CHAP. VI.] INTRODUCTIONS AT TOM DAVIES's.
dinner-table that clay. A youth of two-and-twenty, the son 1762.
of a Scottish, judge and respectable old whig laird, urged to m~si
enter the law but eager to bestow himself on the army, had
come up at the end of the year from Edinburgh to see
Johnson and the London wits, and not a little anxious that
Johnson and the London wits should see him. Attending
Sheridan's summer lectures in the northern city, he had
heard wonderful things from, the lecturer about the solemn
and ponderous lexicographer; what he said, and what he did,
and how he would talk over his port wine and his tea until
three or four o'clock in the morning. It was in the nature
of this new admirer that port wine and late hours should
throw a brighter halo over any object of his admiration;
and it was with desperate resolve to accomplish an introduc-
tion which he had tried and failed in two years before, that
he was now again in London. But he had again been baffled.
Johnson's sneer at Sheridan's pension having brought cool-
ness between the old friends,* that way there was no access;
and though Davies had arranged this dinner with the hope
opinion to Nicholls, and -which is interesting to me for its mention of Johnson, Gray
had pleasantly criticised Dodsley's book on its first appearance (the letter is
undated, but was written at the close of 1751). Here he says that he had always
thought Tickell's Colin and Lucy the prettiest ballad in the world (one of the
prettiest it surely is, notwithstanding Southey's depreciation of it); he then says
of Green, after praising his "profusion of wit," that reading would have formed
his judgment and harmonised his verse, for even his wood-notes often break out
into strains of real poetry and music; and afterwards he continues, " The School-
" mistress is excellent in its kind, and masterly; and (I am sorry to differ from
'' you, but) London is to me one of those few imitations that have all the ease
" and all the spirit of an original. The same man's verses on the Opening of
" G-anick's Theatre are far from bad." Worlcs, Hi, 89-90. A pity that Johnson
had not known of this letter; it might have mitigated his strange and unaccount-
able dislike of the writer. His criticism of the Collection which thus elicited Gray's
praise of himself, is chiefly remarkable for its savage scorn of Gray. Boswell, vi. 157.
* The pension following the Dictionary was not to be forgiven. "He laughed
"heartily," says Boswell, a few days after their first acquaintance, "when I
" mentioned to him a saying of his concerning Mr. Thomas Sheridan, which
" Foote took a wicked pleasure to circulate. ' "Why, sir, Sherry is dull, naturally