whom he always past so much time when he was in Lichfield, and for whom he professed so great a friendship. . . .

I have often heard my mother say, Doctor, that Mrs. Elizabeth Aston was in her youth a very beautiful woman; and that, with all the censoriousness and spiteful spleen of a very bad temper, she had great powers of pleasing, that she was lively, insinuating, and intelligent. I knew her not till the vivacity of he youth had long been extinguished, and I confess I looked in vain for the traces of former ability. I wish to have your opinion, Sir, of what she was, you who knew her so well in her best days.

My dear, when thy mother told thee Aston was handsome, thy mother told thee truth; she was very handsome. When thy mother told thee that Aston loved to abuse her neighbours, she told the truth; but when thy mother told thee that Aston had any marked ability in that same abusive business, that wit gave it zest, or imagination colour, thy mother did not tell thee truth. No, no, Madam, Aston's understanding was not of any strength, either native or acquired

It is not impossible that Ursa Major, who was a great stickler for truth, may have at some time expressed himself in some such way if a leading question had been put to him, both about Mrs. Aston and Mrs. Cobb; but in his authentic letters, even to Mrs. Thrale, with whom he jests occasionally about his Lichfield friends, there is no criticism of the sort; and the Swan was undoubtedly a poet. The worst Johnson has to say of these ladies' conversation is that it sometimes concerned itself with trifles:

Lady Smith has got a new post-chaise, which is not nothing to talk on at Lichfield. Little things here serve for conversation. Mrs. Aston's parrot pecked my leg, and I heard of it some time after at Mrs. Cobb's.

We deal in nicer things

Than routing armies and dethroning kings.

A week ago Mrs. Cobb gave me sweetmeats to breakfast, and I heard of it last night at Stowhill. [This is the passage which the Swan so delicately introduced into her character of Mrs. Cobb.]

Of Lady Smith I know no more than the 'Letters' tell-viz. that she settled at Lichfield in 1775 and saw company at her new house.' Probably her new house had received a fresh inmate before Miss Seward began in 1784 those six volumes of correspondence which have made her and her friends immortal. Minor satellites were the new Dean's lady, Mrs. Proby, 'a lady that talks about Mrs. Montague and Mrs. Carter,' and Miss Vyse, daughter of a Lichfield archdeacon and brother of the Dr. Vyse who asked the Swan for a verse epitaph for Garrick's monument in the Cathedral, praised it when it was sent in, but lo!' (as the muse exclaims in a letter to William Hayley) 'the monument appears with only a prose inscription!' She could not bring herself to tell her poetical friend that the prose in question was a

certain sentence by Dr. Johnson about 'eclipsing the gaiety of

nations.'

But all this time we have said nothing of the lady to whom most of Johnson's Lichfield letters are addressed, and who stood highest in his affections-Miss (afterwards Mrs.) Lucy Porter, the daughter of Johnson's wife by her first marriage with a Birmingham mercer. The Swan, with her romantic notions, would have us believe that Johnson was in love with the daughter before he proposed to the mother, and brings in evidence some verses (which were printed in Boswell's first edition) said to have been addressed to her. But the verses were shown to have had another origin, and the story may be treated as poetry. Johnson's letters display an affection something more respectful than fatherly, but obviously sincere and deep. He writes to Miss Porter sometimes as Dear madam,' sometimes as My dear,' sometimes as My dearest Dear,' or 'My dearest Love,' and signs himself Your affectionate humble servant.' Not seldom the letters reveal a pathetic eagerness that his affection should be returned:

I had no thoughts of ceasing to correspond with my dear Lucy, the only person now left in the world with whom I think myself connected. Every heart must lean to somebody, and I have nobody but you.

I shall take it very kindly if you make it a rule to write to me once at least every week, for I am now very desolate, and am loth to be universally forgotten. This was immediately after the death of his mother, with whom Miss Porter had lived; but again and again the same strain comes out:

As we daily see our friends die round us, we that are left must cling closer, and, if we can do nothing more, at least pray for one another.

I will not suppose that it is for want of kindness that you did not answer my last letter; and I therefore write again to tell you that I have, by God's great mercy, still continued to grow better.

Miss Porter seems to have been a very Cordelia in her inability to heave her heart into her mouth, and poor Johnson longed for an occasional evidence that his warm feelings were understood:

By the carrier of this week you will receive a box, in which I have put some books, most of which were your poor dear mamma's, and a diamond ring, which I hope you will wear as my new year's gift. If you receive it with as much kindness as I send it, you will not slight it; you will be very fond of it.

When I go back to London, I will take care of your reading-glass. Whenever I can do anything for you, remember, my dear darling, that one of my greatest pleasures is to please you.

I find from an unpublished letter to which I have had access that the glass was duly sent. When any show of interest was made,

Johnson's response to it was delighted. He is very careful to note the fact whenever his Lucy presses him to stay longer on his annual visits to Lichfield. In 1763 she had inherited from her brother (a captain in the navy) ten thousand pounds, and built herself a big house.

I longed for Taylor's chaise; but I think Lucy did not long for it, though she was not sorry to see it. Lucy is a philosopher; and considers me as one of the external and accidental things that are to be taken and left without emotion. If I could learn of Lucy would it be better? [To Mrs. Thrale, July 17, 1771.]

My purpose was to have made haste to you and Streatham; and who would have expected that I should be stopped by Lucy? Hearing me give Francis [his black servant] orders to take us places, she told me that I should not go till after next week. I thought it proper to comply; for I was pleased to find that I could please, and proud of shewing you that I do not come an universal outcast. Lucy is likewise a very peremptory maiden; and if I had gone without permission, I am not very sure that I might have been welcome at another time. [Ib. Aug. 3.]

This was to have been my last letter from this place, but Lucy says I must not go this week. Fits of tenderness with Mrs. Lucy are not common; but she seems now to have a little paroxysm, and I was not willing to counteract it. The lady at Stowhill says, 'How comes Lucy to be such a sovereign? all the town besides could not have kept you.'

What was the true character of this little lady? May we not suspect that a very real affection sometimes took the malign form of jealousy? For there were many ladies at Lichfield. The following paragraph is not without significance on such an hypothesis:

I sent Mrs.

Mrs. Aston

I go every day to Stowhill; both the sisters are now at home. Aston a Taxation and sent it nobody else, and Lucy borrowed it. since that enquired by a messenger when I was expected. I can tell nothing about it, answered Lucy; when he is to be here I suppose she'll know. We can see something of the truth, reading between the lines of the patronising sketch drawn by Miss Seward for the amusement of one of her correspondents:

Apropos of old maids.---After a gradual decline of a few months we have lost dear Mrs. Porter, the earliest object of Dr. Johnson's love. This was some years before he married her mother. In youth her fair clean complexion, bloom, and

The chaise in question is described by Boswell as an equipage properly suited to a wealthy well-beneficed clergyman; drawn by four stout plump horses, and driven by two steady jolly postillions.' Dr. Taylor was a man with two ambitions in life: to have the biggest bull in England and to be a dean. The first prayer the Fates probably granted, though a man was once known to say he had seen a bigger; the second they did not. Johnson always visited his friend's rectory at Ashbourne, on his way to or from Lichfield.

rustic prettiness pleased the men. More than once she might have married advantageously; but as to the enamoured affections,

High Taurus' snow, fann'd by the Eastern wind,
Was not more cold.

Spite of the accustomed petulance of her temper and odd perverseness, since she had no malignance, I regard her as a friendly creature, of intrinsic worth, with whom from childhood I had been intimate. She was one of those few beings who from a sturdy singularity of temper and some prominent good qualities of head and heart, was enabled, even in her days of scanty maintenance, to make society glad to receive, and pet the grown spoiled child. Affluence was not hers till it came to her in her fortieth year, by the death of her eldest brother. From the age of twenty till that period she had boarded in Lichfield with Dr. Johnson's mother, who still kept that little bookseller's shop, by which her husband had supplied the scanty means of existence. Meantime Lucy Porter kept the best company of our little city, but would make no engagement on market days lest Granny, as she called Mrs. Johnson, should catch cold by serving in the shop. There Lucy Porter took her place, standing behind the counter, nor thought it a disgrace to thank a poor person who purchased from her a penny battledore.

With a marked vulgarity of address and language, and but little intellectual cultivation, she had a certain shrewdness of understanding, and piquant humour, with the most perfect truth and integrity. By these good traits in her character were the most respectable inhabitants of this place induced to bear with kind smiles her mulish obstinacy and perverse contradictions. Johnson himself, often her guest, set the example, and extended to her that compliant indulgence which he shewed not to any other person. I have heard her scold him like a school-boy for soiling her floor with his shoes, for she was clean as a Dutchwoman in her house, and exactly neat in her person. Dress, too, she loved in her odd way; but we will not assert that the Graces were her handmaids Friendly, cordial, and cheerful to those she loved, she was more esteemed, more amusing, and more regretted, than many a polished character, over whose smooth but insipid surface, the attention of those who have mind passes listless and uninterested.

One forgives the Swan a good deal of her verjuice for that little vignette of Lucy Porter behind the counter on market-days. She outlived Johnson rather more than a year, and bequeathed her fortune to Mr. Pearson, a clergyman of the place, who acted as her domestic chaplain. In roaming round the city to-day I came upon a monument to her in Stow Church, of which I have never seen any mention in print. It represents a sarcophagus surmounted by an urn, is of a good shape, and bears the following inscription;

In a vault near this place are deposited the remains of Lucy Porter, who died the 13th of January, 1786, aged 70 years. To whose memory in gratitude for her liberal Acts of Friendship conferred on him, this Monument is erected by the Revd L. B. Pearson.

It is time now to say a word about the other Lichfield coterie. The centre of the system was, as I have said, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, author of The Loves of the Plants,' and grandfather of the still

more famous author of the Origin of Species.' He was as great in science as Johnson in morals, and if Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes' has survived the 'Loves of the Plants,' it is because ethics has more affinity with poetry than a theory of evolution. As verse, of the school of Pope, Darwin's poem has considerable merits, and it well deserved the parody of the antiJacobin. Darwin and Johnson had sufficient similarity among many differences to make them repellent of each other; both were dictatorial, easily moved to anger and caustic speech, and intolerant of opposition; but while Johnson was a Tory of the Tories and a Churchman of the school of Sacheverell, Darwin was a Radical and Freethinker and a correspondent of Rousseau. They rarely met, purposely avoiding each other; and from Johnson's Letters and Boswell's 'Life' no one would guess that such a person as Darwin was the most prominent inhabitant of Lichfield from 1757 to 1781.

Who were Darwin's satellites ? Chief among them were the Swan of Lichfield, who became his biographer; her father, the Rev. Mr. Seward, a canon of the Cathedral and editor of a very bad edition of Beaumont and Fletcher; the Rev. Archdeacon Vyse (father of the Miss Vyse who belonged to the opposition). who is described by the Swan as of Prioric talents in the metrical impromptu'; Sir Brooke Boothby, a Rousseau-ite, who replied to Burke's tract on the French Revolution; and on their frequent visits to the neighbourhood two gentlemen, also followers of Rousseau, but better known to posterity-Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of the still more renowned Maria, and his friend Thomas Day, author of 'Sandford and Merton.' Edgeworth came to visit Darwin, not from his fame as a physician (though this was deservedly widespread), but from the rumour of his invention of a new carriage on an entirely new system-an invention which, it may be added, nearly proved fatal to its inventor and several of his friends, including the Swan herself. From Lichfield Edgeworth presently secured the middle pair of his four wives. Day, though not so brilliant a figure as his friend, was more whole-hearted in his adoption of Rousseau's system; for while Edgeworth was content with bringing up his son as an Emile, Day endeavoured to return to nature one step further by providing himself with an ideal mother of his children. His matrimonial experiments are described by Miss Seward in the 'Life of Darwin' with immense gusto, and as the book is not now in every library an extract may be appreciated; but the reader