and tried to have her put into a virtuous way of living.  His house, in his later years, was filled with various waifs and strays, to whom he gave hospitality and sometimes support, defending himself by saying that if he did not help them nobody else would.  The head of his household was Miss Williams, who had been a friend of his wife’s, and after coming to stay with him, in order to undergo an operation for cataract, became a permanent inmate of his house.  She had a small income of some 40_l_. a year, partly from the charity of connexions of her father’s, and partly arising from a little book of miscellanies published by subscription.  She was a woman of some sense and cultivation, and when she died (in 1783) Johnson said that for thirty years she had been to him as a sister.  Boswell’s jealousy was excited during the first period of his acquaintance, when Goldsmith one night went home with Johnson, crying “I go to Miss Williams”—­a phrase which implied admission to an intimacy from which Boswell was as yet excluded.  Boswell soon obtained the coveted privilege, and testifies to the respect with which Johnson always treated the inmates of his family.  Before leaving her to dine with Boswell at the hotel, he asked her what little delicacy should be sent to her from the tavern.  Poor Miss Williams, however, was peevish, and, according to Hawkins, had been known to drive Johnson out of the room by her reproaches, and Boswell’s delicacy was shocked by the supposition that she tested the fulness of cups of tea, by putting her finger inside.  We are glad to know that this was a false impression, and, in fact, Miss Williams, however unfortunate in temper and circumstances, seems to have been a lady by manners and education.

The next inmate of this queer household was Robert Levett, a man who had been a waiter at a coffee-house in Paris frequented by surgeons.  They had enabled him to pick up some of their art, and he set up as an “obscure practiser in physic amongst the lower people” in London.  He took from them such fees as he could get, including provisions, sometimes, unfortunately for him, of the potable kind.  He was once entrapped into a queer marriage, and Johnson had to arrange a separation from his wife.  Johnson, it seems, had a good opinion of his medical skill, and more or less employed his services in that capacity.  He attended his patron at his breakfast; breakfasting, said Percy, “on the crust of a roll, which Johnson threw to him after tearing out the crumb.”  The phrase, it is said, goes too far; Johnson always took pains that Levett should be treated rather as a friend than as a dependant.