[1]
[Footnote 1: "It's weel wi' you gentles that can sit in the house wi'
handkerchers at your een when ye lose a friend; but the like o' us
maun to our wark again, if our hearts were beating as hard as any
hammer."--_The Antiquary_. For this very reason the "gentles"
commonly suffer most.]
Lord Macaulay thus portrays the objects of Johnson's hospitality as
soon as he had got a house to cover them. "It was the home of the
most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was brought
together. At the head of the establishment he had placed an old lady
named Williams, whose chief recommendations were her blindness and
her poverty. But in spite of her murmurs and reproaches, he gave an
asylum to another lady who was as poor as herself, Mrs. Desmoulins,
whose family he had known many years before in Staffordshire. Room
was found for the daughter of Mrs. Desmoulins, and for another
destitute damsel, who was generally addressed as Mrs. Carmichael, but
whom her generous host called Polly. An old quack doctor called
Levet, who bled and dosed coalheavers and hackney coachmen, and
received for fees crusts of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and
sometimes a little copper, completed this menagerie."[1]
[Footnote 1: Miscellaneous Writings, vol. i. p. 293.]
Mrs. Williams was the daughter of a physician, and of a good Welsh
family, who did not leave her dependent on Johnson. She is termed by
Madame D'Arblay a very pretty poet, and was treated with uniform
respect by him.
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