Best of all, we have the history of that memorable morning when Beauclerk and Langton, having supped together at a city tavern, roused Johnson at three o’clock at his Inner Temple Lane Chambers, and brought him to the door, fearful but aggressive, in his shirt and his little dark wig, and his slippers down at the heels, armed with a poker. “What! and is it YOU? Faith, I’ll have a frisk with you, ye young dogs!” We have visions of the Covent Garden inn, and the great brimming bowl, with Lord Lansdowne’s drinking-song for grace; the hucksters and fruiterers staring at the strange central figure, always sure to gather a mob, even during the moment he would stand by a lady’s coach-door in Fleet Street; the merry boat going its way by oar to Billingsgate, its mad crew bantering the watermen on the river; and two of the roisterers (equally wild, despite a little chronological disparity of thirty years or so) scolding the other for hastening off, on an afternoon appointment, “to dine with wretched unidea’d girls!” What golden vagabondism! “I heard of your frolic t’other night; you’ll be in _The Chronicle_! . . . I shall have my old friend to bail out of the round-house!” said Garrick. “As for Garrick, sirs,” tittered the pious Johnson aside to his accomplices, “he dare not do such a thing. His wife would not let him!” All this mirth and whim sweetened the Doctor’s heavy life. He had other intimates, other disciples. But these were Gay Heart and Gentle Heart, who drove his own blue-devils away with their idolatrous devotion, and whose bearing towards him stands ever as the best possible corroboration of his great and warm nature. With him and for him, they so fill the air of the time that to whomsoever has but thought of them that hour, London must seem lonely without their idyllic figures. —“Our day is gone: Clouds, dews, and dangers come; our deeds are done.” There are gods as good for the after-years; but Odin is down, and his pair of unreturning birds have flown west and east. FOOTNOTES: [45] A popular eighteenth-century beverage, composed of wine, orange, and sugar. [46] Although Langton is recorded on his college books as having given the usual £10 for plate, and also as having paid his caution money in 1757, his name is not down upon the matriculation lists, possibly because he failed to appear at the moment the entries were being made. In what must have been his destined space upon one of the pages, Dr. Ingram made this note: “Q. Num Bennet Langton hic inserendus?” [47] A boyish fashion of self-entertainment afterwards in great favor with Shelley. [48] It is a pleasant thing to remember that it was Langton, always an appreciator of Goldsmith’s lovable genius, who suggested “Auburn” as the name for his _Deserted Village_. There is a hamlet called Auborne in Lincolnshire.