again. Garrick, too, retained some of his schoolboy tricks of mimicry:

"He could imitate Johnson very exactly....I recollect his exhibiting him to me one day, as if saying, 'Davy has some convivial pleasantry about him, but 'tis a futile fellow;' which he uttered perfectly with the tone and air of Johnson."

Johnson's provincial accent (he pronounced once as woonse) gave Garrick another opening: "Garrick sometimes used to take him off, squeezing a lemon into a punch-bowl, with uncouth gesticulations, looking round the company, and calling out, 'Who's for poonsh?””

Johnson, for his part, never quite got rid of his feeling of contempt for the actor's profession. He often discussed it with Boswell:

"BOSWELL. 'Sir..., you never will allow merit to a player.' JOHNSON. 'Merit, Sir! what merit? Do you respect a rope-dancer, or a ballad-singer?' BOSWELL. No, Sir: but we respect a great player, as a man who can conceive lofty sentiments and can express them gracefully.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, a fellow who claps a hump on his back, and a lump on his leg, and cries "I am Richard the Third?"... BoswELL. 'My dear Sir! you may turn anything into ridicule...a great player does what very few are capable to do: his art is a very rare faculty. Who can repeat Hamlet's soliloquy, “To be, or not to be," as Garrick does it?' JOHNSON. 'Any body may. Jemmy, there (a boy about eight years old, who was in the room), will do it as well in a week.' BOSWELL. 'No, no, Sir: and as a proof of the merit of great acting, and of the value which

mankind set upon it, Garrick has got a hundred thousand pounds.' JOHNSON. 'Is getting a hundred thousand pounds a proof of excellence? That has been done by a scoundrel commissary.' Poor Bozzy! "I was sure, for once, he says, "that I had the best side of the argument." As if that made any difference to Johnson when he was "talking for victory"!

Both Garrick and Johnson were lovers of books -but in a different way. Johnson was "born to grapple with whole libraries," as Boswell's uncle said, but he did not treat a rare volume with the tender care of a collector. When he was putting his books in order, he wore a pair of large gloves "such as hedgers use," and "buffeted" them so that clouds of dust flew round him. When he was reading a new book it was said that "he tore out the heart of it"; when he was tidying his old ones it is to be feared that he sometimes tore off the covers of them. Garrick had some old and valued editions, and seems to have offended Johnson by hesitating to lend them to him. Even Boswell admits that "considering the slovenly and careless manner in which books were treated by Johnson, it could not be expected that scarce and valuable editions should have been lent to him."

Garrick, moreover, had learnt by experience. Here is the story as he told it to Miss Burney: "David!" said Johnson, 'will you lend me Petrarca1?' 'Y-e-s, Sir!' 'David! you sigh?'

your

1 The author whom Johnson had first discovered on the apple-shelf at Lichfield. See p. 7.

'Sir-you shall have it certainly.' Accordingly the book, stupendously bound, I sent to him that very evening. But scarcely had he taken it in his hands, when, as Boswell tells me, he poured forth a Greek ejaculation and a couplet or two from Horace, and then in one of those fits of enthusiasm which always seem to require that he should spread his arms aloft, he suddenly pounces my poor Petrarca over his head upon the floor. And then, standing for several minutes lost in abstraction, he forgot probably that he had ever seen it."

As his old schoolmaster, Johnson took good care that Garrick should not suffer from swelled head:

"Not very long after the institution of our club, Sir Joshua Reynolds was speaking of it to Garrick. 'I like it much, (said he,) I think I shall be of you.' When Sir Joshua mentioned this to Dr Johnson, he was much displeased with the actor's conceit. He'll be of us, (said Johnson) how does he know we will permit him? The first Duke in England has no right to hold such language.' However, when Garrick was regularly proposed some time afterwards, Johnson, though he had taken a momentary offence at his arrogance, warmly and kindly supported him, and he was accordingly elected, was a most agreeable member, and continued to attend our meetings to the time of his death."

Each of them, indeed, was ready to help the other when he could. When the advertisement of Johnson's Dictionary appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine, there was printed beneath it a compli