Chapter III: Part 3

Dr. Johnson met him when they were both working for the booksellers, and when the great dictionary scheme was floated his co-operation was welcomed. Johnson's success in life was largely due to his faculty for discovering people who could be useful to him. It can easily be believed that, knowing something of the scholarship of Baretti, he should be delighted to avail himself of his help. Baretti had an intimate knowledge of several languages and their literature; as a philologist he was probably far superior to Johnson; and possibly Johnson knew this, though he was doubtless too wise ever to acknowledge so much openly. We do not hear that the relations between the two ever became strained while the great work was in course of progress. Shortly after it was completed Baretti returned to his native Italy, and began to reproach Johnson for not writing to him more frequently. We have several examples of the cheerfulness with which Johnson set about exculpating himself from such reproaches. The letters which he wrote to him at Italy are among the most natural that ever came from his pen. They are models of the gossipy style which Johnson could assume without once deviating from that dignity which so frequently became ponderous, suggesting the dignity of the elephant rather than that of the lion. Walpole was a master of the art of being gossipy without being dignified. But Johnson's style was not flexible. We have not Baretti's letters to Johnson, but the references made by the latter to some matters communicated to him by his correspondent let us know something of how Baretti was getting on in the land of his birth. He seems to have set his heart upon obtaining some appointment in Italy, and his aspirations included marriage. He was disappointed in both directions; and it would be too much to expect that his temper was improved by these rebuffs.

It may well be believed that he quarrelled his way through Italy. “I have lately seen Mr. Stratico, Professor of Padua, who has told me of your quarrel with an abbot of the Celestine Order, but had not the particulars very ready in his memory,” Johnson wrote to him at Milan. Any one who could quarrel with an abbot of the Celestine Order would, we fancy, be _capable de tout_, like the prophet Habakkuk, according to the witty Frenchman. One is not disposed to be hard upon Professor Stratico for his shortness of memory in regard to this particular quarrel; the strain of remembering the details of all the quarrels of Mr. Baretti would be too great for any man.

Of course, Dr. Johnson gave him some excellent advice. It seems that poor Baretti had been at first so well received on his return to Italy that he became sanguine of success in all his enterprises, and when they miscarried he wrote very bitterly to Johnson, who replied as follows:

“I am sorry for your disappointment, with which you seem more touched than I should expect a man of your resolution and experience to have been, did I not know that general truths are seldom applied to particular occasions; and that the fallacy of our selflove extends itself as wide as our interests or affections. Every man believes that mistresses are unfaithful and patrons capricious; but he excepts his own mistress and his own patron. We have all learned that greatness is negligent and contemptuous, and that in Courts life is often languished away in ungratified expectation; but he that approaches greatness or glitters in a Court, imagines that destiny has at last exempted him from the common lot.”

It is doubtful if this excellent philosophy made the person to whom it was addressed more amiable to his immediate entourage; nor is it likely that he was soothed by the assurance that his “patron's weakness or insensibility will finally do you little hurt, if he is not assisted by your own passions.”

“Of your love,” continued Johnson, “I know not the propriety; we can estimate the power, but in love, as in every other passion of which hope is the essence, we ought always to remember the uncertainty of events.” He then hastens to add that “love and marriage are different states. Those who are to suffer the evils together, and to suffer often for the sake of one another, soon lose that tenderness of look, and that benevolence of mind which arose from the participation of unmingled pleasure and success in amusement.”

The pleasant little cynical bark in the phrase “those that are to suffer the evils together,” as if it referred to love and marriage, is, Malone thinks, not Johnson's, but Baretti's. It is suggested that Johnson really wrote “those that are to suffer the evils _of life_ together,” and that Baretti in transcribing the letter for Boswell, purposely omitted the words “_of life_.” It would be quite like Baretti to do this; for he would thereby work off part of his spite against Johnson for having given him the advice, and he would have had his own sneer against “love and marriage,” the _fons et origo_ of his disappointment.

But of Dr. Johnson's esteem for the attainments of Baretti there can be no doubt. He thought that the book on Italy which he published on his return to England was very entertaining, adding: “Sir, I know no man who carries his head higher in conversation than Baretti. There are strong powers in his mind. He has not, indeed, many hooks; but with what hooks he has he grapples very forcibly.”

It may seem rather strange after this that Baretti was never admitted to the membership of the celebrated club. He was intimate with nearly all the original members, but the truth remained that he was not what Johnson called a clubbable man: he had too many hooks, not too few.

Such was the man who was brought before Sir John Fielding, the magistrate at Bow Street, on the morning after the tragedy, charged with murder; and then it was that he found the value of the friendships which he had formed in England. The first person to hasten to his side in his extremity was Oliver Goldsmith, the man whom he had so frequently made the object of his sarcasm, whose peculiarities he had mimicked, not in the playful manner of Garrick or Foote, but in his own spiteful style, with the grim humour of the disappointed man. Goldsmith it was who opened his purse for him and got a coach for him when he was remanded until the next day, riding by his side to the place of his incarceration. Goldsmith was by his side when the question of bail was discussed before Lord Mansfield. For some reason which does not require any particular explanation, it was not thought that Goldsmith as a bailsman would appeal irresistibly to the authorities, but the names of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mr. Edmund Burke, Mr. David Garrick, and Mr. H. Fitzherbert were submitted to Lord Mansfield, and immediately accepted. An amusing anecdote was current regarding the few days of Baretti's incarceration. One morning he was visited by a teacher of languages, who begged a trifling favour of him. This was merely a letter of recommendation to Baretti's pupils, so that the applicant might have a chance of taking them over “when you are hanged, sir.” The fact that this sympathetic visitor was allowed to depart without molestation makes people doubt whether Baretti was so bad-tempered after all. He did not assault the man. “You rascal!” he cried. “If I were not in my own room, I would kick you downstairs directly.”

The trial was fixed for October 20th at the Old Bailey, and a few days before this date a number of the prisoner's friends met together to consult as to the line which should be taken for his defence. It seems that they were not all agreed on some points; this was only to be expected, considering what an array of wisdom was brought together upon the occasion of these consultations, and considering also the course which was adopted by Dr. Johnson, who thought that the interests of the prisoner would be advanced by getting up an academical discussion with Burke. Johnson and Burke were notorious rivals in conversation in those days when conversation was regarded as an art, and men and women seemed to have plenty of leisure to talk together for the sake of talking, and to argue together for the sake of argument, and to be rude to one another for the sake of wit. Boswell was for ever extolling Johnson at the expense of Burke; and indeed, so far as one can gather from his pages, Johnson was the ruder man.

The example that Boswell gives of his own readiness in making Goldsmith “shut up” when he questioned Johnson's superiority to Burke in discussion is one of the best instances of the little Scotsman's incapacity to perceive the drift of an argument. “Is he like Burke who winds into a subject like a serpent?” asked Goldsmith.

“But” (said I) “Dr. Johnson is the Hercules that strangled serpents in his cradle.”

This repartee which Boswell gleefully records is about equal to the reply made by one of the poets who was appealed to in the “Bab Ballads” to say if he wrote “the lovely cracker mottoes my Elvira pulls at supper.” It will be remembered that the poet whose name rhymes with “supper” replied:

“'A fool is bent upon a twig, but wise men dread a bandit,'

Which” (the earnest inquirer said) “I felt was very wise,

but I didn't understand it.”

It was in regard to this consultation as to the best defence to be made out for Baretti that Johnson admitted to have opposed Burke simply for the sake of showing the rest of the company that he could get the better of Burke in an argument. “Burke and I,” he said, “should have been of one opinion if we had had no audience.” Such a confession! There was the life of his friend Baretti trembling in the balance, and yet Johnson, solely for the sake of “showing off,” opposed the wisdom and ingenuity Burke exercised to save from the gallows a man whom Johnson professed to admire!

But if we are to believe Boswell, Johnson cared very little whether his friend was hanged or not. As for Boswell himself, he always detested Baretti, and is reported to have expressed the earnest hope that the man would be hanged. However, the “consultations” went merrily on, and doubtless contributed in some measure to a satisfactory solution of the vexed question as to whether Johnson or Burke was the more brilliant talker. They formed a tolerably valid excuse for the uncorking of several bottles, and perhaps these friends of Baretti felt that even though he should die, yet the exchange of wit in the course of these happy evenings would live for ever in the memory of those present, so that after all, let the worst come to the worst, Baretti should have little cause for complaint.

It is reported that the prisoner, upon the occasion of his receiving a visit from Johnson and Burke, cried: “What need a man fear who holds two such hands?” It may here be mentioned, however, that although it was asserted that Johnson and Murphy were responsible for the line of defence adopted at the trial, yet in after years Baretti was most indignant that it should be suggested that credit should be given to any one but himself for his defence; and he ridiculed the notion that Johnson or Burke or Murphy or even Boswell--himself an aspirant to the profession of law in which he subsequently displayed a conspicuous lack of distinction--had anything to do with the instruction either of solicitors or barristers on his behalf.

At any rate, the “consultations” came to an end, and the friends of the accused awaited the trial with exemplary patience. Mr. Boswell seems suddenly to have become the most sympathetic of the friends; for three days before the event he took a journey to Tyburn to witness the hanging of several men at that place, and though it is known that the spectacle of a hanging never lost its charm for him, yet it is generous to assume that upon this occasion he went to Tyburn in order to qualify himself more fully for sympathising with Baretti, should the defence assigned to him break down.

Another ardent sympathiser was Mr. Thomas Davies the bookseller, a gentleman whose chief distinction in the eyes of his contemporaries consisted--if we are to believe one of the wittiest of his associates--in the fact that he had an exceedingly pretty wife; but whose claim to the gratitude of coming generations lies in the circumstance of his having introduced Boswell to Johnson. Tom Davies was terribly cut up at the thought of the possibility of Baretti's being sentenced to be hanged. Boswell, on the day before the trial, after telling Johnson how he had witnessed the executions at Tyburn, and expressing his surprise that none of the wretches seemed to think anything of the matter, mentioned that Foote, the actor, had shown him a letter which he had received from Tom Davies, and in which the writer affirmed that he had not had a wink of sleep owing to his anxiety in respect of “this sad affair of Baretti,” and begging Foote to suggest some way by which he could be of service to the accused, adding that should Mr. Foote be in need of anything in the pickle line, he could strongly recommend him to an industrious young man who had lately set up in that business.

Strange to say, Johnson was not impressed with this marked evidence of Mr. Davies' kind heart.

“Ay, sir, here you have a specimen of human sympathy,” he cried. “A friend hanged and a cucumber pickled! We know not whether Baretti or the pickle man has kept Davies from sleep; nor does he know himself.”

This was rather sweeping, but his dictum showed that he was rather a poor analyser of human emotion. In the minds of the people of to-day who read of Tom Davies' bad nights there is no manner of doubt whatever that the sequence of his emotions was to be attributed to his intimacy with the industrious young pickle maker. Tom had indulged rather too freely in some of the specimens of his art presented to him by the pickler, and the result was a melancholy night; and, being melancholy, he was led to think of the most melancholy incident that had recently come under his notice. When a man is full of mixed pickles he is liable to get a little mixed, and so in the morning he attributed his miserable night to his thoughts about Baretti, instead of knowing that his thoughts about Baretti were the natural result of his miserable night. If he had been acquainted with an industrious young onion merchant he might have passed the night in tears.

“As for his not sleeping,” said Dr. Johnson, “sir, Tom Davies is a very great man--Tom has been on the stage, and knows how to do those things.”

Boswell: “I have often blamed myself, sir, for not feeling for others as sensibly as many say they do.” Johnson: “Sir, don't be duped by them any more. You will find those very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling.” Mr. Boswell thought that he would do well to turn his friend from the subject under discussion, so he made the apparently harmless remark that Foote had a great deal of humour and that he had a singular talent of exhibiting character. But Johnson had on him the mood not only of “the rugged Russian bear,” but also of “the armed rhinoceros and the Hyrcan tiger.”

“Sir, it is not a talent: it is a vice; it is what others abstain from,” he growled.

“Did not he think of exhibiting you, sir?” inquired the tactful Mr. Boswell, though he knew all about Foote and Johnson long before.

“Sir, fear restrained him,” said Johnson. “He knew I would have broken his bones. I would have saved him the trouble of cutting off a leg: I would not have left him a leg to cut off.”

This brutal reference to the fact that Foote's recent accident had compelled him to have a leg amputated should surely have suggested to his inquisitor that he had probably been paying a visit to an industrious young pickle maker without Tom Davies' recommendation, or that he had partaken of too generous a helping of his favourite veal, baked with plums, and so that he would do well to leave him alone for a while. But no, Mr. Boswell was not to be denied.

“Pray, sir, is not Foote an infidel?” he inquired. But as he himself had been dining with Foote the previous day, and as he possessed no more delicacy than a polecat, he could easily have put the question to Foote himself.

But Johnson would not even give the man credit for his infidelity.

“I do not know, sir, that the fellow is an infidel,” he said; “but if he is an infidel, he is an infidel as a dog is an infidel, that is to say, he has never thought on the subject.”

In another second he was talking of Buchanan, a poet, whom he praised, and of Shakespeare, another poet, whom he condemned, winding up by saying that there were some very fine things in Dr. Young's _Night Thoughts_. But the most remarkable of his deliverances on this rather memorable evening had reference to Baretti's fate. After declaring that if one of his friends had just been hanged he would eat his dinner every bit as heartily as if his friend were still alive.--“Why, there's Baretti, who is to be tried for his life to-morrow,” he added; “friends have risen up for him on every side; yet if he should be hanged, none of them will eat a slice of plum pudding the less.” Happily the accuracy of this tender-hearted scholar's prediction had no chance of being put to the test. Baretti was tried and acquitted.

Boswell gives only a few lines to an account of the trial, and fails to mention that the prisoner declined the privilege of being tried by a jury one half of whom should be foreigners. “It took place,” he said, “at the awful Sessions House, emphatically called Justice Hall,” and he affirms that “never did such a constellation of genius enlighten the Old Bailey.”

He mentions that Mr. Burke, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Beauclerk, and Dr. Johnson gave evidence, the last-named being especially impressive, speaking in a slow, deliberate, and distinct tone of voice. It seems strange that Boswell, who was (nominally) a lawyer, when he wrote his life of Johnson, should say nothing whatever respecting the line of defence adopted by the friends of the prisoner upon this interesting occasion. It might have been expected that he would dwell lovingly, as a lawyer would certainly be pardoned for doing, upon the technical points involved in the trial, even though he hated Baretti. For instance, it would be interesting to learn why it was thought that the result of the trial might mean the hanging of Baretti, when from the first it was perfectly plain that he had acted in self-defence: not merely was he protecting his purse, he had actually to fight for his life against an acknowledged ruffian of the most contemptible type. In the present day if a short-sighted man of letters--say Mr. Augustine Birrell--were to be attacked in a dark street by three notorious scoundrels and to manage to kill one of them by poking the ferrule end of an umbrella into his eye, no one--not even a Conservative Attorney-General--would fancy that a grand jury at the New Old Bailey would return a true bill against him for the act, putting aside all question of his being found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. And yet in Baretti's time swords were commonly worn, and they were by no means toy weapons. Why should poor Tom Davies have a sleepless night, owing (as he believed) to his apprehension that his friend would be hanged in a day or two? Why was it necessary to dazzle the “awful Sessions House” by such “a constellation of genius” as had never before assembled in that “Hall of Justice”?

Mr. Boswell might certainly have told us something of the actual scene in the court, when he has devoted so much space to the ridiculous dialogues between himself and Johnson, having more or less bearing upon the case. The course he adopted is like laying a dinner-table with four knives and forks and five wineglasses for every guest--in having a constellation of genii in plush behind every chair, and then serving a dinner of hashed mutton only. A great number of people believe that whatever Boswell may have been, he was invariably accurate. But in this case he does not even give a true account of the constellation of genius to which he refers. He only says that Burke, Garrick, Beauclerk, and Johnson were called as witnesses. He omits to say a word about Goldsmith, who was something of a genius; or Reynolds, who was quite a tolerable painter; or Fitzherbert, who had a wide reputation as a politician; or Dr. Halifax, whose evidence carried certainly as much weight as Johnson's. He does not even say a word respecting the evidence which Johnson and the others were called on to give on behalf of the prisoner at the bar. What is the good of telling us that the constellation of genius had never been paralleled within the precincts of the “emphatically called Justice Hall” if we are not made aware of some of the flashes of their genius when they were put into the witness-box?

The truth is that Boswell had no sense of proportion any more than a sense of the sublime and beautiful--or, for that matter, a sense of the ridiculous. He was the Needy Knife Grinder--with an occasional axe of his own--of the brilliant circle into which he crawled, holding on to Johnson's skirts and half concealing himself beneath their capacious flaps. He had constant stories suggested to him, but he failed to see their possibilities. He was a knife grinder and nothing more; but at his own trade he was admirable; he ground away patiently at his trivialities respecting the man whom he never was within leagues of understanding, and it is scarcely fair to reproach him for not throwing away his grindstone, which he knew how to use, and taking to that of a diamond cutter, which he was incapable of manipulating. But surely he might have told us something more of the actual trial of Baretti instead of giving us page after page leading up to the trial.

From other sources we learn that what all the geniuses were called on to testify to was the pacific character of Baretti, and this they were all able to do in an emphatic manner. It would seem that it was assumed that the prisoner, a short-sighted, middle-aged man of letters, was possessed of all the dangerous qualities of a bloodthirsty brigand of his own country--that he was a fierce and ungovernable desperado, who was in the habit of prowling about the purlieus of the Haymarket to do to death with a fruit-knife the peaceful citizens whom he might encounter. He was a foreigner, and he had killed an Englishman with an outlandish weapon. That seems to have been the reason there was for the apprehension, which was very general in respect of the fate of Baretti, for it was upon these points that his witnesses were most carefully examined.

Goldsmith, Reynolds, and Garrick were very useful witnesses regarding the knife. They affirmed that in carrying a fruit-knife the prisoner was in no way departing from the recognised custom of his fellow-countrymen. He, in common with them, was in the habit of eating a great deal of fruit, so that the knife was a necessity with him.

Johnson's evidence was as follows:

“I have known Mr. Baretti a long time. He is a man of literature--a very studious man--a man of great intelligence. He gets his living by study. I have no reason to think he was ever disordered with liquor in his life. A man that I have never known to be otherwise than peaceable and a man that I take to be rather timorous. As to his eyesight, he does not see me now, nor do I see him. I do not believe he would be capable of assaulting anybody in the street without great provocation.”

It cannot be denied that the reference to Baretti's imperfect sight told upon the jury, and uttered as the words were by Johnson in his dignified way, they could scarcely fail to produce a profound effect upon the court.

Baretti was acquitted, and no one could presume to refer to him for the rest of his life except as a quiet, inoffensive, frugivorous gentleman, since these were the qualities with which he was endowed by a constellation of geniuses on their oath. He was acquitted by the jury; but the judge thought it well to say a few words to him before allowing him to leave the dock, and the drift of his discourse amounted to a severe censure upon his impetuosity, and the expression of a hope that the inconvenience to which he was put upon this occasion would act as a warning to him in future.

Really one could hardly imagine that in those days, when every week Mr. Boswell had a chance of going to such an entertainment at Tyburn as he had attended forty-eight hours before the opening of the Sessions, the taking of the life of a human being was regarded with such horror. One cannot help recalling the remark made by Walpole a few years later, that, owing to the severity of the laws, England had been turned into one vast shambles; nor can one quite forget the particulars of the case which was quoted as having an intimate bearing upon this contention--the case in which a young wife whose husband had been impressed to serve in His Majesty's Fleet, and who had consequently been left without any means of support, had stolen a piece of bread to feed her starving children, and had been hanged at Tyburn for the crime.

Reading the judge's censure of Baretti, who had, in preventing a contemptible ruffian from killing him, decreased by a unit the criminality of London, the only conclusion that one can come to is that the courts of law were very jealous of their precious prerogative to kill. Looking at the matter in this light, the bombastic phrase of Boswell does not seem so ridiculous after all; the Old Bailey had certainly good reason to be regarded as the “awful Sessions House.” But we are not so fully convinced that it had any right to be referred to as emphatically the Hall of Justice. In the Georgian Pageant the common hangman played too conspicuous a part.

But the unfortunate, if impetuous, Baretti left the court a free man, and we cannot doubt that in the company of his friends who had stood by him in his hour of trial he was a good deal harder upon the judge than the judge had been upon him; and probably he was reproved in a grave and dignified manner by Dr. Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds standing by with his ear trumpet, fearful lest a single word of Johnson's wisdom should escape him. Doubtless Mr. Garrick, the moment Johnson's back was turned, gave an inimitable imitation of both Johnson and Baretti--perhaps of the judge as well, and most likely the usher of the court.

Later on, when the avaricious Reynolds had hastened back to his studio in Leicester Fields to daub on canvas the figures of some of his sitters at the extortionate price of thirty-five guineas for a three-quarter length, he and Johnson put their heads together to devise what could be done for Baretti.

For about a year Baretti resumed his old way of living, working for the booksellers and completing his volume of travel through Europe, by which it is said he made £500. It would appear, however, that all his pupils had transferred themselves to the enterprising gentleman who had appealed to him at an inopportune moment for his recommendation, or to some of his other brethren, for by the end of the year he was in needy circumstances. Meantime he had been made by Sir Joshua Reynolds Honorary Secretary for Foreign Correspondence to the Royal Academy, and then Johnson recommended him to the husband of Mrs. Thrale as tutor to her girls at Streatham. This was very kind to Baretti, but it was rather hard on the Thrales. Apparently from the first day he went to Streatham his attitude in regard to the Thrale family was one of spite and malevolence; and there can be no doubt that Johnson bitterly regretted his patronage of a man who seemed never to forgive any one who had done him a good turn.

The agreement made by him with the Thrales was that he should practically be his own master, only residing at Streatham as a member of the family with no fixed salary. He was as artful as an Irish cabman in suggesting this “leave it to your honour” contract. He had heard on all hands of the liberality of Mr. Thrale, and he knew that, in addition to being provided with a luxurious home, he would receive presents from him far in excess of what he could earn. He was extremely well treated for the next three years, though he was for ever grumbling when he had a moment's leisure from insulting the Thrales and their guests. Mrs. Thrale said more in his favour than any one with whom he came in contact. She wrote: “His lofty consciousness of his own superiority which made him tenacious of every position, and drew him into a thousand distresses, did not, I must own, ever disgust me, till he began to exercise it against myself, and resolve to reign in our house by fairly defying the mistress of it. Pride, however, though shocking enough, is never despicable; but vanity, which he possessed too, in an eminent degree, will sometimes make a man near sixty ridiculous.”

Assuredly Mrs. Thrale “let him down” very gently. Dr. Thomas Campbell, a clergyman from Ireland, gives us a glimpse of Baretti's bearing at Streatham. It is clear that Baretti was anxious to impress him with the nature of his position in the house. “He told me he had several families both in town and country with whom he could go at any time and spend a month; he is at this time on these terms at Mr. Thrale's, and he knows how to keep his ground. Talking, as we were at tea, of the magnitude of the beer vessels, he said there was one thing at Mr. Thrale's house still more extraordinary--his wife. She gulped the pill very prettily. So much for Baretti!” wrote the clergyman in a very illuminating account of his visit to Streatham.

But not only did Mrs. Thrale bear with this detestable person for nearly two more years, but she and her husband took him with them and Johnson to Paris, where they lived in a magnificent way, the Thrales paying for everything. It was in a letter to Frank Levet, his domestic apothecary, that Johnson, writing from Paris, said: “I ran a race in the rain this day, and beat Baretti. Baretti is a fine fellow.” This is Johnson on Baretti. Here is Baretti on Johnson; on a copy of the _Piozzi Letters_ he wrote: “Johnson was often fond of saying silly things in strong terms, and the silly madam”--meaning Mrs. Thrale--“never failed to echo that beastly kind of wit.”

It was not, however, until an Italian tour, projected by Mr. Thrale, was postponed, that Baretti became quite unendurable. He had been presented by Mr. Thrale with £100 within a few months, and on the abandonment of the longer tour he received another £100 by way of compensation for the satisfaction he had been compelled to forgo in showing his countrymen the position to which he had attained in England. This was another act of generosity which he could not forgive. He became sullen and more cantankerous than ever, and neglected his duties in an intolerable way. In fact, he treated Streatham as if it were an hotel, turning up to give Miss Thrale a lesson at the most inconvenient hours, and then devoting the most of his time to poisoning the girl's mind against her mother. Upon one occasion he expressed the hope to her that if her mother died Mr. Thrale would marry Miss Whitbred, who would, he said, be a pretty companion for her, not tyrannical and overbearing as he affirmed her own mother was! Truly a nice remark for a young lady's tutor to make to her under her mother's roof.

The fact was, however--we have Baretti's own confession for it--that he had been led to believe that after being with the Thrales for a year or two, an annuity would be settled on him by the wealthy brewer, and he grew impatient at his services to the family not obtaining recognition in this way. It is extremely unlikely that Johnson ever even so much as hinted at this annuity, though Baretti says his expectations were due to what Johnson had told him; but it is certain that he had so exalted an opinion of himself, he believed that after a year or two of desultory teaching he should receive a handsome pension. And there the old story of the car-driver who left the nomination of the fare to “his honour's honour” was repeated. Baretti one morning packed up his bag and left Streatham without a word of farewell.

Johnson's account of his departure and his comments thereupon are worth notice. He wrote to Boswell:

“Baretti went away from Thrales in some whimsical fit of disgust or ill-nature without taking any leave. It is well if he finds in any other place as good an habitation and as many conveniences.”

On the whole it is likely that a good many of Baretti's friends felt rather sorry than otherwise that the jury at the Old Bailey had taken so merciful a view of his accident. If Johnson and Murphy were really responsible for the line of defence which prevailed at the trial, one can quite believe that the Thrales and a good many of their associates bore them a secret grudge for their pains.

In the year 1782 he was granted by the Government the pension which he had failed to extort from the Thrales. It amounted to £80 per annum, and we may take it for granted that he had nothing but the most copious abuse for the Prime Minister who had only given him £80 when Sheridan was receiving £200 and Johnson £300. He drew his pension for seven years.

Baretti's portrait, painted by Reynolds for the Streatham gallery, fetched £31 10s., the smallest price of any in the whole collection, on its dispersal, years after the principal actors in the scene in the “awful Sessions House” had gone to another world.

THE FATAL GIFT

WHEN Mr. Boswell had been snubbed, and very soundly snubbed too, by a Duchess, one might fancy that his ambition was fully satisfied. But he was possibly the most persevering of the order of _Pachydermata_ at that time extant; and in the matter of snubs he had the appetite of a leviathan. He was fired with the desire to be snubbed once more by Her Grace--and he was. Without waiting to catch her eye, he raised his glass and, bowing in her direction, said:

“My Lady Duchess, I have the honour to drink Your Grace's good health.”

The Duchess did not allow her conversation with Dr. Johnson to be interrupted by so flagrant a piece of politeness; she continued chatting quite pleasantly to the great man, ignoring the little one. That was how she had got on in life; and, indeed, a better epitome of the whole art of getting on in life could scarcely be compiled even by the cynical nobleman who wrote letters to his son instructing him in this and other forms of progress--including the Rake's.

Mr. Boswell, who, as usual, is the pitiless narrator of the incident, records his satisfaction at having attained to the distinction of a snub from the beautiful creature at whose table he was sitting, and we are, as usual, deeply indebted to him for giving us an illuminating glimpse of the Duchess of whom at one time all England and the greater part of Ireland were talking. He also mentions that Her Grace made use of an idiom by which her Irish upbringing revealed itself. If we had not Mr. Boswell's account of his visit to Inveraray to refer to we might be tempted to believe that Horace Walpole deviated into accuracy when he attributed to the Duchess of Argyll, as well as her sister, the Countess of Coventry, the brogue of a bog-trotter. It was only by her employment of an idiom common to the south and west of Ireland and a few other parts of the kingdom, that Her Grace made him know that she had not been educated in England, or for that matter in Scotland, where doubtless Mr. Boswell fondly believed the purest English in the world was spoken.

Mr. Boswell faithfully records--sometimes with glee and occasionally with pride--many snubs which he received in the course of a lifetime of great pertinacity, and some that he omitted to note, his contemporaries were obliging enough to record; but on none did he reflect with more satisfaction than that, or those, which he suffered in the presence of the Duchess of Argyll.

It happened during that memorable tour to the Hebrides to which he lured Johnson in order to show his countrymen how great was his intimacy with the man who traduced them once in his Dictionary and daily in his life. It was like Boswell to expect that he would impress the Scottish nation by leading Johnson to view their fine prospects--he certainly was never foolish enough to hope to impress Johnson by introducing the Scottish nation to him. In due time, however, the exploiter and the exploited found themselves in the neighbourhood of Inveraray, the Duke of Argyll's Castle, and the stronghold of the Clan Campbell.

It chanced that the head of the great family was in residence at this time, and Mr. Boswell hastened to apprise him of the fact that the great Dr. Johnson was at hand. He called at the Castle very artfully shortly after the dinner hour, when he believed the Duchess and her daughter would have retired to a drawing-room. He was successful in finding the Duke still at the dinner-table, the ladies having retired. In the course of the interview the Duke said: “Mr. Boswell, won't you have some tea?” and Mr. Boswell, feeling sure that the Duchess could not go very far in insulting him when other people were present, followed his host into the drawing-room. “The Duke,” he records, “announced my name, but the Duchess, who was sitting with her daughter, Lady Betty Hamilton, and some other ladies, took not the least notice of me. I should,” he continues, “have been mortified at being thus coldly received by a lady of whom I, with the rest of the world, have always entertained a very high admiration, had I not been consoled by the obliging attention of the Duke.”

The Duke was, indeed, obliging enough to invite Johnson to dinner the next day, and Mr. Boswell was included in the invitation. (So it is that the nursery governess gets invited to the table in the great house to which she is asked to bring the pretty children in her charge.) Of course, Boswell belonged to a good family, and his father was a judge. It was to a Duke of Argyll--not the one who was now so obliging--that the Laird of Auchinleck brought his son, James Boswell, to be examined in order to find out whether he should be put into the army or some other profession. Still, he would never have been invited to Inveraray at this time or any other unless he had had charge of Johnson. No one was better aware of this fact than Boswell; but did he therefore decline the invitation? Not he. Mr. Boswell saw an opportunity ahead of him. He had more than once heard Johnson give an account of how he had behaved when the King came upon him in the Royal Library; and probably he had felt melancholy at the reflection that he himself had had no part or lot in the incident. It was all Dr. Johnson and the King. But now he was quick to perceive that when, in after years, people should speak with bated breath of Dr. Johnson's visit to Inveraray they would be compelled to say: “And Mr. Boswell, the son of auld Auchinleck, was there too.”

He knew very well that there were good reasons why Mr. Boswell could not hope to be a _persona grata_ to the Duchess of Argyll. In the great Douglas lawsuit the issue of which was of considerable importance to the Duke of Hamilton, the son of Her Grace, the Boswells were on the side of the opposition, and had been very active on this side into the bargain. James Boswell himself narrowly escaped being committed for contempt of court for publishing a novel founded on the Douglas cause and anticipating in an impudent way the finding of the judges. Had the difference been directly with the Duke of Argyll some years earlier, no doubt every man in the Clan Campbell would have sharpened his skene when it became known that a friend of an opponent of the MacCallein More was coming, and have awaited his approach with complacency; but now the great chief tossed Boswell his invitation when he was asking Johnson, and Boswell jumped at it as a terrier jumps for a biscuit, and he accompanied his friend to the Castle.

The picture which he paints of his second snubbing is done in his best manner. “I was in fine spirits,” he wrote, “and though sensible that I had the misfortune of not being in favour with the Duchess, I was not in the least disconcerted, and offered Her Grace some of the dish which was before me.” Later on he drank Her Grace's health, although, he adds, “I knew it was the rule of modern high life not to drink to anybody.” Thus he achieved the snub he sought; but he acknowledges that he thought the Duchess rather too severe when she said: “I know nothing of Mr. Boswell.” On reflection, however, he received “that kind of consolation which a man would feel who is strangled by a silken cord.”

It seems strange that no great painter has been inspired by the theme and the scene. The days of “subject pictures” are, we are frequently told, gone by. This may be so, generally speaking, but every one knows that a “subject picture,” if its “subject” lends itself in any measure to the advertising of an article of commerce, will find a ready purchaser, so fine a perception of the aspirations of art--practical art--exists in England, and even in Scotland, in the present day.

Now, are not the elements of success apparent to any one of imagination in this picture of the party sitting round the table in the great hall of Inveraray--Dr. Johnson chatting to the beautiful Duchess and her daughter at one side, the Duke looking uncomfortable at the other, when he sees Mr. Boswell on his feet with his glass in his hand bowing toward Her Grace? No doubt Her Grace had acquainted His Grace with the attitude she meant to assume in regard to Mi. Boswell, so that he was not astonished--only uncomfortable--when Mr. Boswell fished for his snub. Surely arrangements could be made between the art patron and the artist to paint a name and a certain brand upon the bottle--a bottle must, of course, be on the table; but if this is thought too realistic the name could easily be put on the decanter--from which Mr. Boswell has just replenished his glass! Why, the figure of Dr. Johnson alone should make the picture a success--i.e. susceptible of being reproduced as an effective poster in four printings. “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “claret for boys, port for men, but brandy for heroes.” Yes, but whose brandy? There is a hint for a great modern art patron--a twentieth-century art patron is a man who loves art for what he can make out of it.

Dr. Johnson was unmistakably the honoured guest this day at Inveraray; and perhaps, while the lovely Duchess hung upon his words of wisdom, his memory may have gone back to a day when he was not so well known, and yet by some accident found himself in a room with the then Duchess of Argyll. Upon that occasion he had thought it due to himself to be rude to the great lady, in response to some fancied remissness on her part. He had nothing to complain of now. The Duchess with whom he was conversing on terms of perfect equality--if Her Grace made any distinction between them it was, we may rest assured, only in a way that would be flattering to his learning--was at the head of the peerage for beauty, and there was no woman in the kingdom more honoured than she had been. He may have been among the crowds who hung about the Mall in St. James's Park twenty-two years before, waiting patiently until the two lovely Miss Gunnings should come forth from their house in Westminster to take the air. The Duchess of Argyll was the younger of the two sisters.

The story of the capture of the town by the pair of young Irish girls has been frequently told, and never without the word _romantic_ being applied to it. But really there was very little that can be called romantic in the story of their success. There is far more of this element in many of the marriages affecting the peerage in these unromantic days. There is real romance in the story of a young duke's crossing the Atlantic with a single introduction, but that to the daughter of a millionaire with whom he falls madly in love and whom he marries as soon as the lawyers can make out the settlements. There is real romance in the idyll of the young marquis who is fortunate enough to win the affection of an ordinary chorus girl; and every year witnesses such-like alliances--they used to be called _mésalliances_ long ago. There have also been instances of the daughters of English tradesmen marrying foreign nobles, whom they sometimes divorce as satisfactorily as if they were the daughters of wealthy swindlers on the other side of the Atlantic. In such cases there are portraits and paragraphs in some of the newspapers, and then people forget that anything unusual has happened. As a matter of fact, nothing unusual has happened.

In the romantic story of the Gunnings we have no elements of that romance which takes the form of a _mésalliance_. Two girls, the granddaughters of one viscount and the nieces of another, came to London with their parents one year, and early the next married peers--the elder an earl, the younger a duke. Like thousands of other girls, they had no money; but, unlike hundreds of other girls who marry into the peerage, they were exceptionally good-looking.

Where is there an element of romance in all this? The girls wedded men in their own station in life, and, considering their good looks, they should have done very much better for themselves. The duke was a wretched _roué_, notable for his excesses even in the days when excess was not usually regarded as noteworthy. He had ruined his constitution before he was twenty, and he remained enfeebled until, in a year or two, he made her a widow. The earl was a conceited, ill-mannered prig--a solemn, contentious, and self-opinionated person who was deservedly disliked in the town as well as the country.

Not a very brilliant marriage either of these. With the modern chorus girl the earl is on his knees at one side, and the gas man on the other. But with the Miss Gunnings it was either one peer or another. They were connected on their mother's side with at least two families of nobility, and on their father's side with the spiritual aristocracy of some generations back: they were collateral descendants of the great Peter Gunning, Chancellor of Oxford and Bishop of Ely, and he was able to trace his lineage back to the time of Henry VIII. From a brother of this great man was directly descended the father of the two girls and also Sir Robert Gunning, Baronet, who held such a high post in the diplomatic service as Minister Plenipotentiary to Berlin, and afterwards to St. Petersburg. Members of such families might marry into the highest order of the peerage without the alliance being criticised as “romantic.” The girls did not do particularly well for themselves. They were by birth entitled to the best, and by beauty to the best of the best. As it was, the one only became the wife of a contemptible duke, the other of a ridiculous earl. It may really be said that they threw themselves away.

Of course, it was Walpole's gossip that is accountable for much of the false impression which prevailed in respect of the Gunnings. From the first he did his best to disparage them. He wrote to Mann that they were penniless, and “scarce gentlewomen.” He could not ignore the fact that their mother was the Honourable Bridget Gunning; but, without knowing anything of the matter, he undertook to write about the “inferior tap” on their father's side. In every letter that he wrote at this time he tried to throw ridicule upon them, alluding to them as if they were nothing better than the barefooted colleens of an Irish mountain-side who had come to London to seek their fortunes. As usual, he made all his letters interesting to his correspondents by introducing the latest stories respecting them; he may not have invented all of these, but some undoubtedly bear the Strawberry Hill mark, and we know that Walpole never suppressed a good tale simply because it possessed no grain of truth.

Now, the true story of the Gunnings can be ascertained without any reference to Walpole's correspondence. Both girls were born in England--the elder, Maria, in 1731, the younger in 1732. When they were still young their father, a member of the English Bar, inherited his brother's Irish property. It had once been described as a “tidy estate,” but it was now in a condition of great untidiness. In this respect it did not differ materially from the great majority of estates in Ireland. Ever since the last “settlement” the country had been in a most unsettled condition, and no part of it was worse than the County Roscommon, where Castle Coote, the residence of the Gunning family, was situated. It might perhaps be going too far to say that the wilds of Connaught were as bad as the wilds of Yorkshire at the same date, but from all the information that can be gathered on the subject there does not seem to have been very much to choose between Roscommon and the wilder parts of Yorkshire. The peasantry were little better than savages; the gentry were little worse. Few of the elements of civilized life were to be found among the inhabitants. The nominal owners of the land were content to receive tribute from their tenantry in the form of the necessaries of life, for money as a standard of exchange was rarely available. Even in the present day in many districts in the west of Ireland cattle occupy the same place in the imagination of the inhabitants as they do in Zululand. The Irish bride is bargained away with so many cows; and for a man to say--as one did in the very county of Roscommon the other day--that he never could see the difference of two cows between one girl and another, may be reckoned somewhat cynical, but it certainly is intelligible.

But if rent was owing--and it usually was--and if it was not paid in the form of geese, or eggs, or pork, or some other products of low farming and laziness, it remained unpaid; for the landlord had no means of enforcing his claims by any law except the law of the jungle. He might muster his followers and plunder his debtors, and no doubt this system of rent-collecting prevailed for several years after one of the many “settlements” of the country had taken place, yet by intermarriage with the natives, and a general assimilation to their condition of life by the newcomers, these raids for rent became unpopular and impracticable. The consequence was that the landlords--such as remained on their estates--were living from hand to mouth.