Of this Club, Hawkins was a most unpopular member: even his old friend, Johnson, admitted him to be out of place here. He had objected to Goldsmith, at the Club, "as a mere literary drudge, equal to the task of compiling and translating, but little capable of original, and still less of poetical composition." Hawkins's "existence was a kind of pompous, parsimonious, insignificant drawl, cleverly ridiculed by one of the wits in an absurd epitaph: 'Here lies Sir John Hawkins, without his shoes and stauckins.'" He was as mean as he was pompous and conceited. He forbore to partake of the suppers at the Club, and begged therefore to be excused from paying his share of the reckoning. "And was he excused?" asked Dr. Burney, of Johnson. "Oh yes, for no man is angry at another for being inferior to himself. We all scorned him, and admitted his plea. Yet I really believe him to be an honest man at bottom, though, to be sure, he is penurious and he is mean, and it must be owned that he has a tendency to savageness." He did not remain above two or three years in the Club, being in a manner elbowed out in consequence of his rudeness to Burke. Still, Burke's vehemence of will and sharp impetuosity of temper constantly exposed him to prejudice and dislike; and he may have painfully impressed others, as well as Hawkins, at the Club, with a sense of his predominance. This was the only theatre open to him. "Here only," says Mr. Forster, "could he as yet pour forth, to an audience worth exciting, the stores of argument and eloquence he was thirsting to employ upon a wider stage; the variety of knowledge, the fund of astonishing imagery, the ease of philosophic illustration, the overpowering copiousness of words, in which he has never had a rival." Miss Hawkins was convinced that her father was disgusted with the overpowering deportment of Mr. Burke, and his monopoly of the conversation, which made all the other members, excepting his antagonist, Johnson, merely listeners. Something of the same sort is said by that antagonist, though in a more generous way. "What I most envy Burke for," said Johnson, "is, that he is never what we call humdrum; never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off. Take up whatever topic you please, he is ready to meet you. I cannot say he is good at listening. So desirous is he to talk, that if one is speaking at this end of the table, he'll speak to somebody at the other end." The Club was an opportunity for both Johnson and Burke; and for the most part their wit-combats seem not only to have instructed the rest, but to have improved the temper of the combatants, and to have made them more generous to each other. "How very great Johnson has been to-night!" said Burke to Bennet Langton, as they left the Club together. Langton assented, but could have wished to hear more from another person. "Oh no!" replied Burke, "it is enough for me to have rung the bell to him."