OLIVEE GOLDSMITH S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK III.
17(53. him till he should have a room in a house to offer her, as in
M. 35. former days ; was familiar with his earlier life and its priva-
tions, was always making and drinking tea,* knew intimately
all his ways, and talked well; and he never went home at
night, however late, supperless or after supper, without calling
to have tea with Miss Williams. "Why do you keep that old
" certainly -without intending it, that good but weak man, old Mr. Whiston, whom I
" have seen distributing, in the streets of London, money to beggars on each hand
" of him, till his pocket was nearly exhausted." Life of Johnson, 395. Good, but
weak Whiston—good, but weak Johnson. Well, Hawkins at any rate is not weak
on these points, whatever else he may have been. What an unexceptionable poor-
law guardian he must have made ! "I shall never forget," says Miss Reynolds,
'' the impression I felt in Dr. Johnson's favour, the first time I was in Ms company,
" on his saying, that as he returned to his lodgings, at one or two o'clock in the
" morning, he often saw poor children asleep on thresholds and stalls, and that he
'' used to put pennies into their hands to buy them a breakfast." Groker's Boswdl,
834. "I have heard Gray say that Johnson would go out in London with his
"pockets full of silver, and give it all away in the streets before he returned
" home." Mcholls, in the Worlts, v. 33. Let me add that Burke, though no
mean political economist, had the same habit, and justified it on similar grounds.
But it is also to be remarked that, even in the short space of three quarters of a
century, society has made such great advances in its care and provision for the
poor, that it would be difficult to justify the practice now so easily as Burke and
Johnson did.
* "Mrs. Williams made it," says Boswell, " with sufficient dexterity, notwith-
'' standing her blindness, though her manner of satisfying herself that the cups
"were full enough, appeared to me a little awkward; for I fancied she put her
"finger down a certain way, till she felt the tea touch it." iii. 102. On the
other hand Percy, whose vicarage she visited in Johnson's company in the year
folloAving this, says, in a communication to Dr. Robert Anderson : "When she
" made tea for Johnson and his friends, she conducted it with so much delicacy,
'' by gently touching the outside of the cup, to feel, by the heat, the tea as it
" ascended within, that it was rather matter of admiration than of dislike."
And see Hawkins's Life of Johnson, 321-5, &c: "I see her now," says Miss
Hawkins, in one of the pleasantest passages "of her Memoirs, i. 152, "a pale,
" shrunken old lady, dressed in scarlet, made in the handsome French fashion of the
" time, with a lace cap, with two stiffened projecting wings on the temples, and a
'' black lace hood over it.. . Her temper has been recorded as marked with the Welsh
'' fire, and this might be excited by some of the meaner inmates of the upper floors "
[of Dr. Johnson's house]; "but her gentle kindness to me I never shall forget,
" or think consistent with a bad temper." The bad temper seems nevertheless
indisputable. "Age, and sickness, and pride," Johnson himself writes a few years
later, "have made her so peevish, that I was forced to bribe the maid to stay
"with her by a secret stipulation of half-a-crown a week over her wages."
SosweU, vi. 263. In another letter he writes to Mrs. Thrale : "Williams hates
" every body. Levett hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams. Desmoulins
"hates them both. Poll loves none of them." Piossi Letters (1788), ii. 38;