either in themselves or in their experience of life; all
brought something worth having to the society in which they lived; and
with all of them Johnson may be said to have been on intimate terms.
Nor did he confine his friendship to men. He had a higher opinion of
the intellectual capacities of women than most men of his time, and
many of the most remarkable women of the time enjoyed his intimacy.
Among them may be mentioned Elizabeth Carter, the translator of
Epictetus, whom he thought the best Greek scholar he had known, and
praised for being also a good maker of puddings; Fanny Burney, of whose
novels he was an enthusiastic admirer; Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Macaulay, and
Hannah More, the chief learned ladies of the day, all three women of
real ability; and his own brilliant and witty Mrs. Thrale, who {247}
without being a professed "blue stocking" has for Johnson's sake and
her own quite eclipsed the "blue stockings" in the interest of
posterity. Altogether it is an astonishing list. Johnson never
thought of himself as a man to be envied; but if man is a social being,
and no man was so more than Johnson, there can be few things more
enviable, in possession or in retrospect, than the society, the
friendship, or, as it often was, the love, of such men and women as
these.

If we go further and extend the inquiry to those who can scarcely be
called intimate friends, but with whom he was brought into more or less
frequent social contact, the list becomes, of course, too long to give.
But it may be worth while to mention that it would again include a very
large number of men who had something in them above the ordinary. For
instance, so great a name as that of Hogarth would be found in it,
making with Allan Ramsay whom he also knew well and Reynolds who was
perhaps the most intimate of all his friends, a remarkable trio to
gather round a man who cared nothing for painting. He managed without
that to impress them so much that Reynolds gave the credit of whatever
was best in his _Discourses_ to the "education" he had had under
Johnson: and Hogarth declared that his conversation was to the talk
{248} of other men "like Titian's painting compared to Hudson's." This
outer circle includes also distinguished architects like Sir William
Chambers who built Somerset House, and Gwynn who built Magdalen Bridge
at Oxford and the English bridge at Shrewsbury: bishops like Barnard of
Killaloe, and Shipley the liberal and reforming bish