Johnson, and the gay, dissipated
Beauclerk, were companions. 'What a coalition! (said Garrick, when
he heard of this;) I shall have my old friend to bail out of the
Round-house.' But I can bear testimony that it was a very agreeable
association. Beauclerk was too polite, and valued learning and wit too
much, to offend Johnson by sallies of infidelity or licentiousness;
and Johnson delighted in the good qualities of Beauclerk, and hoped
to correct the evil. Innumerable were the scenes in which Johnson was
amused by these young men. Beauclerk could take more liberty with
him, than any body with whom I ever saw him; but, on the other hand,
Beauclerk was not spared by his respectable companion, when reproof
was proper. Beauclerk had such a propensity to satire, that at one time
Johnson said to him, 'You never open your mouth but with intention to
give pain; and you have often given me pain, not from the power of what
you said, but from seeing your intention.' At another time applying to
him, with a slight alteration, a line of Pope, he said,

'Thy love of folly, and thy scorn of fools--

Every thing thou dost shews the one, and every thing thou say'st the
other.' At another time he said to him, 'Thy body is all vice, and
thy mind all virtue.' Beauclerk not seeming to relish the compliment,
Johnson said, 'Nay, Sir, Alexander the Great, marching in triumph into
Babylon, could not have desired to have had more said to him.'

Johnson was some time with Beauclerk at his house at Windsor, where he
was entertained with experiments in natural philosophy. One Sunday, when
the weather was very fine, Beauclerk enticed him, insensibly, to saunter
about all the morning. They went into a church-yard, in the time of
divine service, and Johnson laid himself down at his ease upon one of
the tomb-stones. 'Now, Sir, (said Beauclerk) you are like Hogarth's Idle
Apprentice.' When Johnson got his pension, Beauclerk said to him, in the
humorous phrase of Falstaff, 'I hope you'll now purge and live cleanly
like a gentleman.'

One night when Beauclerk and Langton had supped at a tavern in London,
and sat till about three in the morning, it came into their heads to go
and knock up Johnson, and see if they could prevail on him to join them
in a ramble. They rapped violently at the door of his chambers in the
Temple, till at last he appeared in his shirt, with his little black wig
on the top of his head, instead of a nightcap, and a poker in hi