husband, Lord Bolingbroke. But he took care not to obtrude his faults of
life, whatever they may have been, upon the old moralist, who
entertained for him a peculiar affection. He specially admired
Beauclerk's skill in the use of a more polished, if less vigorous, style
of conversation than his own. He envied the ease with which Beauclerk
brought out his sly incisive retorts. "No man," he said, "ever was so
free when he was going to say a good thing, from a look that expressed
that it was coming; or, when he had said it, from a look that expressed
that it had come." When Beauclerk was dying (in 1780), Johnson said,
with a faltering voice, that he would walk to the extremity of the
diameter of the earth to save him. Two little anecdotes are expressive
of his tender feeling for this incongruous friend. Boswell had asked him
to sup at Beauclerk's. He started, but, on the way, recollecting
himself, said, "I cannot go; but _I do not love Beauclerk the less_."
Beauclerk had put upon a portrait of Johnson the inscription,--

Ingenium ingens
Inculto latet hoc sub corpore.

Langton, who bought the portrait, had the inscription removed. "It was
kind in you to take it off," said Johnson; and, after a short pause,
"not unkind in him to put it on."

Early in their acquaintance, the two young men, Beau and Lanky, as
Johnson called them, had sat up one night at a tavern till three in the
morning. The courageous thought struck them that they would knock up the
old philosopher. He came to the door of his chambers, poker in hand,
with an old wig for a nightcap. On hearing their errand, the sage
exclaimed, "What! is it you, you dogs? I'll have a frisk with you." And
so Johnson with the two youths, his juniors by about thirty years,