After Garrick’s death, Johnson took occasion to say, in the Lives of the Poets, that the death “had eclipsed the gaiety of nations and diminished the public stock of harmless pleasures.”  Boswell ventured to criticise the observation rather spitefully.  “Why nations?  Did his gaiety extend further than his own nation?” “Why, sir,” replied Johnson, “some imagination must be allowed.  Besides, we may say nations if we allow the Scotch to be a nation, and to have gaiety—­which they have not.”  On the whole, in spite of various drawbacks, Johnson’s reported observations upon Garrick will appear to be discriminative, and yet, on the whole, strongly favourable to his character.  Yet we are not quite surprised that Mrs. Garrick did not respond to a hint thrown out by Johnson, that he would be glad to write the life of his friend.

At Oxford, Johnson acquired the friendship of Dr. Adams, afterwards Master of Pembroke and author of a once well-known reply to Hume’s argument upon miracles.  He was an amiable man, and was proud to do the honours of the university to his old friend, when, in later years, Johnson revisited the much-loved scenes of his neglected youth.  The warmth of Johnson’s regard for old days is oddly illustrated by an interview recorded by Boswell with one Edwards, a fellow-student whom he met again in 1778, not having previously seen him since 1729.  They had lived in London for forty years without once meeting, a fact more surprising then than now.  Boswell eagerly gathered up the little scraps of college anecdote which the meeting produced, but perhaps his best find was a phrase of Edwards himself.  “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson,” he said; “I have tried, too, in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”  The phrase, as Boswell truly says, records an exquisite trait of character.

Of the friends who gathered round Johnson during his period of struggle, many had vanished before he became well known.  The best loved of all seems to have been Dr. Bathurst, a physician, who, failing to obtain practice, joined the expedition to Havannah, and fell a victim to the climate (1762).  Upon him Johnson pronounced a panegyric which has contributed a proverbial phrase to the language.  “Dear Bathurst,” he said, “was a man to my very heart’s content:  he hated a fool and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig; he was a very good hater.”  Johnson remembered Bathurst in his prayers for years after his loss, and received from him a peculiar legacy.  Francis Barker had been the negro slave of Bathurst’s father, who left him his liberty by will.  Dr. Bathurst allowed him to enter Johnson’s service; and Johnson sent him to school at considerable expense, and afterwards retained him in his service with little interruption till his own death.  Once Barker ran away to sea, and was discharged, oddly enough, by the good offices of Wilkes, to whom Smollett applied on Johnson’s behalf.  Barker became an important member of Johnson’s family, some of whom reproached him for his liberality to the nigger.  No one ever solved the great problem as to what services were rendered by Barker to his master, whose wig was “as impenetrable by a comb as a quickset hedge,” and whose clothes were never touched by the brush.