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.[1] All the authorities for the account of Levet were collected by Hawkins[2]:  from these it appears that his patients were “chiefly of the lowest class of tradesmen,” and that, although he took all that was offered him by way of fee, including meat and drink, he demanded nothing from the poor, nor was known in any instance to have enforced the payment of even what was justly his due.  Hawkins adds that he (Levet) had acted for many years in the capacity of surgeon and apothecary to Johnson under the direction of Dr. Lawrence.

[Footnote 1:  Miss Cornelia Knight, in her “Autobiography,” warmly vindicates her respectability, and refers to a memoir, by Lady Knight, in the “European Magazine” for Oct. 1799.]

[Footnote 2:  Life of Johnson, p. 396-400.]

  “When fainting Nature called for aid,
  And hovering death prepared the blow,
  His vigorous remedy display’d
  The power of Art without the show;

No summons mocked by chill delay, No petty gains disdained by pride, The modest wants of every day The toil of every day supplied.”

Johnson’s verses, compared with Lord Macaulay’s prose, strikingly shew how the same subject can be degraded or elevated by the mode of treatment; and how easily the historian or biographer, who expands his authorities by picturesque details, may brighten or darken characters at will.

To complete the picture of Johnson’s interior, it should be added that the inmates of his house were quarrelling from, morning to night with one another, with his negro servant, or with himself.  In one of his letters to Mrs. Thrale, he says, “Williams hates everybody:  Levet hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams:  Desmoulins hates them both:  Poll (Miss Carmichael) loves none of them.”  In a conversation at Streatham, reported by Madame D’Arblay, the menagerie was thus humorously described:—­