ii2 Extracts from
��was offered him, he demanded nothing from the poor, nor was known in any instance to have enforced the payment of even what was strictly his due.
' His person was middle-sized and thin ; his visage swarthy, adust and corrugated. His conversation, except on professional subjects, barren. When in deshabille, he might have been mis taken for an alchemist, whose complexion had been hurt by the fumes of the crucible, and whose clothes had suffered from the sparks of the furnace.
- Such was Levett, whose whimsical frailty, if weighed against
his good and useful qualities, was
"A floating atom, dust that falls unheeded Into the adverse scale, nor "shakes the balance."
Irene, Act i. sc. 3.'
To this character I here add as a supplement to it, a dictum of Johnson respecting Levett, viz. that his external appearance and behaviour were such, that he disgusted the rich, and terrified the poor x .
But notwithstanding all these offensive particulars, Johnson, whose credulity in some instances was as great as his incredulity in others, conceived of him as a skilful medical professor, and thought himself happy in having so near his person one who was to him, not solely a physician, a surgeon, or an apothecary, but all. In extraordinary cases he, however, availed himself of the assistance of his valued friend Dr. Lawrence, a man of whom, in respect of his piety, learning, and skill in his profession, it may almost be said, the world was not worthy, inasmuch as it suffered his talents, for the whole of his life, to remain, in a great measure, unemployed, and himself end his days in sorrow and obscurity 2 . . . .
In his [Dr. Lawrence's] endeavours to attain to eminence, it
1 Percy described Levett as ' a fellow, but I have a good regard
modest, reserved man ; humble and for him ; for his brutality is in his
unaffected, ready to execute any manners, not his mind.' Mme.
commission for Johnson, and grate- D'Arblay's Diary, i. 114.
ful for his patronage.' Anderson's 2 Ante, i. 104 ; Life, ii. 296, n. I ;
Johnson, ed. 1815, p. 181. 'Levett, iv. 143. Madam, (said Johnson), is a brutal
was
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