CHAP. XII.] NEWS JFOB THE CLUB.

" that author who only could have enabled him to display his 170*1
" own." Johnson could not have hit off a compliment of als
such satirical nicety; he must have praised honestly, if at
all, and it went against his grain to do it. He let out the
reason to Boswell eight years afterwards. " Garrick has
" been liberally paid, sir, for anything he has done for
" Shakspeare. If I should praise him, I should much
" more praise the nation who paid him." * With better
reason he used to laugh at his managerial preference of the
player's text (which it is little to the credit of the stage
that the latest of the great actors t should have been the
first to depart from), and couple it with a doubt if he had
ever examined one of the original plays from the first scene
to the last. Nor did Garrick take all this quietly. The
king had commanded his reappearance in Benedict at the
close of the year; and, though he did not think it safe to
resume any part of which Powell was in possession, except
Lusignan, Lothario, and Leon, his popularity had again
shone forth unabated. It brought back his sense of power;
and with it a disposition to use it, even against Johnson.
The latter had not hesitated, notwithstanding their doubtful
relations, to seek to " secure an honest prejudice " in favour
of his book, by formally asking the popular actor's " suffrage "
for it on its appearance; yet the suffrage of the popular

* Boswell, iv. 266. The real truth of his apparent inconsistencies about Garrick,
of which so many instances are given in this biography, was admirably hit off
by Reynolds in the remark, that in point of fact Johnson considered him to be
as it" were his property; and would allow no man either to blame or to praise
Garrick in his presence, without contradicting him. In proof of this Sir Joshua
himself compiled, from actual recollected scraps of his talk about Davy, two
imaginary conversations, in the first of which Johnson attacks Garrick against Sir
Joshua, and in the second defends him against Gibbon. These dialogues are to
be found in Miss Hawkins's Memoirs, i. 110-128.

•f I here allude to Mr. Macready, by whom the Fool in Lear, and other master-
pieces of the poet's original text, were first restored to the stage after more than
two centuries of discreditable exile.ndlord, little Allen the printer of Bolt-court, for "imitating