brought together. At the head of the establishment Johnson had
placed an old lady named Williams, whose chief recommendations
were her blindness and her poverty. But, in spite of her murmurs
and reproaches, he gave an asylum to another lady who was as poor
as herself, Mrs Desmoulins, whose family he had known many years
before in Staffordshire. Room was found for the daughter of Mrs
Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was generally
addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom her generous host called
Polly. An old quack doctor named Levett, who bled and dosed
coal-heavers and hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts
of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little
copper, completed this strange menagerie. All these poor
creatures were at constant war with each other, and with
Johnson's negro servant Frank. Sometimes, indeed, they
transferred their hostilities from the servant to the master,
complained that a better table was not kept for them, and railed
or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make his escape to
Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern. And yet he, who was generally
the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, who was but too
prompt to resent anything which looked like a slight on the part
of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron,
bore patiently from mendicants, who, but for his bounty, must
have gone to the workhouse, insults more provoking than those for
which he had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance to
Chesterfield. Year after year Mrs Desmoulins, Polly, and Levett,
continued to torment him and to live upon him.

The course of life which has been described was interrupted in
Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an important event. He had early
read an account of the Hebrides, and had been much interested by