so Johnson afterwards told his blustering tale—“when I questioned him as to what occasion I had given him for such animadversion, all that he could say amounted to this: that I sometimes contradicted people in conversation! Now, what harm does it do any man to be contradicted?” To this same paternal young Langton the rebel submitted his Latin verses; the _Poemata_, in the shape in which we possess them, were rigorously edited by him. And Johnson leaned upon him in more intimate ways, as he could never lean upon Beauclerk. To the scrupulous nature instinctively right he made comfortable confidences: “Men of harder minds than ours will do many things from which you and I would shrink; yet, sir, they will, perhaps, do more good in life than we.” As to the Honorable Topham Beauclerk, more volatile than Langton, he had as steady a “sunshine of cheerfulness” for his heritage. We find him complaining to a friend in the July of 1773: “Every hour adds to my misanthropy; and I have had a pretty considerable share of it for some years past.” This incursion of low spirits was not normal with him. Johnson, bewailing his own morbid habits of mind, once said: “Some men, and very thinking men, too, have not these vexing thoughts. Sir Joshua Reynolds is the same all the year round; Beauclerk, when not ill and in pain, is the same.” Boswell attests that Beauclerk took more liberties with Johnson than durst any man alive, and that Johnson was more disposed to envy Beauclerk’s talents than those of any one he had ever known. Born into the freedom of London, Beauclerk was familiar with Fox, Selwyn, and Walpole, and with the St. James men who did not ache to consort with Johnson; and he was quite their match in ease and astuteness. He walked the modish world, where Langton could not and would not follow; he alternated the Ship Tavern and the gaming-table with the court levees; Davies’s shop with the golden insipidities of the drawing-room; _la comédie_, _la danse_, _l’amour même_, with the intellectual tie-wigs of Soho. It shows something of his spirit that whereas no member of the Club save himself was a frequenter of White’s and Betty’s,[50] or a chosen guest at Strawberry Hill, yet there was no person of fashion whom he was not proud to make known to Doctor Johnson whenever he judged the candidate for so genuine an honor worthy of it. Some of these encounters must have been queer and memorable! Beauclerk’s unresting sarcasm often flattened out Boswell and irritated the Doctor, though Bennet Langton, in his abandonments of enthusiastic optimism, was never more than grazed. It is not to be denied that this spoiled child of the Club liked to worry Goldsmith, the maladroit great man who might have quoted often on such occasions the sad gibe of Hamlet: “I’ll be your foil, Laertes: in mine ignorance Your skill shall, like a star in the darkest night, Stick fiery off indeed.”