From this auspicious period Burke’s celebrity and importance may be dated; and his reputation speedily secured him a worthy position among men of letters and eminence. Sir Joshua Reynolds sought his society; and at the hospitable mansion of the immortal painter he formed the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, who declared his new friend to be the greatest man living. “Take up whatever topic you will,” he was in the habit of saying, “Burke is ready to meet you. If he were to go into a stable and talk to the ostlers for a short time, they would venerate him as the wisest of human beings. No person of sense ever met him under a gateway to avoid a shower who did not go away convinced that he was the first man in England.” In the year 1764 Reynolds proposed the formation of a club, which met at the Turk’s Head, and soon comprehended several of the most distinguished literary and political characters of whom Great Britain boasted. It long flourished without a name, but was at length recognized as the Literary Club. One of the nine original members was Oliver Goldsmith, who had been a college contemporary of Burke, and afterward gone to study medicine in Edinburgh. He had since traveled over much of the Continent, holding learned disputations at the different Universities that came in his way, where success entitled him to a dinner, a night’s lodging, and a small sum of money. He had now thrown himself into the republic of letters, and much amused the brilliant circle at the Turk’s Head by his strange eccentricities and ludicrous blunders. At their meetings Burke was found fully a match for Johnson; and it was observed, that he was almost the only man living from whom the huge sage would bear contradiction. The subject of Bengal was sometimes under discussion; and Burke, even at that period, showed an extent and accuracy of information in regard to it rarely to be met with. Burke had already projected and brought into operation the “Annual Register,” which was for years carried on under his sagacious inspection; though political matters soon occupied so much of his attention that he had little leisure for literary pursuits not strictly connected with affairs of state: but his introduction to public life was gradual. In the year 1759 he became acquainted with _Singlespeech_ Hamilton, son of a Scottish advocate who had come to England at the Union. This mysterious individual had, a short while previously, made the solitary but successful oratorical effort from which his nickname was derived, in a debate long remembered as one of the greatest in which the parliamentary personages of that generation had partaken. In 1761 he went to Ireland as Secretary to the Lord-lieutenant, and Burke accompanied him as a friend and adviser. For his services on this occasion the latter was granted a pension of £300 a year, which he sacrificed, after enjoying it for eighteen months, on his rupture with Hamilton.