Beauclerk died at his Great Russell Street house on March 11, 1780. He had been failing steadily under visitations of his old trouble since 1777, when he lay sick unto death at Bath, and when his wife nursed him tenderly into what seemed to Walpole a miraculous recovery. He was but forty-one years old, and, for all his genius, left no more trace behind than that Persian prince who suddenly disappeared in the shape of a butterfly, and whom old Burton calls a “light phantastick fellow.” His air of boyish promise, quite unconsciously worn, hoodwinked his friends into prophecies of his fame. He did not give events a chance to put immortality on his “bright, unbowed, insubmissive head.” Yet he was bitterly mourned. “I would walk to the extent of the diameter of the earth to save him,” cried Johnson, who had loved him for over twenty years; and again, to Lord Althorp: “This is a loss, sir, that perhaps the whole nation could not repair.” Boswell mentions the Doctor’s April stroll, at this time, while he was writing his _Lives of the Poets_; and tells us how, returning from a call on the widow of the companion of his youth, David Garrick, he leaned over the rails of the Adelphi Terrace, watching the dark river, and thinking of “two such friends as cannot be supplied.” “Poor dear Beauclerk!” Johnson wrote, when his violent grief had somewhat subsided, “_nec, ut soles, dabis joca!_ His wit and his folly, his acuteness and his maliciousness, his merriment and his reasoning, are alike over. Such another will not often be found among mankind.” Beyond this well-known and characteristic summing-up, the Doctor made no discoverable mention, in his correspondence, of his bereavement, certainly not to the highly-prejudiced Mrs. Thrale, to whom he wrote often and gayly in the year of Beauclerk’s death. Nor shall we know how the catastrophe affected Bennet Langton; for all the most interesting papers relating to him were destroyed when the old Hall at Langton-by-Spilsby was burned in 1855. On this subject, as on others as intimate, he stands, perforce, silent.
Readers may recall a passage in Miss Burney’s _Diary_ which gives countenance to an accusation not borne out by any other testimony, that Beauclerk and his wife had not lived happily together. Dining at Sir Joshua’s at Richmond, in 1782, Edmund Burke, sitting next the author of _Evelina_, took occasion, on catching sight of Lady Di’s “pretty white house” through the trees, to rejoice in the fact that she was well-housed, moneyed, and a widow. He added that he had never enjoyed the good-fortune of another so keenly as in this blessed instance. Then, turning to his new acquaintance, as the least likely to be informed of the matter, he spoke in his own “strong and marked expressions” of the singular ill-treatment Beauclerk had shown his wife, and the “necessary relief” it must have been to her when he was called away. The statement does not seem to have been gainsaid by any of the company; nor was Burke liable to a slanderous error. So severe a comment on Beauclerk, resting, even as it does, wholly on Miss Burney’s veracity, ought, in fairness, to be incorporated into any sketch of the man. On the other side, it is pleasant to discover that Beauclerk, in his will, made five days before the end, bequeathed all he possessed to his wife, and reverted to her the estates of his children, should they die under age. There was but one bequest beyond these, and that was to Thomas Clarke, the faithful valet. The executors named were Lady Di and her brother, Lord Charles Spencer, who had also been groomsman at the marriage, which, despite Burke and its own evil beginnings, it is hard to think of as ill-starred. The joint guardians of Charles George Beauclerk, the only son, were to be Bennet Langton and a Mr. Loyrester, whom Dr. Johnson speaks of as “Leicester, Beauclerk’s relation, and a man of good character;” but the guardianship, provisional in case of Lady Di’s decease, never came into force, as she survived, in fullest harmony with her three children, up to August 1, 1808, having entered her seventy-fifth year. Various private legacies came to Langton, by his old comrade’s dying wish, the most precious among them, perhaps, being the fine Reynolds portrait of Johnson, which had been painted at Beauclerk’s cost. Under it was inscribed:
“_Ingenium ingens Inculto latet hoc sub corpore._”
Langton thoughtfully effaced the lines. “It was kind of you to take it off,” said the burly Doctor, with a sigh; and then (for how could he but recall the contrast of temperament in the two, as well as the affectionate context of Horace?), “not unkind in him to have put it on.” The collection of thirty thousand glorious books “_pernobilis Angli T. Beauclerk_” was sold at auction. The advertisement alone is royal reading. There is much amiable witness to the circumstance that Beauclerk was not only an admirer but a buyer of his friends’ works. From some kind busybody who attended the twenty-ninth day of the sale, and pencilled his observations upon the margins of the catalogue now in the British Museum, we learn that Goldsmith’s _History of the Earth and Animated Nature_ (nothing less!), which was issued, with cuts, in the year he died, was knocked down to the vulgar for two and threepence. The shelves, naturally, were stocked with Johnsons. Things dear to the bibliophile were there: innumerable first editions, black-letter, mediæval manuscript, Elzevirs, priceless English and Italian classics, gathered with real feeling and pride; but the most vivid personal interest belonged to the unpretending Lot 3444, otherwise known to fame as _The Rambler_, printed at Edinburgh in 1751; for that was the young Beauclerk’s own copy, carried with him to Oxford, and with a fragrance, as of a last century garden, of the first hearty friendship of boys. One cannot help wishing that a sentimental fate left it in Langton’s own hands.
Lady Beauclerk, Topham’s mother, had died in 1766; and he asked to be buried beside her, or at her feet, in the old chapel of Garston, near Liverpool: “an instance of tenderness,” said Johnson, “which I should hardly have expected.” There, in the place of his choice, he rests, without an epitaph.
After this the Doctor consoled himself more than ever with Bennet Langton, and with the atmosphere of love and reverence which surrounded him in Langton’s house. He had been of old the most desired of all guests at the family seat in Lincolnshire. “Langton, sir!” as he liked to announce, “had a grant of warren from Henry II.; and Cardinal Stephen Langton, of King John’s reign, was of this family.” Peregrine Langton, Bennet’s uncle, was a man of simple and benevolent habits, who brought economy to a science, without niggardliness, and whom Johnson declared to be one of those he clung to at once, both by instinct and reason; Bennet’s father, learned, good, and unaffected, the prototype of his learned, good, and unaffected son, was, however, a more diverting character. He had sincerest esteem for Johnson, but looked askance on him for his liberal views, and suspected him, indeed, of being a Papist in secret! He once offered the Doctor a living of some value in the neighborhood, with the suggestion that he should qualify himself for Orders: a chance gravely refused. Of this exemplary but rather archaic squire, Johnson, a dissector of everything he loved, said: “Sir! he is so exuberant a talker in public meetings that the gentlemen of his county are afraid of him. No business can be done for his declamation.” In his behalf, too, Johnson produced one of his most astounding words; for having understood that both Mr. and Mrs. Langton were averse to having their portraits taken, he observed aloud that “a superstitious reluctance to sit for one’s picture is among the anfractuosities of the human mind.”
Bennet Langton married, on the 24th of May, 1770, Mary Lloyd, daughter of the Countess of Haddington, and widow of John, the eighth Earl of Rothes, the stern soldier in laced waistcoat and breastplate beneath, painted by Sir Joshua. It was a common saying at the time that everybody was welcome to a Countess Dowager of Rothes; for it did so happen that three ladies bearing that title were all remarried within a few years. Lady Rothes, although a native of Suffolk, had acquired from long residence in Scotland the accent of that country, which Dr. Johnson bore with magnanimously, on the consideration that it was not indigenous. She had a handsome presence, full of easy dignity, and a naturalness marked enough in the heyday of Georgian affectation. With a vivacity very different from Lady Di Beauclerk’s, she kept herself the spring and centre of Langton’s tranquil domestic circle: a more womanly woman historiographers cannot find. His own charm of character, after his marriage, slipped more and more into the underground channels of home-life, and so coursed on beneficently in silence. Their children were no fewer than nine,[55] “not a plain face nor faulty person among them:” the goddess daughters six feet in height, and the three sons so like their Maypole father that they were able once to amuse the Parisians by raising their arms to let a crowd pass. Langton was wont to repeat with some glee certain jests about his height, and Dr. Johnson’s nickname of “Lanky” he took ever with excellent grace; and when Garrick had leaped upon a chair to shake hands with him, in old days, he had knelt, at parting, to shake hands with Garrick. But the King’s awkward digs at his “long legs” he found terribly distasteful, nor was he thereby disposed to agree with the Doctor’s enthusiastic proclamation, after the famous interview of 1767, that George III. was “as fine a gentleman as Charles II.”