Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BRIAN YOUNG

Another momentary release came much later in life when, visiting the family of Bennett Langton in January 1764, Johnson decided to take a roll on a declivity in the Lincolnshire Wolds, an occasion recently imagined in a poem by Joseph Harrison, which consummately achieves in blank verse what Bainbridge had perfected in prose. 24 Johnson, had he accepted the offer of a Lincolnshire living made by Langton’s father, might have lived very like Taylor but he felt unworthy of pursuing a clerical calling, observing of a worthy cleric in that county, ‘This man, Sir, fills up the duties of his life well. I approve of him, but could not imitate him.’ 25 Living on his nerves, Johnson needed sociability to assuage his debilitating tendency to melancholy. Friendship with Taylor afforded him exactly such release, and time spent in bucolic Ashbourne was manifestly refreshing in its many contrasts with literary London. Apparent ambivalence about Ashbourne, as reported by Boswell, is surely, at least occasionally, disguised admiration: ‘Speaking of a gentleman whose house was much frequented by low company: “Rags, Sir, (said he,) will always make their appearance where they have a right to do it”.’ A countryman, Taylor made sure to be in bed by nine to guarantee an early start the following day, the very reverse of Johnson’s urban routine; but there is something reminiscent of having heard the ‘chimes at midnight’ in Johnson’s heartfelt Falstaffian companionship with the clerical Derby magistrate, an ordained Justice Shallow. And who can forget, by contrast, Johnson’s retort to a dull Windsor magistrate who had given a tedious account of sentencing four convicts to transportation, ‘I heartily wish, Sir, that I were a fifth.’ 26 There were times when he grew bored at Ashbourne, and this was due to some degree to his changeableness; by contrast, Taylor, Johnson declared, always remained the same, as did Burke and Reynolds. 27 As the adage has it, opposites attract, and Johnson’s biographers have strangely forgotten this truism when mulling over how he could possibly be the friend of a man dismissively characterised by Aleyn Lyell Reade as ‘the embodiment of clerical worldliness’, an ‘opulent cleric’, ‘the somewhat gross clerical dictator’ of Ashbourne, with whom Johnson, nevertheless, shared a ‘life-long intimacy’. 28

24 Joseph Harrison, ‘Dr. Johnson Rolls Down a Hill’, in Shakespeare’s Horse (Chipping Norton, 2015), pp. 40-1. 25 Boswell, Life of Johnson , p. 338. 26 Boswell, Life of Johnson , pp. 1307, 1361. 27 Boswell, Life of Johnson , p. 870. 28 Reade, Johnsonian Gleanings , iii. 124, v.13, ix. 25, x. 2.

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