e material and positive,
and scoffed at mere mental or sentimental woes. "The sight of people
who want food and raiment is so common in great cities, that a surly
fellow like me has no compassion to spare for wounds given only to
vanity or softness." He said it was enough to make a plain man sick
to hear pity lavished on a family reduced by losses to exchange a
fine house for a snug cottage; and when condolence was demanded for a
lady of rank in mourning for a baby, he contrasted her with a
washerwoman with half-a-dozen children dependent on her daily labour
for their daily bread.[1]

[Footnote 1: "It's weel wi' you gentles that can sit in the house wi'
handkerchers at your een when ye lose a friend; but the like o' us
maun to our wark again, if our hearts were beating as hard as any
hammer."--_The Antiquary_. For this very reason the "gentles"
commonly suffer most.]

Lord Macaulay thus portrays the objects of Johnson's hospitality as
soon as he had got a house to cover them. "It was the home of the
most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought
together. At the head of the establishment he had placed an old lady
named Williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and
her poverty. But in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an
asylum to another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Desmoulins,
whose family he had known many years before in Staffordshire. Room
was found for the daughter of Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another
destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Mrs. Carmichael, but
whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack doctor called
Levet, who bled and dosed coalheavers and hackney coachmen, and
received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and
sometimes a little copper, completed this menagerie."[1]

[Footnote 1: Miscellaneous Writings, vol. i. p. 293.]

Mrs. Williams was the daughter of a physician, and of a good Welsh
family, who did not leave her dependent on Johnson. She is termed by
Madame D'Arblay a very pretty poet, and was treated with uniform
respect by him.[1] All the authorities for the account of Levet were
collected by Hawkins[2]: from these it appears that his patients were
"chiefly of the lowest class of tradesmen," and that, although he
took all that was offered him by way of fee, including meat and
drink, he demanded nothing from the poor, nor was known in any
instance to have enforced the payment of even what was justly hi