. Johnson. I drank tea with Lord Bute's daughter-in-law, and I supped with Miss Boswell. What variety! Mr. Johnson went with me to Beauclerk's villa, Beauclerk having been ill; it is delightful, just at Highgate. He has one of the most numerous and splendid private libraries that I ever saw; green-houses, hot-houses, observatory, laboratory for chemical experiments, in short, everything princely. We dined with him at his box at the Adelphi. I have promised to Dr. Johnson to read when I get to Scotland, and to keep an account of what I read; I shall let you know how I go on. My mind must be nourished.' Letters of Boswell, pp. 193-5.
[1125] Swift did not laugh. 'He had a countenance sour and severe, which he seldom softened by any appearance of gaiety. He stubbornly resisted any tendency to laughter.' Johnson's Works, viii. 222. Neither did Pope laugh. 'By no merriment, either of others or his own, was he ever seen excited to laughter.' Ib p. 312. Lord Chesterfield wrote (Letters i. 329):--'How low and unbecoming a thing laughter is. I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason nobody has ever heard me laugh.' Mrs. Piozzi records (Anec. p. 298) that 'Dr. Johnson used to say "that the size of a man's understanding might always be justly measured by his mirth;" and his own was never contemptible.'
[1126] The day before he wrote to Mrs. Thrale:--'Peyton and Macbean [ante, i 187] are both starving, and I cannot keep them.' Piozzi Letters, i. 218. On April 1, 1776, he wrote:--'Poor Peyton expired this morning. He probably, during many years for which he sat starving by the bed of a wife, not only useless but almost motionless, condemned by poverty to personal attendance chained down to poverty--he probably thought often how lightly he should tread the path of life without his burthen. Of this thought the admission was unavoidable, and the indulgence might be forgiven to frailty and distress. His wife died at last, and before she was buried he was seized by a fever, and is now going to the grave. Such miscarriages when they happen to those on whom many eyes are fixed, fill histories and tragedies; and tears have been shed for the sufferings, and wonder excited by the fortitude of those who neither did nor suffered more than Peyton.' Ib 312. Baretti, in a marginal note on Piozzi Letters, i. 219, writes:--'Peyton was a fool and a drunkard.