NOT very far from 'streaming London's central roar'—or, in plain words, about midway in Fleet Street, on the left-hand side as you go toward Ludgate Hill—is a high and narrow archway or passage over which is painted in dingy letters the words 'Bolt Court.' To the lover of the 'Great Cham of Literature,' the name comes freighted with memories. More than a hundred years ago 'the ponderous mass of Johnson's form,' to quote a poem by Mrs. Barbauld, must often have darkened that contracted approach, when, in order to greet with tea the coming day ('veniente die'), * and to postpone if possible that 'unseasonable hour at which he had habituated himself to expect the oblivion of repose,' he rolled across from the Temple to Miss Williams's rooms. Where the blind lady lodged, no Society of Arts tablet now reveals to us; but as soon as the pilgrim has traversed the dark and greasy entrance-way, and finds himself in the little court itself, with its disorderly huddle of buildings, and confusion of tip-cat playing children, he is in Johnson's land, and only a few steps from the actual spot on which Johnson's last hours were spent. Fronting him, in the farther angle of the enclosure, is the Stationers' Company's School, and the Stationers' Company's School stands upon the site of No. 8 Bolt Court, formerly Bensley's Printing Office, ** but earlier still the last residence of Dr. Johnson, who lived in it from 1776 to 1784.

It was in the backroom of its first floor that, on Monday, the 13th December in the latter year, at about seven o'clock in the evening, his black servant Francis Barber and his friend Mrs. Desmoulins, who watched in the sick-chamber, 'observing that the noise he made in breathing had ceased, went to the bed, and found that he was dead.'

Standing in Bolt Court to-day, before the unimposing faÇade of the school which now occupies the spot, it is not easy to reconstruct that quiet parting-scene; nor is it easy to realize the old book-burdened upper floors, or the lower reception chamber, where, according to Sir John Hawkins, were given those 'not inelegant dinners' of the good Doctor's more opulent later years. Least of all is it possible to conceive that, somewhere in this pell-mell of bricks and mortar, was once a garden which the famous Lexicographer took pleasure in watering; and where, moreover, grew a vine from which, only a few months before he died, he gathered 'three bunches of grapes.' But if Bolt Court prove unstimulating, you have only to take a few steps to the right, and you arrive, somewhat unexpectedly, in a little parallelogram at the back, known as Gough Square. Here, in the north-west corner, still stands one of the last of those sixteen residences in which Johnson lived in London. It is at present a place of business; but the tenants make no difficulty about your examination of it, and when you inquire for the well-known garret you are at once invited to inspect it. The interior of the house, of course, is much altered, but there is still a huge chain at the front door, which dates from Johnson's day, and the old oak-balustraded staircase remains intact. As you climb its narrow stages, you remember that, sixty years since, Thomas Carlyle must have made that ascent before you; * and you wonder how Johnson, with his bad sight and his rolling gait, managed to steer up it at all.

The flight ends in the garret itself, upon which you emerge at present, as in a hay-loft. But it is not in the least such a 'sky-parlour' as Hogarth assigns to his 'Distressed Poet.' It occupies the whole width and breadth of the building; it is sufficiently lighted by three windows in front, and two dormers at the sides; and the pitch of the roof is by no means low. Here you are actually in Johnson's house; and as you turn to look at the stairway you have just quitted, it is odds if you do not expect to see the shrivelled wig, the seared, blinking face, and the heavy shoulders of the Doctor himself rising slowly above the aperture with a huge volume under his arm. For it was in this very garret in Gough Square, within sound of the hammers of that famous clock of St. Dunstan's, to which Cowper refers in the 'Connoisseur,' * that the great Dictionary was compiled.

Here laboured Shiels, the amanuensis, and his five companions, ceaselessly transcribing the passages which had been marked for them to copy, and probably going 'odd man or plain Newmarket' for beer as soon as ever their employer's back was turned; here, also, at the little fire-place in the corner, must often have sat Johnson himself, peering closely (much as Reynolds shows him in the portrait of 1778) at the proofs that were going to long-suffering Andrew Millar. It was in this identical garret that Joseph Warton once visited him to pay a subscription; here came Roubiliac and Sir Joshua; and here, when the room had grown to be dignified by the title of the 'library,' Johnson received Dr. Burney, who found in it 'five or six Greek folios, a deal writing-desk, and a chair and a half.' The half-chair must have been that mentioned by Miss Reynolds; and it is evident that long experience or repeated misadventure had made Johnson both skilful and cautious in manipulating it. 'A gentleman,' she says, 'who frequently visited him whilst writing his "Idlers" [the 'Idler' was partly composed in Gough Square in 1758] constantly found him at his desk, sitting on a chair with three legs; and on rising from it, he remarked that Dr. Johnson never forgot its defect, but would either hold it in his hand or place it with great composure against some support, taking no notice of its imperfection to his visitor.' 'It was remarkable in Dr. Johnson,' she goes on, 'that no external circumstances ever prompted him to make any apology, or to seem even sensible of their existence.'

In Gough Square Johnson lived from 1749 to 1759. 'I have this day moved my things,' he writes to his step-daughter, Miss Porter, on the 23rd of March in the latter year, 'and you are now to direct to me at Staple Inn.' These ten years were among the busiest and most productive of his life. No pension had as yet made existence easier to him; no Boswell was at hand to seduce him to port and the Mitre; and the Literary Club, as yet unborn, existed only in embryo at a beefsteak shop in Ivy Lane. Besides the 'Idler' and the Dictionary, which latter was published in the middle of his sojourn at Gough Square, he sent forth from his garret 'Irene' and the 'Vanity of Human Wishes,' the 'Rambler,' and the essays in Hawkesworth's 'Adventurer.' It was here that he drew up those proposals for that belated edition of Shakespeare of which Churchill said:

He for Subscribers baits his hook,

And takes their cash—but where's the Book?

and here, early in 1759, he wrote his 'Rasselas.' It was in Gough Square, on the 16th of March, 1756, that he was arrested for £5 18s., and only released by a prompt loan from Samuel Richardson; it was while living in Gough Scpiare that he penned that noble letter to Chesterfield, of which Time seems to intensify rather than to attenuate the manly dignity and the independent accent. 'Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the Publick should consider me as owing that to a Patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.'

'Till I am solitary, and cannot impart it.'

The same thought recurs in the closing words of the preface to his magnum opus, which, little more than two months after the date of the above letter, appeared in a pair of folio volumes.

'I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave; and success and miscarriage are empty sounds.' It needs no Boswell to tell us that the reference here is to the death, three years before, of his wife,—that fantastic 'Tetty,' to himself so beautiful, to his friends so unattractive, whom he loved so ardently and so faithfully, and whose name, coupled with so many 'pious breathings,' is so frequently to be found in his 'Prayers and Meditations.' 'This is the day,' he wrote, thirty years afterwards, 'on which, in 1752, dear Tetty died. I have now uttered a prayer of repentance and contrition; perhaps Tetty knows that I prayed for her. Perhaps Tetty is now praying for me. God help me.' In her epitaph at Bromley he styles her 'formosa, culta, ingeniosa, pia.' In a recently discovered letter she is his 'charming Love,' his 'most amiable woman in the world,' and (even at fifty) his 'dear Girl.' He preserved her wedding ring, says Boswell, 'as long as he lived, with an affectionate care, in a little round wooden box, in the inside of which he pasted a slip of paper, thus inscribed by him in fair characters, as follows: 'Eheu! Eliz. Johnson, Nuptay Jul. 9° 1736, Mortua, eheu! Mart. 17° 1752.' *

Her loss was not the only bereavement he suffered in Gough Square. Two months before he left it, in 1759, his mother died at Lichfield,—'one of the few calamities,' he had told Lucy Porter, 'on which he thought with terror.' Confined to London by his work, he was not able to close her eyes; but he wrote to her a last letter almost too sacred in its wording for the profanation of type, and he consecrated an 'Idler' to her memory. 'The last year, the last day, must come,' he says mournfully. 'It has come, and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects.' To pay his mother's modest debts, and to cover the expenses of her funeral, he penned his sole approach to a work of fiction,—the story of 'Rasselas.'

Who now reads Johnson? If he pleases still,

'Tis most for Dormitive or Sleeping Pill,—

one might say, in not inappropriate parody of Pope. His strong individuality, his intellectual authority, his conversational power, must live for ever; but his books!—who, outside the fanatics of literature,—who reads them now? Macaulay, we are told by Lord Houghton, once quoted 'London' at a dinner-table, but then he was talking to Dean Milman; and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in his novel of 'A Mortal Antipathy,' refers to the Prince of Abyssinia.

Browning, says Mrs. Sutherland Orr, qualified himself for poetry in his youth by a diligent perusal of the Dictionary; and it may perhaps be said of him, in those words of Horace which Johnson himself applied to Prior, that 'the vessel long retained the scent which it first received.' But who now, among the supporters of the circulating libraries, ever gets out the 'Rambler,' or 'Irene,' or the 'Vanity of Human Wishes' (beloved of Scott and Byron), or 'Rasselas,'—'Rasselas,' once more popular than the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' *—'Rasselas,' which despite such truisms as 'What cannot be repaired is not to be regretted,' is full of sagacious 'criticism of life'!

The honest answer must be, 'Very few.' Yet a day may come when the Johnsonese of Johnson's imitators will be forgotten, and people will turn once more to the fountain-head to find, with surprise, that it is not so polluted with Latinisms after all, and that it abounds in passages direct and forcible. 'Of all the writings which are models,' says Professor Earle, 'models I mean in the highest sense of the word, models from which the spirit of genuine true and wholesome diction is to be imbibed (not models of mannerism of which the trick or fashion is to be caught), I have no hesitation in saying that there is one author unapproachably and incomparably the best, and that is Samuel Johnson.' And this is the 'deliberate conclusion' of an expert who has given almost a lifetime to the comparative study of English prose.