When we gather here at the Cliff Dwellers, we bring with us certain expectations – that the atmosphere will be “hospitable,” that our table will be “well-covered” – at least with pie – that our conversations will be at least literate, if not “literary.” When the evening ends, we all return home sated in our physical, our intellectual, and our social appetites. And in all of this we recreate and relive similar occasions by similar companies, hundreds of years ago. My affection for such events corresponds to, and is satisfied by, both my own visits in Chicago to the Literary Club and Caxton evenings, in Cleveland to the Rowfant Club, in New York to Grolier, but also by my visits, through my books, to the eighteenth century. Tonight I want to share with you, after our own fine dinner and conversation, another such evening, and another such dinner, in this instance 15 May 1776, two-hundred and thirty-one years ago, give or take a few months.
The place was No. 22, the Poultry, London, the home of the
brothers Charles and Edward Dilly, booksellers – which, in those days, also meant publishers. Also present were the American Arthur Lee, a
physician and later the United States ambassador to Spain, his brother,
Alderman William Lee of London, John Miller, a member of Parliament, once
described as “a dilletanti man [who] keeps a weekly day for the Litterati,” Dr.
John Lettsom, a Quaker physician, Philip Slater, a druggist, and, most
important for our story, John Wilkes, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson. A diverse crowd of business, professional,
legal, medical, and literary people, much like those here tonight. The menu included some “fine veal,” gravy,
stuffing, butter, oranges and lemons and cheese. All-in-all, very much, from the feast to the feasters,
like our dinner tonight.
And yet, of
course, it was different. Different not
only because tonight we lack Johnson and Boswell and Wilkes, but different
because the real point of that long-ago evening was a set-up, a scene carefully
planned and orchestrated by Boswell. It
was a scene now among the most famous in his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.,
and one for which he was proud to take credit for his own “pars magna foi,”
“no small part.” Johnson and Wilkes had
never met, were political opponents, and, as Boswell wrote, “Two men more
different could perhaps not be selected out of all mankind.” It was Boswell’s conceit, successful this
time, to bring them together, face to face, one the author of a pamphlet
attacking the other, whose response had been equally vituperative and
insulting. You know Boswell, of
course. A Scots lawyer and laird, an
author, a man capable of both extreme piety and extreme debauchery, a pursuer
of celebrity and celebrities. He wrote
himself that his “desire of being acquainted with celebrated men of every
description” had made him want to bring Johnson and Wilkes together. “They had,” he said:
. . . even attacked one another with some asperity in their writings; yet I lived in habits of friendship with both. I could fully relish the excellence of each; for I have ever delighted in that intellectual chymistry, which can separate good qualities from evil in the same person.
Johnson, of course, was the great man of English letters,
author of the Dictionary of the English Language, and other works, he
was a famous wit, who saw conversation as a contest, and “talked for victory,”
as we learn from Boswell. He was also a
Tory, a firm believer in the monarchy and in an ordered, disciplined
society. Not least, he was a moralist,
author of The Rambler essays, a man of profound religious principles,
scrupulous about his own behavior – he
was celibate before and after his marriage, and – although not by choice – even
during much of it. The author of prayers
and sermons for himself and others, Johnson was himself a man of celebrated virtue.
Yet, after all,
he lived at a time which is often thought of as the “Age of the Libertine,”
when men, particularly young aristocratic men, indulged their every whim,
without much fear of censure. At least
among the educated and wealthy, drunkenness, gambling, and sexual promiscuity were
an accepted fact of life, particularly for men.
Even Johnson himself, devout Tory and Anglican that he was, accepted the
existence of a double standard for judging sexual activity. Here though, perhaps Johnson’s code of personal
morality was affected by his equally great respect for property and order,
something he also saw as a moral issue.
As he put it in discussing the need for chastity and fidelity in women:
. . . confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime; and therefore a woman who breaks her marriage vows is much more criminal than a man who does it. A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight of GOD; but he does not do his wife a very material injury if he does not insult her; if, for instance, from mere wantonness of appetite, he steals privately to her chambermaid. Sir, a wife ought not greatly to resent this. . . . A wife should study to reclaim her husband by more attention to please him.
Indeed such a husband was Boswell. Beginning early, young, wealthy and privileged, he seduced women of every rank, and paid others. He was deterred in his pursuits neither by his own friendships with their husbands, lovers, or fathers, nor, later, by his own marriage. Although only one part of the character of this complex man, it is no exaggeration to say that to win Dr. Johnson’s affection, Boswell had to work to overcome his well-earned reputation for often uncontrolled sexual escapades. Boswell in fact never abandoned this particular activity, despite the repeated bouts of venereal disease it brought him, leading, ultimately, to his death.
Yet even Boswell, as we shall see, was relatively discreet about this (other than in his private journals and with a few intimate friends), and the rest of his life was marked by a more circumspect effort to appear to be a proper Scottish laird, a man of property and propriety. Boswell and Wilkes had first met in 1763, when Boswell was a young man, already a social climber, and womanizer. Wilkes was by then a leading London wit, a member of Parliament, one of the best-known poets of the day, and a notorious rake. Together again in Italy in 1765, Boswell on the Grand Tour following the conclusion of his legal studies, and Wilkes in exile as a fugitive felon (of which more in a moment), Wilkes entertained Boswell with his bawdy stories of wine, women and the dissolute life. Boswell, always something of an hypocritical prig, enjoyed Wilkes’ company enormously, but thought him “deeply unprincipled and immoral,” in Prof. Pottle’s words. Wilkes saw through Boswell even then. Referring to their mutual and unquenchable thirst for women, Wilkes told Boswell “You too like the thing almost as well as I do, but you dislike the talk and laugh about it, of which I am perhaps too fond.” Well – you know about Johnson and Boswell; who was Wilkes?
John Wilkes had been born in London in 1725, the son of a comfortably well-off distiller. He was well educated, both at Lincoln’s Inn and Leiden University. Wilkes married a woman of significant property, but with significant psychological problems. They had a daughter, with whom Wilkes had a profound and satisfying relationship all his life, but he and his unsociable and perhaps mentally unbalanced wife separated after nine years. Wilkes was a famously ugly man. In the many caricatures of him printed in mid-eighteenth century – including the well-known portrayal by Hogarth – his pronounced squint and distorted jaw emphasize how physically unattractive he was, and suggest why he had difficulty reading, and was a notoriously poor speaker. All of these shortcomings he overcame. With women he claimed he needed “only half an hour to talk away my face.” He also said that “. . . a month’s start of my rival on account of my face . . .” would guarantee him the conquest of any woman. As a politician, he was enormously effective, despite his difficulties as a speaker. As a visionary, he saw things others of his period missed, with a clarity obscured only by his ego, his pride, and his intellectual integrity.
John Wilkes was first elected to Parliament in 1757 as a Whig. He was originally a supporter of Lord Chatham, William Pitt the Elder, but Wilkes’ radical tendencies grew as John Stuart, Lord Bute, became the Tory Prime Minister. Wilkes and his friend Charles Churchill published a radical weekly called The North Briton, regularly attacking Bute and, through him, the King. The attacks culminated in No. 45, for which Wilkes was arrested, charged with seditious libel against George III, and expelled from the House of Commons in 1763. He was convicted in absentia, having fled to Paris. When he finally returned in 1768, despite failing to win the pardon he expected, he was re-elected to Parliament three times, and expelled each time by the House. The fourth time his stubborn Middlesex constituency elected him, the House, rather than expelling Wilkes, disqualified him, claiming that as a convicted felon, he could not stand for office. His opponent was declared the winner, and seated, in 1769.
This set the stage for Wilkes’ first major confrontation
with Johnson. They had clashed before,
as when early editions of The North Briton criticized several of
Johnson’s definitions in his great Dictionary of the English Language. Wilkes had caught Johnson in a mistake, where Johnson
had oddly asserted in the famous “Preface” to the Dictionary that the
letter “H” never begins a syllable after the first. Wilkes gleefully pointed out that “the author
. . . must be a man of quick appre-hension, and of a most compre-hensive
genius.” Another minor skirmish had occurred
because Johnson, Tory that he was in 1763, had accepted a pension of £ 300 year from George III granted at Bute’s
urging, relieving Johnson of poverty for the first time in his life. Wilkes then used The North Briton to attack
Johnson, based on his 1755 Dictionary definition of “Pensioner,” as “A
slave of state hired by a stipend to obey his master,” Wilkes asking whether Johnson
now, post-pension, had become simply a mouthpiece for the administration.
However, as much as
these earlier gibes had stung, their mutual antipathy became a greater issue a
few years later, because the real disagreements between Johnson and Wilkes were
over politics and morality, not semantics.
A defender of the established order, Johnson in 1770 published one of
his four famous political essays, The False Alarm. In it Johnson entered the fray over the
House’s repeated refusal to seat Wilkes.
Although The False Alarm purported to deal only with the issue of
Parliament’s right to determine who could stand for election, not to attack
Wilkes himself, who was often the target of caricatures and gossip, Johnson
observed “Lampoon itself would disdain to speak ill of him of whom no man
speaks well.” The rest of The False
Alarm, despite Johnson’s disclaimer, went on to attack Wilkes' character
and conduct as much as it defended the House’s right to set criteria for
membership.
Wilkes, of
course, hardly took this attack in silence.
Instead he published, anonymously, A Letter to Samuel Johnson, L.L.D,
although it was no secret that Wilkes was the author. His famous wit was immediately apparent, as
he began by making fun of the famous Latinate Johnsonian style, calling him “an
Orator of Polysyllables,” and suggesting that “ordinary freeholders’ . . .
undisciplined taste is apt to be nauseated by the reduplicated evomition
of unknown idioms. If you would adapt
yourself to our faculties, you must sink into language of a lower stature from hendecasyllables.” Wilkes went on to make a serious reply to
Johnson, distinguishing carefully between the right of the House to eject a
member – as it had done three times previously in his case – and the right of
the people to nominate and elect whomever they chose. Both essays, however, while demonstrating the
vast chasm between their political positions, also demonstrate that they had in
common erudition, wit, and a profound grasp of persuasive English prose.
Their other
differences can be more entertainingly illustrated. For example, while Johnson was a member of
The Club, sometimes known as The Literary Club, which included Boswell, Joshua
Reynolds, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and distinguished
others, and met for high-toned literary and political conversation, John Wilkes
was a member of the Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe, one of the “Hellfire”
clubs of those libertine days. Organized
by John Montagu and Francis Dashwood, the Knights were also known as the Medmenham
Monks, after the thirteenth century abbey ruins that Dashwood and the others
had restored and converted into their Gothic style “Clubhouse,” the scene of
drunken feasts and orgies. Montagu, the
famous Earl of Sandwich (whose unwillingness to leave off gambling to eat gave
us his eponymous delicacy), Dashwood, and Wilkes were libertines in the
eighteenth century sense; that is, they were not only debauched rakes, they
were also scholars and gentlemen who happened to be just as seriously engaged
with drinking, gambling and whoring as they were with literature. Sometimes they combined their interests. For example, one of Wilkes' poetic
compositions for his fellow Monks was the notorious “Essay on Woman,” a
take-off on Pope’s “Essay on Man.” Wilkes'
poem includes his timeless couplet “Life can little else supply/But a few good
fucks and then we die.” In later years,
after Wilkes and the Earl of Sandwich had diverged politically, Sandwich asked
him “’Pon my soul, Wilkes, I don’t know whether you’ll die upon the gallows or
of the pox.” Wilkes’ famous answer, of
course, was “that depends, my Lord, whether I first embrace your Lordship’s
principles, or your Lordship’s mistresses.”
Thus we have Wilkes, radical Whig, supporter of the American colonists, general all-around rake, and promoter of liberty and freedom, and Johnson, devout Anglican Tory, supporter of tradition, upright citizen. Although Wilkes, in later years after his troubles with Parliament, was elected an alderman of London, Sheriff of London and then Lord Mayor of London, and then again re-elected to Parliament where he was finally considered rehabilitated and seated, he and Johnson remained on the opposite sides of almost everything. Apart from Johnson’s disapproving acceptance of Boswell’s own sexual conduct, there seemed to be little reason for Boswell to have believed bringing Johnson and Wilkes together would be successful. Having them together at an intimate dinner was the equivalent of seating Pope John Paul with Joseph Stalin, or perhaps that combination enhanced by also seating Hilary Clinton with Monica Lewinsky. Yet Boswell, who noted, as we have seen, that “Two men more different could perhaps not be selected out of all mankind,” also recognized that they:
. . . had so many things in common – classical learning, modern literature, wit, and humour, and ready
repartee – that it would have been much to be regretted if they had been
forever at a distance from each other.
Thus in 1776 the great dinner plot was hatched in Boswell’s fertile brain.
Boswell recognized that “How to manage it, was a nice and difficult matter.” When his friends the Dilly brothers invited him for dinner with Wilkes and others, Boswell at last saw his opportunity. He himself enjoyed the “hospitable and well-covered table” he always found at the Dillys’, and knew that “Johnson owned that he always found a good dinner there.” As Boswell observed, “No man eat more heartily than Johnson, or loved better what was nice and delicate.” Thus Boswell asked Edward Dilly if Dr. Johnson might be invited too. Dilly replied “What, with Mr. Wilkes? Not for the world. . . . Dr. Johnson would never forgive me.” Not put off by the Dillys’ reluctance, Boswell proposed to “let me negociate for you. . . .” The Dilly brothers were pleased to agree, for, as Edward said, “I am sure I will be very happy to see them both here.”
Boswell tells us next that, notwithstanding his veneration of Johnson, “I was sensible that he was sometimes a little actuated by the spirit of contradiction,” and thus Boswell sought to use this understanding of Johnson’s personality and his knowledge of Johnson’s love of a good dinner at the Dillys’, to secure Johnson’s consent to dine with Wilkes. There follows in the Life of Samuel Johnson one of the most masterful examples of Boswellian reconstruction. Permit me to read it to you:
“Mr. Dilly, Sir, sends his respectful compliments to you, and
would be happy if you would do him the honour to dine with him on Wednesday
next along with me, as I must soon go to Scotland.” JOHNSON. “Sir I am obliged to Mr. Dilly. I will wait upon him –“ BOSWELL. “Provided, Sir, I suppose, that the Company
which he is to have is agreeable to you.”
JOHNSON. “What do you mean,
Sir? What do you take me for? Do you think I am so ignorant of the world,
as to imagine that I am to prescribe to a gentlemen what company he is to have
at his table?” BOSWELL. “I beg your pardon, Sir, for wishing to
prevent you from meeting people whom you might not like. Perhaps he may have some of what he calls his
patriotick friends with him.”
JOHNSON. “Well, Sir, and what
then? What care I for his patriotick
friends? Poh!” BOSWELL.
“I should not be surprised to find Jack Wilkes there.” JOHNSON.
“And if Jack Wilkes should be there, what is that to me,
Sir? My dear friend, let us have no more
of this. I am sorry to be angry with
you; but really it is treating me strangely to talk to me as if I could not
meet any company whatever, occasionally.”
BOSWELL. “Pray forgive me,
Sir: I meant well. But you shall meet whoever comes, for
me.” Thus I secured him, and told Dilly
that he would find him very well pleased to be one of his guests on the day
appointed.
When the evening arrived, there was an unexpected glitch. Johnson had forgotten the engagement, and had told his housekeeper, the imperious, if blind, Mrs. Williams, that he would be dining in. Johnson would not consider hurting Mrs. Williams feelings; as Boswell observed, “He had accustomed himself to show Mrs. Williams such a degree of humane attention, as frequently imposed some restraint upon him.” Thus Boswell went to talk to the obstinate and possessive Mrs. Williams, and, persuasive as always, secured her agreement that Johnson should indeed attend, rather than disappoint, the Dillys, which would also have put Boswell in a bad light for having promised his attendance. Johnson, delighted at the thought of an excellent dinner out at the Dillys’, and perhaps forgetting who else was to be present, “roared to his servant for a clean shirt.” Boswell then tells us, “when I had him fairly seated in a hackney-coach with me, I exulted as much as a fortune-hunter who has got an heiress into a post-chaise with him to set out for Gretna-Green.”
On arriving and learning that “the gentlemen in lace” was none other than the despised John Wilkes, Johnson was, according to Boswell, “confounded,” and to settle himself took up a book and read, or at least pretended to read, in the window-seat, until he had regained his composure. Boswell surmises that despite feeling “awkward,” Johnson remembered his assurance to Boswell that he could not be “disconcerted by any company,” and that “he, therefore, resolutely set himself to behave quite as an easy man of the world, who could adapt himself at once to the disposition and manners of those whom he might chance to meet.” Then came the call “Dinner is upon the table.”
Wilkes seated himself next to Johnson, and, Boswell continues,
. . . behaved to him with so much attention and politeness
that he gained upon him insensibly. . . .
Mr. Wilkes was very assiduous in helping him to some fine veal. “Pray give me leave, Sir: – It
is better here – A little of the brown – Some fat, Sir – A little of the
stuffing – Some gravy – Let me have the pleasure of giving you some butter –
Allow me to recommend a squeeze of this orange; or the lemon, perhaps, may have
more zest.” – “Sir, Sir, I am obliged to
you, Sir,” cried Johnson, bowing, and turning his head to him with a look for
some time of “surly virtue,” but, in a short while, of complacency.
The conversation went on, with Wilkes and Johnson exchanging amusing stories about people they knew, and their famous, or infamous, qualities. Then the table-talk turned to literary and political matters. Wilkes skillfully referred to Johnson’s reference in his book about his tour of the Hebrides with Boswell, to Scotland being a barren place, and to his own political vulnerability to men of power.
Next Wilkes and Johnson engaged in a learned discussion
about a passage in Horace’s “Ars Poetica,” a discussion to which, it is fair to
say, few among us tonight could have contributed much. Then a subject always sure to amuse returned – making fun of Scotland (and – the real
point – of Boswell too). Let me again
simply quote from Boswell’s great reconstruction of the dinner party. It began with the observation by the American
Arthur Lee, that some Scotsmen had emigrated to America, and his surprise that
they had chosen a quite “barren part.”
JOHNSON. “Why, Sir, all barrenness is comparative. The Scotch would not know it to be barren.” BOSWELL. “Come, come, he is flattering the English. You have now been in Scotland, Sir, and say if you did not see meat and drink enough there.” JOHNSON. “Why yes, Sir; meat and drink enough to give the inhabitants sufficient strength to run away from home.” All of these quick and lively sallies were said sportively, quite in jest, and with a smile, which showed that he meant only wit. Upon this topick he and Mr. Wilkes could perfectly assimilate; here was a bond of union between them, and I was conscious that as both of them had visited Caledonia, both were fully satisfied of the strange narrow ignorance of those who imagine that it is a land of famine. But they amused themselves with persevering in the old jokes. When I claimed a superiority for Scotland over England in one respect, that no man can be arrested there for a debt merely because another swears it against him; but there must first be the judgement of a court of law ascertaining its justice; and that a seizure of the person, before judgement is obtained, can take place only, if his creditor should swear that he is about to fly from the country, or, as it is technically expressed, is in meditatione fugae. WILKES. “That, I should think, may be safely sworn of all the Scotch nation.” JOHNSON. (to Mr. Wilkes) “You must know, Sir, I lately took my friend Boswell and shewed him genuine civilised life in an English provincial town. I turned him loose at Litchfield, my native city, that he might see for once real civility: for you know he lives among savages in Scotland, and among rakes in London.” WILKES. “Except when he is with grave, sober, decent people like you and me.” JOHNSON. (smiling) “And we ashamed of him.”
They were quite frank and easy. Johnson told the story of his asking Mrs. Macauley to allow her footman to sit down with them, to prove the ridiculousness of the argument for the equality of mankind; and he said to me afterwards, with a nod of satisfaction, “You saw Mr. Wilkes acquiesced.” Wilkes talked with all imaginable freedom of the ludicrous title given to the Attorney-General, Diabolous Regis; adding, “I have reason to know something about that officer; for I was prosecuted for a libel.” Johnson, who many people would have supposed must have been furiously angry at hearing this talked of so lightly, said not a word. He was now, indeed, “a good-humoured fellow.”
And so it went. After dinner Wilkes held a candle to a print on the wall of a beautiful woman, “and pointed out the elegant contour of the bosom, with the finger of an arch connoisseur.” Later, he told Boswell he thought Johnson “shewed visible signs of a fervent admiration of the corresponding charms” of Mrs. Knowles, who had stopped by after dinner to join the conversation.
The evening now was a triumph. Here is Boswell’s own summary of both the experience and his reportage:
This record, though by no means so perfect as I could wish, will serve to give a notion of a very curious interview, which was not only pleasing at the time, but had the agreeable and benignant effect of reconciling any animosity, and sweetening any acidity, which in the various bustle of political contest, had been produced in the minds of two men.
Mr. Burke gave me much credit for this successful negotiation; and pleasantly said, that “there was nothing to equal it in the whole history of the Corps Diplomatique.”
The next day Boswell wrote to Johnson’s dear friend Hester Thrale, of the dinner. He told her that while she had been sitting soberly with her family and friends, Johnson “. . . [had been] breaking jokes with Jack Wilkes upon the Scots. Such, Madam, are the vicissitudes of things.”
We might pause for a moment and wonder why Wilkes and Johnson got along so well. Was it simply, as Boswell suggest, Johnson’s desire to prove that he was indeed a gentlemen of manners, who could behave appropriately with anyone? Was it their common learning, their mutual appreciation of good food and witty conversation? I think it was something more. In the later part of the 18th century many of the more sophisticated intellectuals had found a common enemy, and they called it “cant.” Lord Byron denounced “Cant political, cant poetical, cant religious, cant moral.” Johnson’s own Dictionary defined it as a “ whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” It was hypocrisy in every form.
Boswell and Johnson had once had their own discussion of “cant,” precipitated by Boswell’s claiming that if he were in Parliament, “I would never sell my vote, and I should be vexed if things went wrong.” Johnson responded:
JOHNSON. “That’s cant, Sir. It would not vex you more in the house, than in the gallery: publick affairs vex no man.” BOSWELL. “Have not they vexed yourself a little, Sir? Have not you been vexed by all the turbulence of this reign. . . .” JOHNSON. “Sir, I have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not vexed.” BOSWELL. “I declare, Sir, upon my honour, I did imagine I was vexed, and took a pride in it; but it was, perhaps, cant; for I own I neither ate less, nor slept less.” JOHNSON. “My dear friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, ‘Sir, I am your most humble servant.’ You may say, ‘These are sad’ times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times.’ You don’t mind the times. You tell a man, ‘I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day of your journey, and were so much wet.’ You don’t care six-pence whether he was wet or dry. You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society: but don’t think foolishly.”
But in fact neither Johnson nor Wilkes either thought or spoke in cant. They were many things, and many different things, but neither of them were hypocrites. Wilkes, devotee of liberty and champion of the common Englishman and the American patriot became a popular hero precisely because he was so free of cant, so direct, and so faithful to his principles in word and deed. So was Johnson. In fact Dr. Lettsom, one of those present at the 1776 Wilkes-Johnson dinner, described Johnson’s conversation this way:
Dr. Johnson was a pious man; attached, I confess, to established system, but it was from principle. In company I neither found him austere nor dogmatical; he was certainly not polite, but he was not rude . . . when he spoke it was like lightning out of a dark cloud. In social company, when he unbended from critical austerity, he afforded the finest dessert to a rational repast.
In many ways, Johnson and Wilkes were ultimately bound to respect each other for their honesty, for their freedom from cant.
15 May 1776 was not the last time they met. Although they did not become fast friends, they dined again, and once more at Boswell’s urging, in 1781. This was after the famous anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, which Wilkes – then an Alderman of London and an MP – had personally helped quell, and in which Johnson saw his friend Henry Thrale’s brewery threatened by crowds who mistakenly believed him to be Catholic. While Wilkes had, earlier, supported the mobs who cried “Wilkes and Liberty” after The North Briton No. 45, and while Johnson never reconciled himself to his friend Mrs. Thrale’s affection for the Catholic music master Gabriel Piozzi, who became her second husband, Johnson and Wilkes moved closer over the years, united in such things as their dislike of bigotry and mob violence. Toward the end of Johnson’s life, at their second dinner, also at the Dillys’, Wilkes said to Boswell, loud enough for Johnson to hear, “Dr. Johnson should make me a present of his Lives of the Poets, as I am a poor patriot, who cannot afford to buy them.” Johnson pretended not to hear, but quietly told Mr. Dilly, one of the publishers, to send a set to Wilkes, with his compliments. Later, Johnson reported that when he was ill “Wilkes . . . with whom I had a very rough bout, called upon me & was very amusing.”
Perhaps the last word though ought to belong to Boswell. Describing that second dinner in 1781, he tells us
The company gradually dropped away. . . . I left the room for some time; when I returned, I was struck with observing Dr. Samuel Johnson and John Wilkes, Esq. literally tête-a-tête; for they were reclined upon their chairs, with their heads leaning almost close to each other, talking earnestly, in a kind of confidential whisper, of the personal quarrel between George the Second and the King of Prussia. Such a scene of perfectly easy sociality between two such opponents in the war of political controversy, as that I now beheld, would have been an excellent subject for a picture. It presented to my mind the happy days which are foretold in Scripture when the lion shall lie down with the kid.
So it is here at the Literary Club. Brought together despite our differences by our common interests, we enjoy our dinners, our conversations, our sociability. We rise, as Wilkes and Johnson did, above pettiness, and celebrate our common humanity. It is an honor to be with you. Thank you for your company.
© Paul T. Ruxin 2007