Reynolds had made his trip to Italy, and had brought back from Rome, in addition to his studies of Raphael--an affection of the ear--caught, as he always said, in the draughty corridors of the Vatican, which obliged him ever after to carry an ear-trumpet; but his courtesy and grace and precision of speech made the awkwardness forgotten. Looking at the exquisite child's face of his little Penelope Boothby, expressing all that was most winning in girlhood for him who was so reverent of exterior graces, and looking from this to the leathern, seamy face of Johnson, and his unlaundered linen, and snuffy frills (when he wore any), and it is hard to understand the intimacy of these two men; but there was a tenderness of soul under the Doctor's slouchy ways which the keen painter recognized; and in the painter there was a resolute intellection, which Johnson was not slow to {110} detect, and which presently--when the new Royal Academy was founded by George III.--was to have expression in the great painter's discourses on Art--discourses which for their courageous common-sense will, I think, outrank much of the art-writing of to-day. [Sidenote: Turks-Head Club.] In 1760 (the year after _Rasselas_ appeared) Reynolds moved into a fine house, for that day, in Leicester Square--a quarter now given over mostly to French lodgers; but in its neighborhood one may find a marble bust of the eminent painter; and the house where he gave great steaming dinners--famous for their profusion and disorderly array--is still there, though given over to small artists and sellers of bric-à-brac. His good sister, Miss Fanny, who was his housekeeper, loved painting and poetry, and a drive in the painter's chariot, which he set up in later days, better than she loved housewifery. Over-shrewd ones said that Sir Joshua (the title came to him a few years after with the presidency of the Royal Academy) did not marry because he had wholesome dread of a wife's extravagance; certain it is that he remained a bachelor all his life, and {111} thereby was a fitting person to discuss with the widowed Johnson the formation of a club. The Doctor was always clubably disposed; so he caught at the idea of Sir Joshua, and thence sprung that society--called "The Literary Club" afterward, which held its sessions, first at the Turk's Head, in Gerrard Street, Soho Square--on Monday evenings at the start, and afterward on Fridays--numbering among its early members Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Hawkins, Beauclerk, and Goldsmith. This famous club, though moving from place to place in the closing years of the last century, still preserved its identity; it took a new lease of life in the first quarter of the present century, and it still survives in a very quiet old age, holding its fortnightly meetings--rather sparingly attended, it is true--at Willis's Rooms, St. James's Street, in the west of London. Among recent members may be named Gladstone, Sir Frederick