an irreconcileable difference had taken place between Johnson
and Sheridan. A pension of two hundred pounds a year had been given to
Sheridan. Johnson, who, as has been already mentioned, thought
slightingly of Sheridan's art, upon hearing that he was also pensioned,
exclaimed, "What! have they given _him_ a pension? Then it is time for
me to give up mine." Whether this proceeded from a momentary
indignation, as if it were an affront to his exalted merit that a
player should be rewarded in the same manner with him, or was the
sudden effect of a fit of peevishness, it was unluckily said, and,
indeed, cannot be justified. Mr Sheridan's pension was granted to him
not as a player, but as a sufferer in the cause of government, when he
was manager of the Theatre Royal in Ireland, when parties ran high in
1753. And it must also be allowed that he was a man of literature, and
had considerably improved the arts of reading and speaking with
distinctness and propriety. . . .

This rupture with Sheridan deprived Johnson of one of his most
agreeable resources for amusement in his lonely evenings; for
Sheridan's well-informed, animated, and bustling mind never suffered
conversation to stagnate; and Mrs Sheridan was a most agreeable
companion to an intellectual man. She was sensible, ingenious,
unassuming, yet communicative. I recollect, with satisfaction, many
pleasing hours which I passed with her {97} under the hospitable roof
of her husband, who was to me a very kind friend. Her novel, entitled
_Memoirs of Miss Sydney Biddulph_, contains an excellent moral while it
inculcates a future state of retribution; and what it teaches is
impressed upon the mind by a series of as deep distress as can affect
humanity, in the amiable and pious heroine who goes to her grave
unrelieved, but resigned, and full of hope of heaven's mercy. Johnson
paid her this high compliment upon it: "I know not, Madam, that you
have a right, upon moral principles, to make your readers suffer so
much."

Mr Thomas Davies, the actor, who then kept a bookseller's shop in
Russell Street, Covent Garden, told me that Johnson was very much his
friend, and came frequently to his house, where he more than once
invited me to meet him; but by some unlucky accident or other he was
prevented from coming to us.

Mr Thomas Davies was a man of good understanding and talents, with the
advantage of a liberal education. Though somewhat pompous, he was an
entertaining