aylor, then a prebendary of
Westminster, read the funeral service over his old friend in the Abbey.
He showed, said some of the bystanders, too little feeling. The relation
between the two men was not one of special tenderness; indeed they were
so little congenial that Boswell rather gratuitously suspected his
venerable teacher of having an eye to Taylor's will. It seems fairer to
regard the acquaintance as an illustration of that curious adhesiveness
which made Johnson cling to less attractive persons. At any rate, he did
not show the complacence of the proper will-hunter. Taylor was rector of
Bosworth and squire of Ashbourne. He was a fine specimen of the
squire-parson; a justice of the peace, a warm politician, and what was
worse, a warm Whig. He raised gigantic bulls, bragged of selling cows
for 120 guineas and more, and kept a noble butler in purple clothes and
a large white wig. Johnson respected Taylor as a sensible man, but was
ready to have a round with him on occasion. He snorted contempt when
Taylor talked of breaking some small vessels if he took an emetic.
"Bah," said the doctor, who regarded a valetudinarian as a "scoundrel,"
"if you have so many things that will break, you had better break your
neck at once, and there's an end on't." Nay, if he did not condemn
Taylor's cows, he criticized his bulldog with cruel acuteness. "No, sir,
he is not well shaped; for there is not the quick transition from the
thickness of the fore-part to the _tenuity_--the thin part--behind,
which a bulldog ought to have." On the more serious topic of politics
his Jacobite fulminations roused Taylor "to a pitch of bellowing."
Johnson roared out that if the people of England were fairly polled
(this was in 1777) the present king would be sent away to-night, and his
adherents hanged to-morrow. Johnson, however, rendered Taylor the
substantial service of writing sermons for him, two volumes of which
were published after they were both dead; and Taylor must have been a
bold man, if it be true, as has been said, that he refused to preach a
sermon written by Johnson upon Mrs. Johnson's death, on the ground that
it spoke too favourably of the character of the deceased.

Johnson paid frequent visits to Lichfield, to keep up his old friends.
One of them was Lucy Porter, his wife's daughter, with whom, according
to Miss Seward, he had been in love before he married her mother. He was
at least tenderly attached to her through life. And, for