ii4 Extracts from
��surrounded by such necessitous and undeserving people as he had about him, his answer was, * If I did not assist them no one else would, and they must be lost for want.' (Page 396.)
Johnson was a great lover of penitents x , and of all such men as, in their conversation, made professions of piety 2 ; of this man 3 he would say, that he was one of the most pious of all his acquaintance, but in this, as he frequently was in the judgment he formed of others, he was mistaken. It is possible that Southwell might, in his conversation, express such sentiments of religion and moral obligation, as served to shew that he was not an infidel, but he seldom went sober to bed 4 , and as seldom rose from it before noon.
He was also an admirer of such as he thought well-bred men. What was his notion of good breeding I could never learn. If it was not courtesy and affability, it could to him be nothing ; for he was an incompetent judge of graceful attitudes and motions, and of the ritual of behaviour. Of lord Southwell 5 , the brother of the above person, and of Tom Hervey, a pro fligate, worthless man 6 , the author of the letter to Sir Thomas Hanmer 7 , and who had nothing in his external appearance that could in the least recommend him, he was used to say, they were each of them a model for the first man of quality in the kingdom 8 . (Page 406.)
1 Life, iv. 406, n. I. 6 ' Tom Hervey, who died t' other
2 Reynolds said that Johnson * ap- day, though a vicious man, was one peared to have little suspicion of hy- of the genteelest men that ever lived.' pocrisy in religion.' Ante, ii. 9, n. I. Ib. ii. 341. See ante, i. 254.
3 Edmund South well. Letters, \. 205. Horace Walpole wrote on Jan. 24,
4 Johnson said of his old school- ij J $ (Letters, vi. 182): 'Tom Hervey fellow, the Rev. Charles Congreve, is dead ; after sending for his wife, ' He has an elderly woman . . . who and re -acknowledging her in pathetic encourages him in drinking, in which heroics.'
he is very willing to be encouraged ; 7 Life, ii. 32, n. I ; 33, n. 2.
not that he gets drunk, for he is 8 ' Garrick used to tell, that John-
.a very pious man, but he is always son said of an actor, who played Sir
muddy.' Life, ii. 460. Harry Wildair at Lichfield, " There
5 ' Lord Southwell,' he said, * was is a courtly vivacity about the fellow"; the highest-bred man without in- when, in fact, according to Garrick's science that I ever was in company account, " he was the most vulgar with ; the most qualitied I ever saw.' ruffian that ever went upon boards" '
iv. 173. Ib. ii. 465.
Johnson
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