JOHNSON. 35 



would allow others to say anything against him. He 

 must have a monopoly of the censure. Miss Burney 

 relates a diverting instance of this in her Memoirs of her 

 father. It had been observed that the great actor 

 was chagrined at the King and Queen receiving coldly his 

 private reading of ' Lethe/ which they had commanded. 

 " Sir," said Dr. Johnson, " he has no right, in a royal 

 apartment, to expect the hallooing and clamour of the one 

 shilling gallery. The King, I doubt not, gave him as 

 much applause as was rationally his due. And, indeed, 

 great and uncommon as is the merit of Mr. Garrick, no 

 man will be bold enough to assert that he has not had 

 his just proportion, both of fame and profit. He has long 

 reigned the unequalled favourite of the public ; and 

 therefore nobody, we may venture to say, will mourn his 

 hard lot, if the King and the royal family were not trans- 

 ported into rapture upon hearing him read ' Lethe !' 

 But yet, Mr. Garrick will complain to his friends ; and 

 his friends will lament the King's want of feeling and 

 taste ; but then, Mr. Garrick will kindly excuse the 

 King he will say that his Majesty might, perhaps, be 

 thinking of something else ! that the affairs of America 

 might, possibly, occur to him or some other subject of 

 state, more important perhaps than ' Lethe. 7 But 

 though he will candidly say this himself, he will not easily 

 forgive his friends, if they do not contradict him !" 



Mr. Langton was a Lincolnshire gentleman, of a very 

 elegant turn of mind, and strictly correct life. Mr, 

 Beauclerk was a man of brilliant talents and celebrated 

 for his powers of conversation, but of dissipated habits, 

 and whose connexion with Lady Bolingbroke occasioned 

 her divorce from her husband, upon which she married 



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