"Garrick was the very soul of the company, and I never saw Johnson in such perfect good-humor. Sally knows we have often heard that one can never properly enjoy the company of these two unless they are together. There is great truth in this remark; for after the Dean and Mrs. Boscawen (who were the only strangers) were withdrawn, and the rest stood up to go, Johnson and Garrick began a close encounter, telling old stories, " e'en from their boyish days" at Lichfield. We all stood round them above an hour, laughing, in defiance of every rule of decorum and Chesterfield. I believe we should not have thought of sitting down or of parting, had not an impertinent watchman been saucily vociferous. Johnson outstayed them all, and sat with me half an hour.'"- Vol. 1. p. 48.

She thus speaks also of her manner of passing her time, as she did for months together, with her kind friends, the Garricks. Those who think of that extraordinary man only as an actor, are unjust to his character and private habits.

"Mrs. Boscawen came to see me the other day with the duchess, in her gilt chariot, with four footmen (as I hear, for I happened not to be at home). It is not possible for any thing on earth to be more agreeable to my taste than my present manner of living. I am so much at my ease; have a great many hours at my own disposal, to read my own books and see my own friends; and, whenever I please, may join the most polished and delightful society in the world. Our breakfasts are little literary societies; there is generally company at meals, as they think it saves time, by avoiding the necessity of seeing people at other seasons. Mr. Garrick sets the highest value upon his time of anybody I ever knew. From dinner to tea we laugh, chat, and talk nonsense; the rest of his time is generally devoted to study. I detest and avoid public places more than ever, and should make a miserably bad fine lady. What most people come to London for would keep me from it.'", Vol. I. p. 53.

Here is another example of considerate kindness, at a time when Miss More was indisposed at her own lodgings.

"Mrs. Garrick came to me this morning, and wished me to go to the Adelphi, which I declined, being so ill. She would have gone herself to fetch me a physician, and insisted upon sending me my dinner, which I refused: but at six this evening, when Garrick came to the Turk's Head to dine, there accompanied him, in the coach, a minced chicken in the stew-pan, hot, a canister of her fine tea, and a pot of cream. Were there ever such people! Tell it not in Epic, or in Lyric, that the great Roscius rode with a stew-pan of minced meat with him in the coach for my dinner.

"Percy" is acted again this evening; do any of you choose to go? I can write you an order: for my own part, I shall enjoy a much superior pleasure, that of sitting by the fire, in a great chair, and being denied to all company: what is Percy to this?'" - Vol. I. p. 82.

No wonder that, after the loss of so excellent a friend, she should write,

"I can never cease to remember with affection and gratitude so warm, steady, and disinterested a friend; and I can most truly bear this testimony to his memory, that I never witnessed, in any family, more decorum, propriety, and regularity than in his where I never saw a card, or even met (except in one instance) a person of his own profession at his table; of which Mrs. Garrick, by her elegance of taste, her correctness of manners, and very original turn of humor, was the brightest ornament. All his pursuits and tastes were so decidedly intellectual, that it made the society, and the conversation which was always to be found in his circle, interesting and delightful.'"- Vol. I. pp. 91, 92.

The next passage we select exhibits Johnson in a highly characteristic, and Boswell, though a guest in the house of a bishop, in no very creditable mood. The letter is dated from London, 1781.

"Tuesday we were a small and very choice party at Bishop Shipley's. Lord and Lady Spencer, Lord and Lady Althorpe, Sir Joshua, Langton, Boswell, Gibbon, and, to my agreeable surprise, Dr. Johnson were there.

"Mrs. Garrick and he had never met since her bereavement. I was heartily disgusted with Mr. Boswell, who came up stairs after dinner, much disordered with wine, and addressed me in a manner that drew from me a sharp rebuke, for which I fancy he will not easily forgive me. Johnson came to see us the next morning, and made us a long visit. On Mrs. Garrick's telling him she was always more at her ease with persons who had suffered the same loss with herself, he said that was a comfort she could seldom have, considering the superiority of his merit, and the cordiality of their union. He bore his strong testimony to the liberality of Garrick. He reproved me with pretended sharpness for reading "Les Pensées de Pascal," or any of the Port Royal authors, alleging that, as a good Protestant, I ought to abstain from books written by Catholics. I was beginning to stand upon my defence, when he took me with both hands, and with a tear running down his cheeks, Child," said he, with the most affecting earnestness, "I am heartily glad that you read pious books, by whomsoever they may be written.""" - Vol. 1. p. 124.

We have already mentioned Dr. Porteus, the Bishop of London, but first of Chester, as among her early and honored friends. He entertained the highest respect for her talents, and once and again suggested to her topics for her powerful pen. To such counsel she paid a filial deference. His letters, which are among the pleasantest in the volume, show the elegance of his taste not less than the cheerfulness and kindness of his temper. He was most exemplary in his devotion to the duties of his station; and of his popularity as a preacher, besides other well known testimonies, we notice incidentally the following; which we adduce chiefly for its connexion with a yet clearer testimony of the extravagance of one lady of fashion contrasted with some astonishing reverses in the condition of another.

"Did I tell you, that the Bishop of Chester's Sermons were out of print in eight days? I hope the age is not so bad as we took it to be and yet it cannot be very good either, when the strawberries at Lady Stormont's breakfast last Saturday morning cost one hundred and fifty pounds,'

i. e. nearly seven hundred dollars! The question might have been asked here with more grace than it was once asked of Why was not this sold for much and given to the

old,

poor?'

66

Now let our readers contrast this costly breakfast with what follows.

"Did you hear of a woman of quality, an earl's daughter, perishing for want the other day near Cavendish-square? The sad story is, that she had married an attorney, a bad man, and had several children; they all frequently experienced the want of a morsel of bread. Lady Jane grew extremely ill, and faint with hunger. An old nurse, who had never forsaken her mistress in her misfortunes, procured by some means a sixpence; Lady Jane sent her out to buy a cow-heel; the nurse brought it in and carried a piece of it to her mistress; "No," said she, "I feel myself dying, all relief is too late; and it would be cruel in me to rob the children of a morsel, by wasting it on one who must die," so saying, she expired. I leave you to make your own comments on this domestic tragedy, in a metropolis drowned in luxury. What will Sally say to side-dishes and third courses now?'" Vol. 1. p. 159.

But the extravagance of Lady Stormont's breakfast, great as it was, seems to us not quite so objectionable as a rout,

which Miss More attended at the house of a Bishop, Dr. Shipley. We of New England, with our pristine notions of clerical, to say nothing of episcopal decorum, should be apt to regard such an assemblage better suited to the levee of at Prime Minister. And the old King himself in his capacity as Head of the Church thought so too. For it was a rout of the same sort, and about the same time, given by an Archbishop of Canterbury (Dr. Cornwallis), in the palace of Lambeth, or perhaps against his will by a fashionable wife, that drew from his Majesty a letter to his Grace, that may be handed down to future monarchs as their model for royal rebuke. Never was reproof at once so courteous and so severe.

"On Monday I was at a very great assembly at the Bishop of St. Asaph's. Conceive to yourself one hundred and fifty or two hundred people met together, dressed in the extremity of the fashion; painted as red as bacchanals; poisoning the air with perfumes; treading on each other's gowns; making the crowd they blame; not one in ten able to get a chair; protesting they are engaged to ten other places, and lamenting the fatigue they are not obliged to endure; ten or a dozen card-tables crammed with dowagers of quality, grave ecclesiastics, and yellow admirals; and you have an idea of an assembly. I never go to these things when I can possibly avoid it, and stay, when there, as few minutes as I can.' - Vol. 1. pp. 141, 142.

And since, with our heroine, we have got up into kings' and bishops' palaces, we may introduce here an anecdote related with his characteristic simplicity by Bryant, the learned mythologist, a near neighbour at Windsor and special favorite of King George, who sometimes visited him in his own study. It is a ludicrous example of the self-consequence and pretension of even the youngest sprigs of royalty. "Mr. Bryant had been that morning to Windsor to present his great work. He was met in the ante-chamber by the youngest of the princes, then but a little boy, who begged to look at it. When it was put into his hands, he held it upside down, and glancing his eyes for a moment over the pages, returned it with an air of important graciousness, pronouncing it excellent!" The distinctions of birth and place, which, in a government like that of England, hold so large a place in the estimation of the multitude, and on some minds exert a power little short of fascination, could never bribe the judgment of Miss More, or even in her youth confound her exquisite moral perception. She was gratified, as she should have been, because it is

altogether natural to the ardent and generous mind, by the attentions of the great. But folly was still folly, and profligacy in its most refined forms lost to her view nothing of its vileness, because it was the profligacy of princes and nobles. She held in due respect the distinctions which every good subject and every wise citizen identifies with the order and well-being of society; and felt and expressed the deference which belongs to those, who from their birth or their station "are called gods." But she knew also, that they were "to die like men;" and the spectacle of their magnificence and glory never dazzled her youthful imagination, or tempted her to forget, what it would be their own true happiness to remember, that exalted privileges only involve the deeper obligations; and that the only enviable distinctions are the distinctions of virtue. Accordingly, not only in her books, some of which, as her "Thoughts on the Manners of the Great," were expressly written to illustrate these great truths, but in her most familiar intercourse with people of fashion, she exhibits the modesty always, but with it the independence and elevation of her mind. She could make due allowances for the customs of courts, for the perils of station, and for the inexorable demands which fashion, that unpitying despot, makes upon the humblest of its votaries. But to her judgment of character she applied the only true standard, the standard of Christian virtue; looking not to things that are seen, which she knew were only temporal, but to things that are eternal.

There is to our view nothing, in which her own excellent character appears to more advantage, than in the simplicity she retained in her own manners, and the faithfulness of her friendships to her humblest friends, after she became the object herself of such flattering notice. The reader will see how often, at this brilliant period of her fame, she declined a fashionable party, or hastened from a splendid dinner, that she. might "take a sociable cup of tea," or pass an hour, tasting, with Hooker, "God's blessing, if not out of mother earth, yet in peace and privacy," with some worthy personage, who had perhaps never set foot in a drawing-room, and whose retirement she could cheer by her lively, not wicked, descriptions of the great folks and the gay scenes she was daily witnessing. We say not wicked, for though she had a keen sense of the ridiculous, she was too generous to requite hospi

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