OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1763. " perhaps we could perfectly understand." Arthur Murphy
mUs. calls it a humour which pleased the more for seeming-
undesigned.* It might more briefly have been defined, I
imagine, as the feeling of a superiority to his subject. No
man was ever so free, said Johnson very happily, when he
was going to say a good thing, from a look which expressed
that it was coming; or, when he' had said it, from a
look that expressed that it had come.t This was a sense
of the same superiority; and it gave Beauclerc a predomi-
nance of a certain sort over his company, little likely to
be always pleasant, and least so when it pointed shafts
of sarcasm against Ms friends. Even Johnson was not
tolerant of these. " Sir," he said to him, after one of his
malicious sallies, " you never open your mouth but with
" intention to give pain; and you have often given rne pain,
" not from the power of what you said, but from seeing your
" intention." J No one suffered from the evil habit so much
as Goldsmith,
y, 28. Boswell, vii. 265. "As Johnson and I," Boswell adds,
" accompanied Sir Joshua Beynolds in his coach, Johnson said, ' There is in
" ' Beauclerk a predominance over his company, that one does not like. But he is
" ' a man who has lived so much in the world, that he has a short story on every
" ' occasion : he is always ready to talk, and is never exhausted.' "
f Bosiuett,'-m. 321. " Sir," he said to Boswell, on another occasion, " every-
." thing comes from him so easily. It appears to me that I labour, when I say a
" good thing." BOSWELL. " You are loud, Sir, but it is not an effort of mind."
I could give many examples of. this exquisite ease of Beauclerk's talk, but one
perhaps mil be enough. During one of the frequent disputes when the whigs,
" the cursed whigs," "the bottomless whigs," as Johnson called them, had become
predominant in the club, and when, in the course of repelling a bitter attack on
Fox and Burke, Beauclerk had fallen foul of George Steevens, Boswell interposed :
" The gentleman, Mr. Beauclerk, against whom you are so violent, is, I know,
a man of good principles." BEATJCLERC. "Then he does riot wear them out in
practice." JBos. vii. 123.
J Lord Charlemont, who loved him thoroughly, has not omitted to observe this.
"He was eccentric, often querulous, entertaining a contempt for the generality
"of the world, which the politeness of his manners could not always conceal;
" but to those whom he liked, most generous and friendly." Hardy's Life, i. 344.
And see Bosnuell, vii. 258-60.