CHAF. VUl.j THE CLUB AND ITS FIKST MEMBEES.
wig sticking on the top of his head, and the sleeves of his 1763.
shirt and the knees of his breeches hanging loose. " A con- jjt~35.
" siderable crowd of people gathered round," says Beauelere,
" and were not a little struck by this singular appearance."
The hero of the incident would be the last person to be
moved by it. The more the state of his toilet dawned upon
him, the less likely would he be to notice it. There was no
more remarkable trait in Johnson, and certainly none in
which he more contrasted with the subject of this narrative,
than that, as Miss Reynolds was always surprised to remark
in him, no external circumstances ever prompted him to
make the least apology for them, or to seem even sensible of
their existence.
It was not many months after this that he went to see
Goldsmith in a new lodging in the locality which not Johnson
alone has rendered illustrious, but its association with a hue
of the greatest names of English literature; the Dorsets,
Ealeighs, Seldens, Clarendons, Beaumonts, Fords, Marstons,
Wycherleys, and Cougreves. He had taken rooms on the then
library staircase of the Temple. They were a humble set
of chambers enough (one Jeffs, the butler of the society,
shared them with him); and, on Johnson's prying and peering
about in them, after his short-sighted fashion, flattening his
face against every object he looked at, Goldsmith's uneasy
sense of their deficiencies broke out. " I shall soon be in
" better chambers, sir, than these," he said. " Nay, sir,"
answered Johnson, " never mind that. Nil te quasiveiis
" extra." Invaluable advice ! could Goldsmith, blotting out
remembrance of his childhood and youth, and looking solely '
and steadily on the present and the future, but have dared
to act upon it.