Johnson’s influence on him, potent though it was, seems to have been negative enough. It kept him from a few questionable things, and preserved in him an outward decorum towards customs and established institutions; but it failed to incite him to make of his manifold talents the “illustrious figure” which Langton’s eyes discerned in a vain anticipation. Beauclerk and the great High Churchman went about much together, and had amusing experiences. On such occasions, as in all their familiar intercourse, the disciple had the true salt of the Doctor’s talk, which, as Hazlitt remarks, was often something quite unlike “the cumbrous cargo of words” he kept for professional use. In the late winter of 1765 the two visited Cambridge, Beauclerk having a mind to call upon a friend at Trinity. These, as we know, had their many differences, “like a Spanish great galleon, and an English man-o’-war”; the one smooth, sharp, and civil, the other indignantly dealing with the butt-end of personality. Boswell gives a long account of a charming dispute concerning the murderer of Miss Reay, and the evidence of his having carried two pistols. Beauclerk was right; but Johnson, with quite as solid a sense of virtue, was angry; and he was soothed at the end only by an adroit and affectionate reply. “Sir,” the Doctor began, sternly, at another time, after listening to some mischievous waggery, “you never open your mouth but with the intention to give pain, and you often give me pain, not from the power of what you say, but from seeing your intention.” And again, he said to him whom he had compared to Alexander, marching in triumph into Babylon: “You have, sir! a love of folly, and a scorn of fools; everything you do attests the one, and everything you say the other.”[52] Beauclerk could also lecture his mentor. It was his steadfast counsel that the Doctor should devote himself to poetry, and draw in his horns of dogma and didactics. He had, ever ready, some quaint simile or odd application from the classics; in the habit of “talking from books,” as the Doctor called it, he was, however, distanced by Langton. Referring to that friend’s habit of sitting or standing against the fireplace, with one long leg twisted about the other, “as if fearing to occupy too much space,” Beauclerk likened him, for all the world, to the stork in Raphael’s cartoon of The Miraculous Draught.[53] One of Beauclerk’s happiest hits, and certainly his boldest, was made while Johnson was being congratulated upon his pension. “How much now it was to be hoped,” whispered the young blood, in reference to Falstaff’s celebrated vow, “that he would purge and live cleanly, as a gentleman should do!” Johnson seems to have taken the hint in good-humor, and actually to have profited by it.